Vaidnayathan Weekly thought paper

Here is my thought paper from last week...

Charlotte Tschider
02/24/05
Thoughts #4

The presence and poignancy of the Napster debate has forced us as researchers to view copyright in a whole new light. From a rhetorical standpoint, our views on copyright have less to do with “rights” and more to do with audience “anticipation.” The government seems captivated by whether something is “right” or “wrong,” as Jeff noted this week, the “natural right” to the Author’s “work,” but this offers a standard that gathers dust in an active online, collaborative environment. What means more here is not the Author’s right, but the Audience’s.

Having lived through the Napster debate, using Napster myself as well as Kazaa, Morpheus, and others, the restrictions seem to have approached the problem from the wrong side. Students today (especially students that I teach) seem to think that there is no such thing as “property,” that only something physical (tangible medium) can be “stolen.” Presenting someone else’s work (including a human experience, for storytelling, or a joke) as one’s own seems less transgressive; because that experience could just as well be the work of another (again speaking to this idea of speech as community-generated), it is permissible. Music file-sharing does not go this far: files are still associated with their artists; artists receive renewed appreciation, lauding, and marketing in other ways. Instead of improving marketing tactics (as Logie has noted, the Eminem CD with enclosed DVD), the recording industry has seemed hell-bent on 1) improving the technology of restriction (improving the steel of the jails so the ‘convicts’ cannot break out), 2) Threatening by punishment or following through on punishment (deterring little Jimmy with his 30 downloaded Big-Bird songs from downloading more or fining 70-year-old Gertrude), and 3) Sabotage (uploading ‘ghost songs’ to mislead and frustrate downloaders).

Vaidhyanathan mentions these while quoting Peter Jaszi’s issues of “pseudo-copyright,” “paracopyright,” and “metacopyright.” Pseudo-copyright relates to data protection efforts (deterrence, shut-downs of centralized data-sharing), paracopyright to“technical locks,” and metacopyright to “contractual rights surrender.” I question why at this point the DMCA requires preventing and punishing, instead of establishing it as a reality (not a crime), especially when the only “people” who suffer—who are pictured as ‘poor, starving, artists’ instead of the multi-billion dollar recording companies—are really corporations unwilling to “let go” of an eclipsed technology and reinvent a marketing scheme. This strikes me as not much different than printing presses of late, 16th-century England turning out cheap copies and subsequent laws reinforced by a monarchical power structure, solely to protect particular businesse). In a capitalistic society, it should be appropriate to invent according to market demand, instead of attempting to change/repress the market. The audience exists, regardless, in spite of, and because of the speakers (in this case, artists, corporations, and other people where that particular communication begins), but it remains an autonomous group, a group which interprets and acts as it will. “Protection” of “property” here does not do the job; Vaidhyanathan does not go as far as I’d like—even “thin” protection exists in an environment where corporations virtually own and certainly control works.