Capitalism Magazine’s Andrew West (Pirates of the Internet) comes out strongly against Gnutella, Napster and the whole panoply of tools that people are using to trade MP3 and others files over the Internet and takes to task those who “praise the piracy-enabling Internet software as “brilliant” while panning industry attempts to require and enable customers to pay for their products as cumbersome.” Unfortunately the case against Napster and Gnutella is not nearly that cut and dried.
First, let me emphasize that I think people trading MP3 versions of songs and albums on the Internet, whether using Napster or plain-old fashioned FTP, is wrong. On the other hand, like many observers West seems to want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
There are, after all, real world analogues to MP3 and Napster, the most obvious being the VCR and UPS. The VCR lets anyone with a little technical know how to make copies of pretty much any copyrighted videotape (there are anti-piracy mechanisms in most VCRs, but they are pathetically easy to bypass), and services like UPS allow anyone to ship a pirated videotape to anywhere in the world. In fact, there is an underground of tape traders who traffic in pirated videotapes of movies that have been long out of print or are extremely hard to find.
Yet no one in his right mind would suggest that there is something inherently wrong with the VCR — well, except for the content companies that West mentions in his article who in fact sued Sony to try to stop production of the VCR. Their argument was similar to the argument against Napster. Since the VCR makes it easy for people to violate the intellectual property rights of content owners. Fortunately, U.S. courts rejected this market and allowed the marketing of VCRs without more onerous copy protection schemes.
Napster is very similar. All Napster ultimately does is let user share files amongst each other. The current problem is that what most people on Napster are sharing is pirated MP3s. The solution is straightforward — content producers should take legal action against the individuals transmitting the illegal MP3s rather than going after the network, in the same way they would go after illegal pirates rather than the shipping companies they use to distribute their products.
Or to stick to high technology, what the content producers are asking is akin to arguing for a ban on CD recorders which now come with many computers because they can be used to make exact duplicates of compact disks (and, in fact, many people use them for just that purpose). A highly useful tool would be then relegated to the dustbin to stop pirates. Doesn’t sound like a very good tradeoff for me.
Finally, although as I said I oppose the trading of illegal MP3s online, West’s claim that “global companies like the ones above [EMI, Sony] are developing innovative methods to enable online sales and digital distribution of their works” is bizarre. The only reason MP3s are so popular is precisely because the music industry is definitely not interested in this. After having first using their clout in Congress to re-write copyright laws in ways that the Framers of the Constitution wouldn’t have recognized, they seem intent on moving to a licensing scheme for music where users have to pay for every device they play music on. Currently, for example, I can take a CD I buy and play it in my home stereo, my car stereo or my computer. I can further encode the music for storage on my hard drive so I can listen to the music on my laptop when away from home. The music industry hates this and all of the “innovative” technologies West mentions are designed primarily to force users to pay a licensing fee for each and every one of those uses.
The big media content companies are dinosaurs who deserve to be replaced, but the way to do that is by inventing alternative companies and distribution methods. Go after the pirates, but leave Gnutella and Napster alone.