I live in Old Montreal, Quebec, where almost all households and offices depend on the legal sale of copyrighted materials, be they software, music or film/television, for a livelihood. Children here have clothes on their backs because someone was willing to pay for fair use of copyrighted material in some form or another.

Giving power "back to the people" by allowing them to steal from those who worked hard to create art and science, using Napster, Gnutella, or any other service, is in fact taking power away from people -- who really believes that anarchy is empowering? Hey, why not take it one step further and allow anyone to steal food off supermarket shelves? Wouldn't that empower them? Isn't A&P a huge corporation who now oppresses people by asking for so much money from them? Isn't asking people to shell out cash at the checkout counter something that they don't like, would prefer to not do, and, using your arguments, a reason for which all food should be free?

Hollywood is not just fat cats hanging around poolside champagne bars. Hollywood is also people like me who work very long hours to make a living, and some very simple folks who do things like serve food on the set and drive production vehicles. If consumers think that $11 is too much to pay to see the projects we work on, then they can chose not to. Next time, we'll work harder. However, we OWN these projects. If we wanted to, we could charge $50. If consumers didn't like it, we could then revise our plan. Sound "wrong" or "offensive"? Well, however it sounds, this is simply the way a capitalist democracy works. What you and the many academics you quote are suggesting sounds much like communism, where individual ownership is seen as a sin. Who would pay the salaries of musicians, writers, etc., if their work were available for free? No one. All these art forms would regress to a pre-medieval scenario, where you could only practice them as an amateur, or maybe hope a benefactor would throw you a few pennies once in a while. In this scenario, only non-information-related, blue-collar jobs could be considered viable.

Is this what you and the academics you quote want?

I also think you overstate the problem of being unable to make fair-use backups. Sure, it happens that a CD gets scratched, or that a program needs to be installed twice on the same computer, or whatever. Those problems can easily be solved by better protection technology, like dongles, and by better customer service. I'm sure software makers would be more than glad to offer better customer service in return for regaining the estimated 60 percent of revenues they lose to piracy.

Really, this is not about Hollywood fat cats protecting their asses, this is about entire industries protecting the means of survival of millions of people, most of them neither fat nor particularly catlike.

-- Rob Ruffo

Would you please be so kind as to stop referring to fair-use copying as "intellectual property violation"? Not only is there no such thing as "intellectual property," but making copies of a CD you've bought is not a violation of any law. The only thing owned is a copyright, which restricts commercial copying.

It is unfortunate that Congress and the courts have ignored the clear intention of the founders where copyrights, patents and trademarks are concerned. They are trying to invent something they call "intellectual property," for a whole host of reasons, none of them good for our democracy or the freedoms we enjoy.

Ask yourself this, is it legal or ethical for me to take your car, spray-paint it and crash it? Certainly not. How about if I sing your song to my friends in a Elmer Fudd voice, out of key and with weird or naughty words? There's nothing illegal or unethical about this (although it may be in poor taste).

This shows how silly the notion of "intellectual property" is. If you tell me your idea, I have a copy in my head, and I can do anything with it I like. I can wreck it, twist it, fold, spindle and mutilate it. I can spray-paint it and crash it. I can tell one friend, or a thousand.

Except for just one thing: If your idea is patented, I can't use it to make something to sell for profit.

That is all the founders intended patents and copyrights to be used for. Not to keep secrets, but to give creators the financial security to share their ideas with the rest of us. Not to set up a cash pipeline for the record and movie industries, but to keep those industries from stealing from creators.

If your only concerns about music, science and art have to do with commerce, then you might be forgiven for thinking that "intellectual property" exists. But if all that matters to you is commerce, then you are a shallow person indeed and deserve to be a "consumer" rather then a citizen.

-- G.R. Svenddal

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the SSSCA is that it would effectively make it impossible to produce your own digital content -- for if no machine is allowed to view content without the proper encrypted watermark, what incentive do the major studios have to share those watermarks with the public?

A video file transferred from a camcorder could as easily contain a movie recorded off a cinema screen as it could contain legitimate original content. Even a simple text file could as easily contain the "pirated" text of a book that has been run through a scanner as it could contain legitimate original content.

