Things I Know I Know

The Shifted Librarian quotes Senator Norm Coleman on his call for an investigation of the RIAA's subpeona extravaganza:

"The chairman of the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations Thursday began an inquiry into the music industry's crackdown against online music swappers, calling the campaign 'excessive.'

'Theft is theft, but in this country we don't cut off your arm or fingers for stealing,' said Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican who was a rock roadie in the 1960s....

In the conference call, Coleman acknowledged that he used to download music from Napster, the file-sharing service that a federal judge shut down for violating music copyrights.

'I must confess, I downloaded Napster, and then Napster was found to be the wrong thing,' he said. 'I stopped.' "

First, I applaud the Senator for asking questions about just what's going on here and what exactly is being done.

But I'm also blogging this because I want to stop supporting, even tacitly, the notion that copyright infringement is 'theft.' It is not. It is infringement, an important difference and one that needs to be made over and over and often. This is all about money and power. It isn't about losing something or damaging something or having something taken that you can never get back. Copyright infringement does none of those things. It can be serious. It can result in loss of income, though we ought always to ask (and in particular in the context of the music industry) whether the loss is significant or substantial. Often, though, it isn't about not making a living, but rather not making all the money it's possible to make--quite a different thing. In all the high emotinoal rhetoric the RIAA puts out there's a lot of obscurity about whether sales are down due to copyright infringement or not and whether people who download also buy significant amounts of music (and whether they'd buy more or less if they couldn't download and share anymore).

Pretending intellectual property is the same as real property doesn't make it so. Acknowledging that the public has rights in the issue as well as the creators and the licensors of the creation is not saying that creators of intellectual property shouldn't have some significant right to profit from their creativity. It's saying that future creativity and innovation are also important.