Stealing apples and IP theft
When I was a kid, I used to go out with my friends and steal apples from gardens. We did this not because the apples around my home town in Scotland were particularly delicious. They were sour, hard and barely edible. We stole the apples because we enjoyed doing something that we weren't supposed to do. Technically, I guess, we were stealing, but there was an unarticulated consensus that pinching a few apples from gardens was no big deal. Culturally, it was acceptable.
We stole the apples. Nobody really cared (including the owners of the apples) and we had a bit of a laugh doing something that was "against the law."
I am the law
The same attitude to downloading and sharing music exists in many cultures around the world, both at the national and sub-cultural levels. This is why it is so hard to get international copyright laws enforced at street level -- there's no buy-in from those individuals given the job of catching people. Sure, you'll read about cases where people have been caught, but this is just carnival.
One of the most despised workers in the UK is the traffic warden. He tries to enforce a law, punishment for parking on double yellow lines, that is seen as an OK thing to do.
Walk down the streets of New York and you'll see counterfeit purses being sold on the streets. Nobody is losing much sleep over the fact that LVMH shareholders are -- possibly -- missing out on a sale. No, the sale of the original wouldn't have occurred anyway, and the girl still has her eye on the authentic item.
And should anybody be stressing out that a child is being treated with a generic/unofficial drug at a discount to the branded original when the alternative was no treatment?
Firms often forget that the more you try to legislate against a certain behavior accepted as no big deal within a given culture, the less likely it will work. It may actually force people to find more creative ways to skirt the law because, just like stealing apples, there's a certain adrenalin rush from doing something that the law says you can't do.
Check out a very interesting article in the Guardian by Cory Doctory about a recent deal between the record industry and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
We stole the apples. Nobody really cared (including the owners of the apples) and we had a bit of a laugh doing something that was "against the law."
The same attitude to downloading and sharing music exists in many cultures around the world, both at the national and sub-cultural levels. This is why it is so hard to get international copyright laws enforced at street level -- there's no buy-in from those individuals given the job of catching people. Sure, you'll read about cases where people have been caught, but this is just carnival.
One of the most despised workers in the UK is the traffic warden. He tries to enforce a law, punishment for parking on double yellow lines, that is seen as an OK thing to do.
Walk down the streets of New York and you'll see counterfeit purses being sold on the streets. Nobody is losing much sleep over the fact that LVMH shareholders are -- possibly -- missing out on a sale. No, the sale of the original wouldn't have occurred anyway, and the girl still has her eye on the authentic item.
And should anybody be stressing out that a child is being treated with a generic/unofficial drug at a discount to the branded original when the alternative was no treatment?
Firms often forget that the more you try to legislate against a certain behavior accepted as no big deal within a given culture, the less likely it will work. It may actually force people to find more creative ways to skirt the law because, just like stealing apples, there's a certain adrenalin rush from doing something that the law says you can't do.
Check out a very interesting article in the Guardian by Cory Doctory about a recent deal between the record industry and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
posted by Gordon Graham at 9:17 AM
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