Copyright law is a mess

Copyrights were originally intended to encourage authors by granting them a limited monopoly on their creations. In a nutshell, if one creates an interesting work, one has the right to earn money from it - you can prohibit others from copying and selling your work, you receive the proceeds from sales and distribution.

With the advent of media giants, copyrights have become something else entirely. The interests of a company are very different from the interests of an individual, and companies never die. This has led to laws such as the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), first enacted in America and subsequently in many other countries. First of all, the DMCA criminalizes copyright infringement (which used to be a purely civil matter). Second, it prohibits attempts to circumvent copy-protection methods - even where these methods restrict legitimate uses of the work. For example, if you purchase a CD, it is completely legal for you to copy the music to your MP3 player. But if the CD has some sort of copy protection on it, the DMCA calls you a criminal if you have circumvent this to make your copy.

What needs to be done, to return sanity to copyright law? Let's take a step back and look some underlying principles:

One important principle that has been forgotten (or deliberately ignored) by the lawmakers is this: while it is right and proper for the government to regulate what happens in the town square, the government has no business trying to control what you do in privacy.

If you take great pleasure in intricate programming, why shouldn't you crack a copy-protection scheme? If you do this at home, affecting no one else, why should anyone care. Of course, if you start distributing the result, it's a different matter - a straightforward case of copyright infringement, for which the old laws were perfectly adequate. But the DMCA is not really about copyright protection, but rather about coming into your living room and telling you what you can and cannot do on your own computer.

The second tangent: a fundamental principle of our legal system is that we are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. And yet, on every DVD-recorder, on every copy machine the purchaser pays a fee. This fee is supposedly to recompense artists for copyright infringement. If you purchase such a device, you are presumed guilty. You cannot possibly prove yourself innocent - you must pay the fee!

There is now serious talk (at least in Europe - if it's not in the States, it will be soon), that there should be similar charges on any device capable of storing and replaying music or films. If this presumption of guilt is not offensive enough, think of the counterproductive effect. Imagine: if a teenager pays a $40 per gigabyte fee (that's the proposed amount) on a new MP3 player, said teenager is going to be damned sure to pirate at least $40 worth of music!

To summarize: the law - and enforcement of the law - should respect our basic rights. In particular:

1. Privacy. As long as our activities do not directly impinge on others, they should be of no interest to the law. In your own house, you should be able to do anything you like with copyrighted material: copy it decrypt it, encrypt it, nail it to the bathroom wall. As long as your activities remain private, they are of no interest to anyone else.
   
   
2. Innocent until proven guilty. No law or regulation should presume that we are going to behave illegally. We should pay no fees for infringement we haven't done. Content providers should not prevent us from making private copies (i.e., DRM) without notifying us in advance on the outer packaging so that we can choose not to buy their product. Our computers should not be able to disable our hardware because some hacker somewhere pirated content using the same model.
   
   
3. A fine but important point that follows from both of the above: merely possessing illegally copied material should not be punishable. The punishable activity is the distribution: the person who copied and passed out the material. Too many end-consumers have been sued for downloading something in good faith - this should not happen.

Three simple principles that would return a bit of sanity to copyright law...

George Bush and Hermann Göring

Hermann Göring discussed war with an American journalist, shortly before his suicide. It was his view that the population of a country can always be led into war, even against their better judgment. And he should know - after all, the Nazis did just that, with calculated manipulation. Here is the relevant passage in full:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Note how relevant this is to America's attach on Iraq. President Bush led the country into war using just this technique. And even added to it - after all, he never bothered with the congressional part.

In modern times, a comparison with the Nazis is anethema, and usually the end of a discussion. That is a shame - remember the old saying "those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it". An uneducated populace, unaware of how cynical leaders can manipulate it, is ripe for the plucking.

Of course, it's still not clear what George Bush and company were seeking in Iraq.

• It wasn't oil - else he would have secured the oil fields first thing.
  
• It wasn't terrorists - Iraq was just about the only country in the area that did not actively support terrorists, being too wrapped up in its own internal affairs.
• It wasn't WMD - there weren't any, and it was obvious to any objective observer that Bush's data was cooked.
• It can't have been to bring democracy to the region - could anyone really be that naive?
• It can't just be that Saddam Hussein was a despicable dictator - there are plenty of those in the world, with Saddam far from the worst.
  

So what was it?

Critical thinking?

I tend to read more right-leaning blogs than left-leaning. One thing strikes me about both: the uncritical acceptance of any event that happens to fit their point of view.

Take the recent case of a man assaulted in London by three men, apparently muslims. His story of the assault is upsetting enough, but the way the police refuse to follow-up makes the blood boil. If he insists on pressing charges, the police say that they will charge him with a violation of the race relations act.

Well, maybe. Every story has two sides, and one wonders what a fly on the wall of the police station would have seen. While the description of the events is calm and factual, how did he handle himself at the time? Were the police perhaps persuaded that he, himself was a loony? Was he ranting on more about the *ç%&* muslims and less about the assault? Clearly, he must have emphasized ethnicity, else the police would have known nothing of it.

I don't say his story isn't true. Perhaps it is just as he reported. The point is: the right-wing blogs that reported this event accept it "as is". They pose no questions, do not seek more detail. For example, if one knew the station where this took place, and the date and time of the report, one could ask the police for a response.

Bloggers are the new journalists. They demand critical thinking of the MSM - they also need to demand it from themselves...