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A new battlefront between the law and the public is opening up before our eyes and many don’t even realise. Ominous signals are coming from corporations and governments worldwide as what is to be a global system of militarised enforcement of “intellectual property” laws materialises.

Now I’m all for creators getting paid for their creations, but not at the expense of reasonable expectations of privacy and civil liberties. The content industry would have you believe that the only way for artists to get paid is to wage a “War on File-Sharing” in the vein of the oh-so-successful “War on Drugs”. Well if that’s the only way then I would say the harm is not worth the gain, but I hope we as a civilisation can do better than that.

Before discussing this issue any further, I think it is important to examine what file-sharing actually is, and what the implications of draconian enforcement of potentially outdated ideas of copyright are for the development of ideas and culture. “File-sharing” is simply the sharing of knowledge and culture. Books, movies, shows, works of art, software, any type of file that can be shared are part of the rich culture and technological knowledge that form the cornerstone of advanced civilisation. We are supposed to share these things. Our crowning achievement as a species was supposed to be maximising access to the aforementioned items to as many of our kind as possible. But along the way somewhere, someone decided that it was more important for them to make a personal profit.

Let me give the example of a library. A good library has always been the hallmark of advanced civilisations. Cicero said “if you have a library and a garden then you have all you need”. And the idea of a modern library as a place where any person, no matter what their means, can come and access the collective knowledge and heritage of human culture is something that nobody of moral conscience would try to undo.

As a citizen, no matter what my background or financial capability, I can go to the library and educate myself about any subject free of charge. What I can afford never even comes into the equation. Indeed the idea that someone in an unfortunate circumstance could lift themselves up through access to knowledge and better their situation is, in theory, what many nations stand for.

Why the analogy of a library? Because the internet is equivilant to a giant library, and as the internet evolves along with the way that we use it, it will increasingly fill this function. If I want to read a book, I can go to the library and check it out, even if it’s brand new. But if I download a .pdf of the book then that is copyright infringement unless I pay a cartel of entertainment companies for the right to access it. The same goes for any movie or TV show or opportunity to use computer software like Microsoft Office. Now the difference in a library is that there is a limited number of each item. But for popular items libraries make an effort to have more copies, and I think most libraries would argue that the number of copies of most items is limited only by funding and that if they could have a greater number of copies of any book, needed to meet demand, they ideally would.

So when you think of the internet in that way, things like iTunes and armed police enforcing file-sharing legislation to “protect copyright holders” seems a lot like some Mafia thug standing at the door to the library and demanding cash before you get in. And hitting you up for more cash each time you read more than a couple of pages of a book or watch more than a few minutes of a video. You pay and use iTunes, sweet as. You use some alternative to access the same knowledge and culture because you can’t afford to otherwise, you get thumped. This is what John Key and his mates at Warner Brothers are actually trying to do, not to make sure Bic Runga doesn’t go hungry.

None of this is to say that creative individuals should not be paid for their contributions to knowledge and culture. Just that it should not come at the expense of the underlying morals and ideals of said culture; because then, what would be the point of developing the culture in the first place? Furthermore the current model, which puts the entertainment company executive as the middleman in charge of a trickle-down economics which still sees artists struggling despite record sales, has alternatives. Creative Commons licensing is one of many. Social micropayments is another.

All in all, when you start to look at “intellectual property” through this lens, the two words together start to leave a really bad taste in the mouth, and it makes the course our society is headed down look like the wrong one. Instead of sacrificing our collective morals and limiting technological advancement, we should focus on using our ingenuity to find creative solutions to support the creators of knowledge and culture in our society.

– Abe Gray