waffle

I was looking at the del.icio.us information page for the well-written EC letter I linked to earlier this week. That people were linking it at all is wonderful. However, mikewest’s comment stood out for me:

Honestly, this is a much more intelligently written and well thought-out “DRM is bad” argument than I would have expected from the Pirate Party. I’m impressed with [its] lucidity, and agree completely with [its] conclusions.

It’s important to remember that the Pirate Party name was simply chosen out of spite. The label “pirate” was chosen by the music and movie industries to criminalize and make illicit something fairly abstract: seeing and listening to certain things. People have been singing and performing for thousands of years, and the concept of something other than the performance itself being something you should be morally obliged to pay for is a recent invention.

The idea behind the label is to characterise people as morally corrupt — no better than bearded pillagers. Adopting the name is just a way of trying to dull the edge of the concept. The best possible ultimate outcome in my opinion is for the Pirate Party to cease to exist because it doesn’t serve a purpose anymore.

Right now, it serves a purpose. People think that this is about downloading MP3 files and not paying anything. Alternatively, the slightly more savvy will recognize that it is in fact about people downloading and uploading MP3 files (and not paying anything) — file sharing. The downside to the name is that, as mikewest’s comment suggests, people will regard you as “cheap bastards wanting only free music just because”, which is off the mark for most people involved.

People miss that (and I will quote the letter here) –

[By] requiring the Internet Service Providers to monitor traffic for copyright infringements, the messenger immunity - that the messenger is never responsible for the contents of a sealed message - is revoked. This is a fundamental principle of justice dating back to the Roman Empire, which was now revoked in France without consideration that this was the case. It is exactly like making the Postal Service liable for every crime prepared over postal mail, and charging them with prevention thereof.

In fact, it’s worse than this:

[Removing] the messenger immunity means that the ISPs will err on the side of caution, assuming ANY transmission of ANY work to be not permitted. This leads to economic and democratic consequences. First, it has consequences for the freedom of the press, as documents showing improper behavior with corporations and authorities can no longer be leaked to reporters - the act of copying the documents and transmitting them to reporters would in itself be a copyright infringement. (This is not a theoretical construct. The site WikiLeaks was shut down recently for this very reason, for documents allegedly showing that a Swiss bank was involved in money laundering.) Second, it has economic consequences - it cements the notion that only today’s rightsholders are allowed to distribute creative works over authorized channels.

These are some of the important revelations highlighted by the letter (and there are more, in droves, which is why I was reluctant to quote any piece of it last time; for fear of singling out specific malfunctions).

You’ve all heard what I’m about to say. The industry that for the past century has taken advantage of the fact that people can be guilted and tricked into paying for the performance of an artistic work more than once due to technical advances, has witnessed another technical advance. It wants to undo scientific progress. It wants to freeze the status quo, because in the status quo, they make the money, artists and performers are (mostly) shafted out of reasonable cuts, and anyone wishing to partake of anything produced is pressured into payment by society at large.

You’ve all heard it. You know these lines by heart. This industry knows these lines by heart too, which is why it’s adapting. Piece by piece, they are letting go of some of the DRM measures now that it is abundantly clear how consumers do loathe them, but way more than that, they continue the neverending guilt trip by telling people who do buy their work to not download their work. (That’s the awesome part. This is exactly like punching your friend in the face because your enemy isn’t in the room right now. Pretty quickly he’ll become your enemy and I guess you can make some sort of perverted argument retroactively about having punched the right guy since hey, now for some reason he resents you.)

After all this, I’m still not trying to make a point that you shouldn’t humor these people and pay up. If you decide to go along with this or not is your own decision, naturally. If I want to own a copy of a song, I check on iTunes — if it’s available without DRM in iTunes Plus, I download it; if it’s not, well, I want to have a copy without DRM, and if the labels don’t provide me an option to get one and pay for it, it’s their loss. I’ll get my DRM-less copy elsewhere. You had your shot. I’m even along for the idea of digital movie rentals, even if it’s based on DRM. This is all a case of providing the right thing for the right price: being able to get this movie in good quality for a low price might be worth it even if it magically disappears after a while, since I watch a movie several orders of magnitude fewer times less than I listen to my favorite song.

My point at the end of all this is that this whole debate is about downloading things in the same way that running a restaurant is about, say, eggs. It’s an important part of the process, but the eventual issues worth discussing are things that arise from it. In the case of “pirating”, it’s about how introducing the necessary technical instruments to potentially stop all infringements of the laws in place now would preoccupy and slyly delegate law enforcement, while being an inadequate solution (there’s no way to detect intent or permission) and at the same time be completely adverse to democracy, human rights and basic judicial cornerstones.

This goes way beyond “papieren, bitte” — it creates a legal framework of workarounds that can be used to follow, map and harass people and basically nullify most aspects of what kind of freedom living in a developed country brings you.

If that’s the choice you have to make — and a choice needs to be made — I think we all know which choice we’d make.