Ordinary Gweilo

I found this article in the New York Times interesting because it appeared to offer a counter-argument against the current copyright laws and all the fuss about people ‘stealing’ intellectual property:

The entertainment industry’s pursuit of tough new laws to protect copyrighted materials from online piracy is bad for business and for the economy, according to a report being released today by the Committee for Economic Development, a Washington policy group that has its roots in the business world.

Record companies and movie and television studios have fought copyright infringement on many fronts, hoping to find ways to prevent their products from being distributed free on the Internet. But critics warn that many of the new restrictions that the entertainment industry proposes – like enforcing technological requirements for digital television programming that would prevent it from being transmitted online – would upset the balance between the rights of the content creators and the rights of the public.

[..]

“The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support,” said Debora L. Spar, a professor at Harvard Business School. “It’s no longer a wacky idea cloistered in the ivory tower; it’s become a more mainstream idea that we need a different kind of copyright regime to support the wide range of activities in cyberspace.”

Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University and an author of the report said that a growing number of business leaders are worried that the trend toward “equating intellectual property with physical property” might be hampering innovation.

“Bits are not the same as atoms,” she argued, contending that the distinction is being blurred by Hollywood. “We need to reframe the legal discussion to treat the differences of bits and atoms in a more thoughtful way.”

However, having read the report itself (which you can download from here), I think they are actually trying to make a narrower point:

Such enforcement, however, should not be designed to protect a specific technology or business model. The point is to protect the principles of copyright.

[..]

In some instances, such as automated business method patents, current intellectual property policy undermines the very thing it means to protect—the long-term flow of innovation and creative works. The issuance of patents for automated business methods has the potential to overstimulate unproductive
“innovations.”

I admit that I haven’t read the full report, but I have read enough of it to know that they aren’t being as radical as the NYT story appears to suggest.  They raise the valid point that consumers are entitled to make ‘fair use’ of the material that they have purchased, and quite rightly argue that over-zealous technical limitations will be counter-productive.  Don’t forget that video recorder was once seen as a threat to the film industry, as were DVD players (hence the crazy system of region codes just to show us consumers who is in charge).  Perhaps most importantly, they believe that eventually the market will find a solution that consumers will accept, and the problem will go away.