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If people wouldn’t steal, we wouldn’t need Internet piracy laws
By Lauren | January 19, 2012
Yesterday’s blackout of Wikipedia and other highly trafficked websites must have put quite a dent in a lot of people’s time online. The blackout was, of course, to protest Congressional proposals to enact tough new laws against online piracy. The entertainment industry, the publishing industry, and other providers of creative content are strongly in favor of the new laws, while web gurus oppose anything that compromises the freewheeling, unregulated culture of the Internet.
I have a lot of sympathy for the writers and artists who are sick of seeing their creative work bootlegged and distributed around the world for free. And yes, it matters. Apart from a handful of superstars, writers and artists don’t usually make a whole lot of money. Every time a fan bootlegs their work online instead of paying for it, the artists and writers lose a piece of their livelihood. That’s just plain unfair. At the same time, I recognize that it’s not always easy to tell whether something on the Internet is copyrighted or not, so there’s a very real likelihood that anti-piracy laws would be enforced unfairly. And, for that matter, there’s always the question of whether the proposed laws can be enforced, especially if the “pirates” are based outside our borders. It’s not as though our existing copyright laws have been especially effective.
This may be naive, but I think it would be better if writers and artists took their case directly to their fans. If online publications and artwork were clearly marked as copyrighted (when they are) but available for sale at a reasonable price, wouldn’t most consumers respect the creators’ rights and buy what they wanted? I’d be interested to hear from my readers on this one. To me, it’s better for artists and their fans to respect one another than for the government to adopt complicated laws that may not even solve the problem. Do you agree?
Topics: Business Ethics, Social Ethics, business communications, customer relations, ethics |
January 19th, 2012 at 9:48 pm
In theory, I understand why they would want to help fight copyright violations. However, I think the problem so many people have with the law is how sweeping it is, and its potential for being overused. As one site participating in the blackout observed, sites like YouTube and Wikipedia already do a pretty thorough job removing illegal content. Under these laws, such content would cause these sites to be shut down entirely, leaving lawful users in the lurch until the sites go through undoubtedly lengthy procedures to be restored. The question is whether all the creativity, innovation, and knowledge-gathering encouraged by these websites should be sacrificed for a few bad apples.