Why shouldn’t copyright monopoly law apply on the Internet?

[Rick]

Copyright Monopoly: Every so often, you hear copyright industry lobbyists ask “why copyright law shouldn’t apply on the Internet”, suggesting that the Internet is a lawless land with regard to people sharing what they like. They have a point, but not the point they think: Our laws have checks and balances that prevent enforcement against sharing culture and knowledge in the offline world, and there’s no reason why these check-and-balance laws shouldn’t apply online too.
Every so often, you will hear people from the copyright industry pull the cliché, “why shouldn’t copyright law apply on the Internet!?”, with the understanding that laws apply everywhere in society, and so obviously copyright law should apply on the Internet too.

This question is misleading and false. If the offline laws applied fully online, which they don’t, then copyright law could not be enforced at all against ordinary file sharers — and that would be a good thing.

In the offline world, there are many laws that provide checks and balances against each other. It’s important that these checks and balances carry over to the digital world, and today, they don’t — the checks and balances haven’t been carried over at all.

For example, you’re technically not allowed to send a copy of some creative work under copyright monopoly in the mail — but nobody is allowed to open your mail to check if you did. You’re not allowed to play a song to your friend in a phonecall (yes, really), but nobody is allowed to listen in to your phonecall to determine if you do.

In this way, the copyright industry executives have a point; the offline laws regarding copyright don’t fully apply online. If they did, no file sharing would ever be punished, ever, because privacy is considered more important than noncommercial copyright infringement in the offline law book.

In our transition to digital, very important liberties have been lost — such as the important right to send a private letter.

Our children can still send an analog letter the way our parents did, but they don’t have nearly the same rights when performing the equivalent action in their digital environment — and there’s really no reason for that other than copyright industry lobbying. (I predict that’s going to be regarded as one of the greatest failures of our generation: our failure to carry the civil liberties of our parents over to our children.)

Let’s take a look at the analog letter. It has a couple of properties we associate with proper law and order: it is untracked, it is anonymous (or can be, that’s entirely up to the sender), the carrying courier has immunity from liability, and it is never opened in transit (except in the case of prior individual suspicion of a serious crime — note the words prior, individual, and serious).

This letter can even contain a copy of something: sheet music, a poem, something that makes sending the letter a copyright infringement. It would not matter, and precisely that is the point — the rights above would still apply: the letter would still be untracked, anonymous, unopened, carried without liability. It would still reach its recipient unopened and untracked.

This is what we call Analog Equivalent Rights — the idea that a civil liberty that existed in the analog world should also exist in the digital world, in its equivalent action, completely regardless of whether that means somebody needs to make money in a different way, or not at all. It isn’t rocket science. It should not even be controversial to say that our children should have at least the same amount of civil liberties in their environment as our parents had in theirs.

In other words, privacy law completely trumps copyright law offline, as far as private noncommercial copies are concerned, and there’s no reason it should not do so online as well. The laws should apply online exactly as they do offline.

So the next time you hear this argument, respond with a “yes, all the laws should apply on the Internet. Especially the laws that say we can send an anonymous package to somebody with a copied film or cassette, without the letter being opened in transit, the courier being responsible for carrying the package, or the letter being traced to its sender — even if it is a copyright infringement. That’s what the laws look like outside of the Internet, and there’s absolutely no reason they shouldn’t apply on the Internet as well!”.

They will typically respond something like, “But then we can’t make money!”, or possibly with some nonsense like “then the artists won’t create”. It doesn’t matter.

At that point it’s just a matter of driving the point home; “A business exists for the purpose of making money within existing laws. If you can’t do so, you don’t get to dismantle civil liberties just because you don’t know how to run a business.”

(This is a post from Falkvinge on Liberty, obtained via RSS at this feed.)


Originally Published: Mon, 02 Oct 2017 18:00:55 +0000
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[contrail]

They always think they can join our networks and bust us for our money. We need a law that says they can't do it since it is internet privacy or something like that. Maybe California or Portugal?

[Sid]

The last thing we need, when the governments of the world have been captured by the corporations, and do their bidding (before pandering with the remainder of their attentions to the ignorant masses), is another law. It is laws which got us into this mess.

What we need is to find a way to educate judges about the iniquities and flaws in the laws they are enforcing. They are, by comparison, relatively free of bias. But they are old, and their education and experience is for the most part analog-based. They do not understand the digital world and technologists almost universally do an appallingly bad job at explaining themselves.

The few judges who do understand what is being presented to them are the ones who throw cases out of court.

[joew771]

Pretty sure the OP is wrong about alot of stuff there. I can send a copyrighted work to someone in the mail. To say you can't is totally ridiculous. Anyone that ships a book or cd or whatever in the mail, is sending a copyrighted work. Amazon for example. If what the OP says is true in any way, then all mail order is illegal. That's not true at all. A stupid pointless post.

[contrail]

We need some common sense to be injected into these judges that don't have any common sense and play by the rules.

[Sid]

Pretty sure the OP is wrong about alot of stuff there. I can send a copyrighted work to someone in the mail. To say you can't is totally ridiculous.

He is not saying you can't.

He is saying you can.

And pointing out what is totally ridiculous is that you cannot also send a copyrighted work to someone via email.

In the analog world, your right to privacy trumps copyright.

In the digital world, copyright trumps your right to privacy.

That is wrong.

[joew771]

This question is misleading and false. If the offline laws applied fully online, which they don’t, then copyright law could not be enforced at all against ordinary file sharers — and that would be a good thing.

In the offline world, there are many laws that provide checks and balances against each other. It’s important that these checks and balances carry over to the digital world, and today, they don’t — the checks and balances haven’t been carried over at all.

For example, you’re technically not allowed to send a copy of some creative work under copyright monopoly in the mail — but nobody is allowed to open your mail to check if you did.

Pretty sure that the op meant that a copyrighted work can't be sent through the regular snail mail. Since what he is saying is that it's illegal to send a copyrighted work in the regular mail, and it's illegal to open someone else's mail, so noone would know. But you can look at what people send over the internet, or 'open their mail', which is legal, and find copyrighted material, and that's not fair.

That was the whole point of the post. Lol.

[contrail]

If the MPAA can snoop on us I would like to snoop on them and star releasing their prized info... since real laws don't apply online. I really dont know but it is all screwed up, thx politics.