Put Another Quarter in the Jukebox
Posted on July 30, 2009
Filed Under Copyright | Comments Off
I know you paid for it already, but you shouldn’t expect to own anything
The strongest divide today between Pirates and *insert big business attempting to sell digital content* is that even if we were to ‘come to our senses’ and stop breaking the law, to get the content we want how we want, the ‘legitimate’ way of getting the content we want doesn’t provide us with anything real. The value of my dollar is being eaten up by the corporation and I get nothing in return, I should feel lucky they let me listen to the new pop album once before asking for some more money.
“We reject the view,” he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office, “that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.”
What he’s saying is that even though you can buy copyrighted works that doesn’t necessarily mean you own anything, you’re just renting the time in which you will be allowed to consume the material. He justifies this by saying nothing lasts forever and that should include the licenses you hold to be allowed to see ideas. Just as computer products are made to fail books, CD’s and movies should be made to fail too. Obviously the problem with *insert big digital content provider*is that their products last forever, that people who expect the music they download today to work tomorrow, next week or even next year should consider themselves lucky they get that time at all.
Nothing will drive piracy more than an entertainment industry that offers us nothing in return for our money. If my options are to break the law so I can get MP3 versions of the songs I want that will last forever and play on anything I own or pay a wealthy executive monthly or yearly fees to access the content only as exactly as they allow me to, I don’t feel like there’s much of a competition there.
Metalitz suggests that the market will take care of problems that arise, pointing out that Wal-Mart and others have all kept their DRM servers running after public outcries. But Harvard Fellow Chris Soghoian, who proposed the exemption, noted that Wal-Mart will be shutting down its DRM servers for good in October 2009.
“Wal-Mart’s latest actions provide ample evidence that the issue of DRM abandonware is not a hypothetical concern and that the market cannot be counted on to provide consumers with an adequate remedy,” he wrote.
Wal-Mart’s servers go down and you lose access to everything you ‘invested’ in, since it wasn’t your content anyway you have no rights to that content anymore and you must give the content provider money for the privilege to consume the product again. If the private market isn’t actually selling anything, why should anyone buy it?
The suit doesn’t seek any damages for copyright infringement, though Wadsted didn’t discount that as a future possibility. “What matters [most] is that the spreading of these works is stopped,” she [Monique Wadsted, the studios' legal counsel in Sweden] told The Local. While Global Gaming Factory has announced plans to buy The Pirate Bay and turn it into a legal downloading service, Wadsted said that the studios she represents can’t “wait and see” if that will ever happen or not.
At least they’re being honest.
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