http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/13/atandt-training-document-piracy/
Disclosure: I am a music attorney who is more than familiar
with copyright law. And I am definitely not an opponent of digital progress.
One of the reasons I quit my job as a lawyer at a major record label in the
late 1990’s was because I saw how slow record labels were to react to new media.
In fact, the initial model of my business (online music distribution) failed
precisely because we expected majors to license their repertoire to 3rd
parties like us to sell digitally to consumers (this was 1999, and it didn’t happen until 2003).
So I just want to set the stage here by saying that I have been an advocate for
the recorded music industry to join the digital revolution before most people
ever heard the term “MP3”.
That said, I still think it’s remarkable that an entire
generation of people have grown up thinking that it’s ok to violate copyright law
since “record companies are greedy anyway” and artists can just get paid “from
shows and merchandise”. Copyright law
ensures that creators get paid because getting paid for your work is a strong
enticement to keep creating more work. Now, I’ve never been an advocate
of suing your customer base (as the record industry did stupidly for years); I’d
have much rather have seen a massive campaign of education, like this ISP experiment can be. If a performer/songwriter/producer
(collectively, artist) wants to give away the fruits of their labor for free, that’s
their right to do so. But the vast majority of artists barely scratch out a
living and would very much like to get paid for your use and enjoyment of their
work.
As much as I can’t stand AT&T, I think that banding with
ISP’s to limit piracy is a necessary move, and has been advocated by some for
many years. By reading the comments to this article I am in the minority. But
how would you like it if you did a job and created a benefit and didn’t get
paid for it. Just because you can’t download what you do for a living doesn’t
mean that you should be able to download a pop song without permission that
many people have invested heavily in to create (time, money, emotion).
BUT there are very real privacy issues here; so I will hope
that those “suspected of piracy” by an ISP will be sufficiently vetted. But remember – a decade and a half of internet
use does not give anyone the right to circumvent a multi-century standard of
intellectual property protection. Maybe
the U.S will eventually move toward less rigid intellectual property
protection. But I’m definitely curious to see how people react to the “ISP
police” and how that affects digital consumption in the future.
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