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Your Rights On The Line

A decade's worth of "digital revolution" has given everyone who owns or uses a computer the possibility to circumvent intellectual property laws on a scale formerly available only to professionally run counterfeiting operations. File sharing services such as Napster (now defunct), GNUtella and FastTrack (the backbone powering Morpheus and KaZaa) enable users to swap music, movies and software with incredible ease, without any concern for copyright issues whatsoever, so it's easy to understand why businesses that make a living selling intellectual property are none too pleased with this development. Faced with a new, digitally spurned disregard for their copyrights, they see no option but to attempt regaining their control and livelihood by any means necessary, even (and this is where it gets nasty) if it means curtailing consumers' rights.

Tekst: Matthijs de Jonge

Publicatiedatum: 31 januari 2002

So what are these laws computer users are breaking by adding to their audio and video collections with the help of Napster's more formidable offspring? Simply put, intellectual property laws determine that any idea, artistic, scientific or otherwise, is owned by whomever came up with it first. If you write a song, that song is yours. It is illegal for someone else to take your song and claim they wrote it. That is pretty much all there is to it. These laws (also known as copyright laws: copyright is defined as "explicit legal ownership of a piece of intellectual property") determine who can reap the profits associated with a piece of intellectual property and in what way, but nothing else. If you've paid for a CD, you can play it backwards, stick it in a microwave (by all means, try this at home!) or give it to your mom and you'll never run into legal trouble. You cannot, however, sell copies of your CD's to all your friends. That right is reserved exclusively to the owner of the intellectual property. Namely, the primary function of intellectual property laws is to protect copyright owners (artists or scientists) against malicious publishers who wish to make profits by selling something that isn't theirs.
You will find, however, that most legal systems provide a few extra's to further define what you as a consumer can or cannot do with media products you buy. Under most legal systems, you'll find, for example, provisions for Fair Use (you have the right to make cassette copies of your CD's so you can listen to your music in your car; these provisions are present in any legal system which honors intellectual property), lending fees levied by libraries to reimburse copyright owners for sharing their property between a large group of consumers and so forth.

Unfortunately, thanks to the advent of digital technology, copyright laws are more and more becoming impossible to uphold, meaning they're absolutely useless in practice, just like speeding laws and prohibition of marijuana smoking. It used to be that only a limited number of specialized criminal organizations were able to distribute and obtain perfect copies of copyrighted material. Nowadays, however, everyone who owns a desktop computer and an internet connection can do the same thing with incredible ease. It is, therefore, all but impossible to fight "piracy" (the term used to describe copyright infringement), because every computer user is a (possible) criminal.

Faced with this reality, copyright holders (in practice, these aren't the artists and scientists themselves, but rather a limited number of corporations which take care of administrating the intellectual property rights for large numbers of intellectual property creators at once and this is putting it nicely), have to come up with new technologies to once again make it impossible for ordinary consumers to redistribute copyrighted material on a significant scale. Examples of such technologies are the copy protection measures currently finding their ways onto audio CD's, region encoding for DVD's and the digital rights management (DRM) techniques Windows Media Player uses to make sure you can only play legal WMA files.

These new technologies do not, however, merely prevent consumers from copying media products as they see fit (which would be fair). They also restrict ordinary, legal uses of copyrighted material. For example, copy protection for audio CD's has the unfortunate side-effect of making them impossible to play on CD-ROM drives. This way, you're prevented from exercising your legal right to Fair Use (playing your media wherever you like), if only because you're no longer able to turn the songs you buy into MP3 files for use on portable MP3-players. A similar problem occurs with the restricted ("protected") WMA files Microsoft is currently cajoling the music industry into accepting as a standard. These MP3-like files can only be played on computers which have been given explicit permission to do so. If you want, you can compare this to a situation where you can only play a CD you buy on your own stereo: if you wish to take it to a friend's house to listen to it there (something that is most certainly permitted by current copyright laws), you can't, because his stereo doesn't have permission to play your CD.

And if you think this is bad, just wait 'till you hear what Microsoft researchers still have in store for you: about a month ago, they patented a technique that makes sure users can't execute "untrusted programs" on their computers while listening to "protected" music. The idea behind this technique is that such an "untrusted program" could be trying to turn the protected audio stream into unprotected data that users can copy freely. In practice, however, if you were to work with an operating system that employed this kind, you'd be likely to find almost every piece of software you wanted to work with to be "untrusted", unless the programmers have explicitly asked (paid) Microsoft to register their product as "trusted" (not very likely, especially in the case of shareware and freeware programs). Meaning, if Microsoft has their way, users can no longer use their computers any way they want.

The schemes mentioned above are by no means the end of the intellectual property industry attempting to force consumers to once again play nice with their copyrights. You're likely to see many more such schemes getting developed in the near future, as, after all, this industry is indeed threatened by users freely swapping copyrighted material. Since it has already become clear that taking legal action against one Napster will only result in the birth of many more such file sharing systems, the industry feels it has no choice but to go after the consumers themselves, even if that means taking away their rights. Which is something you, as a consumer, may want to think about.

If this article has piqued your interested, you may wish to visit the following websites:

» 10 Big Myths about copyright explained: Check this out if you're unclear about what is and what isn't permitted.

» Electronic Frontier Foundation: This organisation, run by a former Grateful Dead drummer, among others, has been fighting for online rights since the early days of the 'net.

» What's wrong with copy protection: an article explaining the issues surrounding copyright and copy protection. A good read, if nothing else.

» A history of copyright: A UK-centric (but that's not a bad thing, since UK-ies were the first to come up with the notion of intellectual property) narration of the origins of our present-day copyright laws.

» The full text of the Bern convention: For those of you who enjoy legalese, here's the full text of the international treaty on intellectual property a vast number of states (most likely including yours) adhere to.

This list is incomplete, somewhat one sided and most definitely not comprehensive. You'd be well advised to regularly check online news sources focussing on IT-related topics (computer geeks tend to worry a lot more about these issues than us ordinary folk) such as The Register, Newsbytes and the wonderfully biased Slashdot. The online version of Wired magazine features good articles on copyright issues aimed at a broader audience. You'd be well advised to check it from time to time.

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