Maybe Orwell wasn't so far off after all. Microsoft UK has recently started a marketing campaign that is straight out of 1984: Thought Thieves. This would be hilarious if they were joking. They're not.
The gist of the campaign is to get teenagers to create movies that show what they would do "if you saw your hard work being passed off as the property of someone else" and submit them to a competition. Trying to recruit teenagers as thought police? Sounds vaguely familiar...
On other fronts, a major TV-show trading site, btefnet.net, got shut down this week. This site had people exchanging high-quality video files recorded from broadcast television shows, using BitTorrent, a powerful peer-to-peer file sharing application widely used to distribute Linux distributions and free content of all types. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sued them and five other sites to get them to stop distributing copyrighted television shows.
Obviously, broadcast television programs are not free. They're copyrighted programs, and were expensive to create. But aside from the cable bill, you don't actually pay to watch or record a tv show. So what do the Hollywood studios and the MPAA stand to lose from you getting a copy of a free show? According to the MPAA, they lose advertising revenue and a market for syndicating shows later. And because they "own" the content, they have the right to control its distribution.
Have you ever had a friend or neighbor tape a show for you, and give you the video tape? According to the MPAA, that's illegal. That's exactly the level of illegality these file-trading sites have. BTEfnet.net didn't even share movies or software or games or other things you generally have to pay money for. Only TV shows that you could tape yourself for free, with a little bit of effort--the combination of BitTorrent and an automatic downloading system available for some of the BitTorrent client software is much easier than trying to figure out when to set your VCR to record, and much cheaper than a TiVo subscription.
Is it really illegal? Well, I'm sure you could find an attorney to support just about any reading of its legality. According to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), if there was any encryption defeated, yes it's illegal. Under the DMCA, the mere act of watching a commercial DVD in Linux is illegal, because it outlaws any tools that defeat the encryption of copyrighted material. Even your own copyrighted material.
But you could make an argument that the original authors of the United States Constitution might have thought exchanging such works would be fine. They would probably argue that the original purpose of copyrights, to provide incentive to get creative works that would eventually be in the public domain, has been warped beyond all sense of reasonableness by a coalition of large corporations trying to maintain a monopoly on ideas.
I'm a writer. I produce content in the form of words and code for a living. You might think I would want to jealously guard my content, prevent anyone from using it for their own purposes. You would be wrong.
The funny thing about ideas is that they are more valuable when they are shared, and more irrelevant when they are hoarded. If you were a musician, would you want to be heard by a few hundred people, or a few million? The recording industry hardly distributes the money it collects back to the artists--talk to a few artists and you might be surprised to find how little they make on CD sales through the labels. Even the popular ones make most of their money through concerts, not CD sales. Giving their music away online for free expands their audience, popularity, and ultimately the amount of money they could make through live concerts, without making much of a dent in the money they're not making from CD sales. Only the record company executives and owners have anything to lose as their business model becomes irrelevant--and they're fighting tooth and nail to keep the Internet at bay, sueing grandmothers and teenagers.
Likewise, when the CEO of Proctor and Gamble, the largest advertiser in the world, declares at an advertizing convention that television advertising is broken, you know the broadcast media is frightened. BitTorrent and Peer-to-peer networks put users in control of what they watch, allowing them to skip advertising and watch programs on their schedule, instead of the broadcaster's schedule. As we regain control over our time, and can still participate in mass culture through time-shifted media, the old business models of record label conglomorates and Hollywood studio executives having an exclusive monopoly on reaching the public is disintegrating.
Meanwhile, proprietary software companies like Microsoft try to spread propaganda, and get teenagers to participate in this propaganda, by promoting the concept that ideas can be exclusively owned by somebody, and sharing those ideas is theft. What a twisted world.
Copyright isn't the only area that's an issue--there's also patents. Fortunately, patent terms are short compared to copyright, expiring after a dozen years instead of a century or more. Unfortunately, in Internet time, people are innovating so quickly that having an algorithm locked up in a patent makes it tough for any software to really have a breakthrough advance--they have to spend too much time avoiding patent lawsuits if they happen to come up with a similar solution to a similar technical problem that some other company patented.
Why is this a problem? Because software is complex, and built upon other software. The typical Windows machine can easily have over 100,000 individual files, and a very high percentage of those contain code that is part of a program. Any one of these files could run in such a way that it infringes on somebody's patent.
Computers are often compared to construction. Imagine if one company got a patent on making wall studs sixteen inches apart. Another company patented the process of putting a hardwood floor together, and yet another patented a door hinge. With hundreds of such "inventions" patented, nobody could afford to build a house, because of all the people who had to be paid a license. Even if you didn't know about any of these patents, but came up with a similar solution to a patented process, you could be taken to court. The computer industry is new enough that many of these basic building techniques are still covered by patents, and this situation seriously hampers the ability of software companies and the open source software community's ability to truly innovate, let alone build decent houses to any sort of standard.
Think I'm exaggerating? Read this: Wine development stifled by software patent. Wine is a set of libraries that make it possible to run Windows software in Linux. Because Microsoft was found to be a monopoly, they are required by the Consent Decree from the Department of Justice to not do things to prevent interoperability between their application software and other operating systems than Windows. But another company holds a patent on a key way of assembling Windows software, and so the open source Wine library can't provide full interoperability without infringing on this patent. Regardless of whether they even knew about the patent or original method.
And even though IBM has publicly granted open source projects a free license for some of their patents, this patent grant has caused problems for more liberal open source projects that allow people to include their code in other proprietary software. These liberal open source licenses are generally considered much more friendly to business than the "copyleft" types of licenses like the GNU General Public License--but because of the patent issues, a project would need the copyleft provisions to be able to use the patented techniques. See Patent worries trigger PostgreSQL code rewrite for an example.
It's long past time for people to pay attention to this stuff. We should all be asking:
- Who benefits from these copyright rules?
- Why shouldn't I be able to share information freely? Free Speech is covered by the First Amendment.
- How does the public benefit from extended copyright terms, and patents on software and business processes?
- Why is it illegal to sing the Happy Birthday song in a public place or over the air, without paying a licensing fee to a big corporation?
- Why should I buy computers, movies, and content that reports back to the copyright holders whatever I do with them?
- Why are my Constitutionally-given rights to Fair Use of copyrighted material being taken away from me?
Feel free to share this content with anyone, and publish it anywhere. All I ask is that you give me credit for the original writing, and that if you change the content and redistribute it, that you not add any other restrictions to the people you give it to. These are the terms of the Creative Commons "Attribution-Share-Alike" license, viewable here.
--John Locke
Freelock, LLC
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