If you are muddled and confused by the flurry of activity since the Great Web Rebellion stun-gunned the two anti-piracy bills in Congress last week, this week’s ArtsWatch column at Grammy.com provides a cogent play-by-play. Even though Grammy.com is anything but neutral on the issue of anti-piracy legislation, the column takes a balanced look at what has happened in the past week and at some of the motivations behind the scenes.
As columnist Philip Merrill points out, "regulation to build the best functioning environment for both consumers and commerce" is likely to be a long and messy process.
Meanwhile,it’s undoubtedly not a coincidence that at the same time the drama was playing out in the U.S., police in New Zealand were serving warrants on the founder of Megaupload.com for copyright infringement and money laundering. The German-born Kim Dotcom (he legally changed his name from Schmitz) and six others were charged with operating a $175 million scheme to pirate movies, music and TV programs over a five-year period.
Authorities served more than 20 search warrants in the U.S. and eight other countries. Four suspects are in custody. Three remain at large. According to Bloomberg News, during the raids authorities seized an estimated $50 million in assets, including 18 luxury automobiles with a combined value of $4.8 million.
The arrest of the notorious IP pirate put the spotlight on the copyright infringement problem but apparently had little or no effect on events in Washington D.C. where lawmakers quickly backtracked on the two pending bills known as SOPA and PIPA in the face of successful efforts by Internet companies to incite public protest.
Kim Dotcom’s bust also failed to draw much attention to the root of the problem, which is the staggering number of users of Megaupload.com and other pirate sites. Before being shut down, Megaupload.com boasted of having more than 1 billion visitors, more than 150 million users and 50 million daily visitors. It was reportedly at one point responsible for 4% of all the traffic on the Web.
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Ed. Note: "Users" is the operative term here. The parallel between downloaders of pirated media and drug users is hard to ignore. While it is unlikely that watching too many movies can lead to addiction, illness and death, the act of downloading illegal content does make the user a criminal. And there is no question that were it not for the hundreds of millions of IP perps the shady and financially destructive content piracy business would not exist.
Take away the illegal drug users and you kill the illegal drug trade. Stop downloading stolen media and people like Mr. Dotcom can’t afford their rented mansions or their Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupes.
This is the point at which digital literacy becomes digital larceny. The new skills of using computers and the Web are facilitating new forms of thievery. This is also the point where we have to ask ourselves why so many people who might otherwise be law abiding seem to be okay with stealing.
The answer is in the question–a lot of people are fine with it. It makes it "okay" if your peers are doing it, too. And it especially makes it "okay" if you only have a minuscule chance of getting caught.
Thus far in the digital revolution, traditional citizenship and digital citizenship have failed to achieve full alignment. The Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule have not sufficiently translated into binary code. At no one’s direction, we have evolved a different set of standards for online behavior than in-person behavior. The Web has become a world of its own, a social realm with different definitions of citizenship.
If there is only one reason that we need to adopt a Literacy 2.0 worldview it is that we need to sync online and offline values and social behavior. The Digital World cannot operate as a parallel universe. We need to see that principles such as honesty, respect and civility that we apply to atoms also apply to bits.
Image: R. Lindstrom
This article is published with permission from Literacy 2.0.