And the SSSCA would make it illegal to make a computer that could play files from that camcorder or read that text file. So if you created a video or text file and sent it to your friends, they could not read it. And letting you make your own watermarks would defeat the entire purpose of the SSSCA as Hollywood is proposing it, because then you could watermark pirated content.

Furthermore, the SSSCA would effectively outlaw the open-source movement -- for if the source of an operating system is open, it can be modified into a circumvention device. No more Linux, no more FreeBSD ... because these are grass-roots-developed operating systems and anyone can modify them (or simply compile old versions that don't have the protections in place), they cannot be permitted.

This overly broad law will adversely affect many of the freedoms we take for granted. It must not be allowed to pass.

-- Chris Meadows

I'd like to thank Salon for all of the interesting coverage on copy protection and file sharing. I hope it continues.

One angle I've been particularly interested in is something that has coincided with the emergence of the MP3 format and huge file-sharing services like Napster: how cheap it's gotten for amateur musicians to produce nearly professional-quality music.

I look at programs like Fruity Loops ($49-$99) and Sonic Foundry's Acid ($349) as cheap and fairly easy-to-learn computer programs. Yet, they are also deep enough to open the door for some really interesting new ideas about music by people who aren't under any self-imposed pressure to be the next Britney Spears, but who just love music.

Hell, the way I see it, let the big five music companies stop people from stealing music by the lame employee/artists on their rosters. I believe that even if it becomes impossible to copy or download Metallica or Eminem albums, people will still have that hunger for opening up their favorite file-sharing program and having free music instantly. If they are forced by the record companies to pursue alternative music to do that, maybe that would be good for music in general.

I don't think that the record companies are going to crumble because of consumer rage at their crappy copy-protection schemes, but I do think that it's possible that people who spend a lot of time online are going to be faced with the prospect of (a) buying restrictive copy-protected media that they can't listen to on half of the listening devices in their house, or (b) just downloading music by unfamiliar artists from sites like mp3.com, file-sharing services, or sites that artists put up on their own as part of a bigger collective (as they do in the mod music scene).

A critic would be right to point out that affordable software with a small learning curve would open the floodgates for tons of hacks, sensationalists (like the "porn music" on mp3.com), and even thieves that would plagiarize other Internet artists for attention. My response to that is: may the best man or woman win. I'm up to the challenge. As a musician, I don't have a problem giving my music away for free for the rest of my life. As a music fan, I welcome the opportunity to listen to music in a different way.

-- Josh Taillon

For anyone outside the U.S., the possibility of further digital media rights protection legislation is horrifying.

Here in Australia, we are seriously limited in what DVDs we can access: I would love to watch "Labyrinth" on my Mac -- I would pay to be able to do it... But I cannot -- the DVD is not encoded for region 4, so my DVD player won't play it if I do buy it.

Now the U.S. Congress is considering extending these sorts of restrictions to all digital media, all hardware and software. I can see a time coming when I cannot buy a copy of a Pat Metheny CD to play on my Walkman, because the Walkman is a few years old and doesn't have the right enabling chip. Oh, hey, I just figured out how to get a copy -- I'll get a mate to pick up a pirated copy without read protection while he's in Bali.

The only people who will benefit from the legislation are people with malicious intent, and the media publishers. The hardware manufacturers will have added costs that they'll pass along to the consumers. Software manufacturers will spend more on lawyers than programmers (if they don't already!). And U.S. consumers will face the problem we already have here -- legitimately purchased media won't play on legitimately purchased and unaltered hardware.

-- Robert Hook

I still think the solution to much of the music recording industry's problems is to lower the prices of CDs and DVDs. Album tape cassettes retail for around $10. It certainly is easier and faster and cheaper to make a CD than a tape. Yet the CD in many cases costs nearly twice as much as a cassette. Another factor hardly taken into consideration by the industry is that the irritation involved in their various schemes will be so high that consumers will simply stop buying their stuff. They will turn to totally different sources for their music entertainment.

-- Ronald W. Dyke

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