# propositional writing

# Boycotting Copyright Holders Might Not Be The Best Way To Save The Internet

Philip Dorrell, 23 January 2012

A brief summary of the SOPA saga: the copyright industry attacked freedom on the internet, so the internet attacked back. And won. Kind of.

So, should the internet go on the offensive? Maybe lovers of the internet should boycott music and movies ...

- Boycotts work if the target is demonstrably evil.

  Let us suppose: one company sells a product which kills little babies in third world countries. Another company sells costume jewelry manufactured by little children working in factories ten hours a day pouring molten glass into moulds.

  These companies are doing things that are evil, and it is easy to understand that they are evil. It is very easy for everyone to understand that they are evil. You don't have to be in the food business or the jewelry business to understand how evil they are.

  People will sacrifice their enjoyment of costume jewelry if little children are being exploited to make that jewelry. Some people might even give up chocolate, if that can save little babies.

  So in these examples, boycotts might work.

  But ...

- The copyright industry is not demonstrably evil.

  The "copyright industry" might on occasion do things that are bad. They might accidentally prosecute some old lady for file-sharing and she didn't even have an internet connection.

  Or some industry association might make a political funds contribution in a manner that could perhaps be interpreted as a bribe. (But then lots of industries do that.)

  And the copyright industry does promote legislation that threatens freedoms to use digital technology like computers and the internet (which is the problem we are trying to solve here ...)

  But, on the whole, the "copyright industry" is just an industry full of people trying to make content that consumers want, in the hope of selling the content they produce for a profit so they can make a living.

- Copyright is not demonstrably evil.

  We shouldn't blame the copyright industry for attacking our digital freedoms.

  Really it is the logic of copyright itself that threatens digital freedoms.

  What makes copyright potentially evil is that, to enforce copyright, it is necessary to eliminate those digital freedoms that enable "unauthorized copying".

  Unfortunately, for anyone who wishes to conclude that copyright is obviously evil, copyright has its own plausible moral logic.

  Copyright gives "ownership" of content to the person who created that content. Which seems a completely reasonable and fair thing to do. This concept of "ownership" of content allows the person who created the content to sell it, just like anyone else who makes something can sell it, so they can make a living. And the better the content, as measured by how many people like it enough that they are willing to pay for it, the more money the content producer can make.

  Also, copyright seems to have worked quite well historically. Everyone alive today has lived all their life in a world with copyright. And until quite recently (like the last decade or so), nobody complained that much about it.

- Copyright might be evil, in the long term, because it has to attack digital freedoms, but the details are rather technical.

  We know that the legislative attacks on digital freedoms aren't going to stop.

  Is this because the people working in the copyright industry have some unstoppable tendency towards evil?

  The real reason that the copyright industry feels the need to attack digital freedoms is that there is an irreconcilable conflict between copyright and digital freedoms. Digital freedoms are also freedoms to "pirate", and there is no way to avoid that.

  But, hardly anyone seems to know this. So what happens is, the copyright holders exercise their rights, and the people exercise their freedoms, and then some new type of piracy occurs. And everyone is surprised. "What can we do to stop this?" they ask.

  The cause of the piracy always turns out to be some particular digital freedom.

  So, inevitably, another legislative attack on digital freedom will be proposed.

- Instead of "fighting" the war, with boycotts or whatever, we should educate the public that there is a choice that they have to make.

  The problem with copyright is not that it is intrinsically bad, but that, in the long run, we have to choose between one of two bad things:

  - Loss of digital freedoms, which means that we won't be able to do all the things that computer technology and internet technology would help us to do if we had the freedom to do them.
  - Loss of copyright, which means that some people doing good work making good stuff won't get paid, or at least they won't get paid the way that they get paid now.

  Telling everyone they should boycott movies fails for two different reasons:

  - People actually want to watch movies (which is kind of why copyright exists in the first place).
  - Boycotting doesn't explain what the real issues are. If people don't already believe that the movie industry is doing something evil by promoting anti-internet "anti-piracy" legislation, then a boycott of movie theatres by the tiny number of people who understand the problem isn't going to change that.

  So we should stop with the boycotting, and get on with the explaining. We shouldn't assume that 99% of the population understands what is evil about anti-piracy legislation that attacks digital freedoms. We shouldn't even assume that 99% of the population understands the concept of "digital freedoms". We should explain to them what the real issues are, and, explain to them what their choices are going to be, in the long run.

- There might be a middle way, and then again, there might not.

  The "middle way" is the better business model scenario.

  In this scenario, the copyright industry recognizes that piracy cannot be prevented, and it also recognizes that it will not be allowed to legislate against digital freedoms in a desperate attempt to prevent piracy, and, within those constraints, it does everything it can to keep copyright alive as much as possible for as long as possible.

  The copyright industry can do this by making "legitimate" digital copies of content available to the public as cheaply as possible, and in the most convenient form possible. In other words, the copyright industry must "compete" with piracy.

  This scenario may work, if the copyright industry gives up on its current fight to win – at any cost – the "war on piracy". If they give up before it's too late.

  Even if this middle way scenario does work, there is no guarantee that it will last forever. New technology can only make piracy easier and easier, which means that "competing with free" will get harder and harder, and eventually even the "better business model" will disappear.

  If, and when, that happens, then something else may be required ...

- Finally, we can explain that not getting paid from copyright is not the same thing as not getting paid.

  If we can get the public to understand that digital freedoms are worthwhile in themselves, and that, in the long run, digital freedoms are more important than copyright, then, possibly, we can advance the argument to the next stage, and point out that not getting paid by copyright is not the same thing as not getting paid.

  Even if everyone agrees that digital freedoms are really important, and that therefore copyright must die, because copyright can't co-exist with digital freedoms, people might still want to watch movies.

  However, there is no law of physics or economics or anything else that says that a movie producer has to be paid from copyright royalties or not be paid at all.

  I give movies as an example, because movies are the one type of content that everyone likes and which are really expensive to make, and no one has yet found a way to construct great movies by open collaboration. (Whereas, for other types of content, like open-source software, and online encyclopedias, open collaboration seems to work pretty well.)

  So if we can accept that paying for movies via copyright requires unacceptable costs in terms of loss of digital freedoms, but we still really want movies, we can start thinking "outside the copyright box", and we can start thinking about the possibility that there might be some other way to pay for the production of movies.

  (For more details on how that might happen, see here.)

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This manifesto is a Propositional Manifesto. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.