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9.15.2004
Tortured rationalizations
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On Monday, Tech Daily's Issue of the Week column contained a quotation from a software developer and file-sharer, Peter Royal, that illustrates the tortured rationalizations used to defend file-sharing. It consists of three pairs of sentences, in which the second sentence either undermines or refutes the first. Here is the relevant paragraph from Tech Daily (an invaluable publication that I recommend to all):
"Royal, who bought 90 percent of the music on his hard drive, said content creators should be paid for their work. But in the spectrum of criminal activity, he equates music sharing to jaywalking. 'File sharing isn't stealing, it's copyright infringement,' he said. 'Digital files aren't really anything. They're just atoms arranged a certain way. The person who creates the music doesn't lose anything tangible from having the file shared. They just lost an [economic] opportunity.'"
"File sharing isn't stealing, it's copyright infringement." True enough, but this distinction proves very little. Copyright infringement is illegal, subject to civil and criminal sanctions, and rightly so. Royal is apparently rationalizing file-sharing by suggesting that infringement is a less serious wrong than stealing. But both are illegal for similar reasons. Downloading an album and stealing a CD with the same music have the same consequences -- reduced incentives to produce works (see below).
"Digital files aren't really anything. They're just atoms arranged a certain way." Basically everything is comprised of arranged atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. Royal's second sentence thus refutes his first. Moreover, as anyone who has accidentally deleted his or her only copy of a draft memo knows, digital files are often significant things that can be lost and sometimes (thank God) retrieved. Of course, Royal is correct in suggesting that a physical object like a CD seems more real than a file -- we can see it and feel it. This perception that the file is less "real" probably does make it easier to rationalize file-sharing, and distinguish it from stealing a CD (see above). But this is just a rationalization. A music file stored on a hard drive (or on a pirated CD) is no less real than the file on a store-bought CD.
"The person who creates the music doesn't lose anything tangible from having the file shared. They just lost an [economic] opportunity." Again, Royal moves from one claim, that a content producer "doesn't lose anything tangible," to a contradictory proposition, that he or she "just lost an [economic] opportunity." Apparently Royal thinks this opportunity is insignificant and without substance. Another rationalization: No harm, no foul. But the lost economic opportunity is very real and important. It is the content producer's chance to earn tangible economic rewards -- money -- by selling to others the right to enjoy copies of the content. File-sharing enables consumers to free-ride, obtaining the opportunity to enjoy works without paying producers.
In this regard, it is interesting that Tech Daily makes a point of identifying Royal as an "enthusiast" who "bought 90 percent of the music on his hard drive." Well. If Royal were the typical file-sharer, concerns about undermining incentives to create works would, of course, be largely eliminated -- the ten percent leakage would be unlikely to threaten the basic economics of the creative industries. But Royal is an extremely atypical file-sharer. File-sharing overwhelmingly represents free-riding and piracy on a previously unimagined scale, greatly reducing the ability of content producers to earn tangible rewards for their creations, and thereby dramatically threatening incentives to create new works.
posted by Bill Adkinson : 9/15/2004 02:25:48 PM
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