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Anti-piracy ads and copynorms

David wrote two good pieces on the MPAA's anti-downloading propaganda.

I bought a copy of Secretary a while ago. The supposedly anti-piracy locks in the player are used to run ten minutes of ads at the start of the disk. I don't mind them putting them on there, but I do object to not being able to skip ads on a DVD I paid for, just as I can rip ad wrappers off a magazine. I think next time I watch it, I'll make a point of ripping it onto a hard disk first, so that I can cut them off and re-record it.

The MPAA's current strategy seems to be to grab away all fair-use rights. I don't think this influences norms; it just makes people laugh. It gives me a reason to copy this disk (for personal use) when previously I had none. (Stupid region coding is another reason; lack of resale rights for downloaded music is another.)

As a society we are in the process of working out new copynorms. Technology has made something possible, and now we need to work out what is the polite way to use it. I can imagine a similar process after the advent of the telephone or the birth-control pill.

How do norms evolve? Several forces interact: reasoning from fundamental ethics (the golden rule, etc), law, extension from previous patterns, reaction to events.

Saying "copying is illegal" only weakly affects norms because it begs the question of whether it should be illegal. Time-shifting TV shows or copying music onto an iPod is illegal in Australia, but you'd have to go a long way to make it socially unacceptable.

Saying "copying is theft" is also unconvincing because it's clearly not exactly the same as theft of rivalrous goods. We need to collectively decide whether that is a useful analogy or not. Other analogies are possible: it's considered OK to use someone's ideas, but polite to acknowledge them.

Linux and open source software is demonstrating that harsh control is not the only possible way to produce complex intellectual goods.

You need not accept the WMP EULA, which permits Microsoft to make arbitrary changes to your PC. On the other hand, by using an alternative like mplayer, you can be technically illegal but still doing things that are absolutely ethically reasonable: watching purchased DVDs in your own home. Iterating through this shifts the copynorms: Secretary is not reasonable; mplayer is reasonable. By extension, people who want to ban Linux DVD players are not reasonable, and their ads are silly.

Kim Weatherall has more good bits on this, and rather better informed than the ramblings of this hack.

posted Tue 21 Sep 2004 in /issues/copyright | link

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