CRIA war against piracy
p2pnet.net News:- “The Canadian Recording Industry Association is on the verge of going to war against piracy,” writes Susan Crean in a Globe and Mail story here.
Actually, the CRIA has been at war with the alleged ‘pirates’ – p2p file sharers – for some considerable time and what Crean refers to is a conflict escalation as represented by a court case which opened last Monday.
The Big Five record labels are using it to try to get the identities of 29 people they claim are “pirates who have been openly and illegally distributing thousands of digital music files over public networks”.
With their wholly owned CRIA as a front, they’re demanding that Justice Konrad von Finckenstein force Bell Canada, Shaw Communications, Rogers Communications, Videotron and Telus Corp to hand the names over.
Only Videotron, owned by Quebec’s Quebecor, a supporter of the corporate music industry, has no qualms about doing so.
“Following the lead of the U.S. industry (which caught a 12-year-old in its dragnet), CRIA’s strategy is to make an example of a group of 29 ‘flagrant infringers’,” Crean, co-chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance, continues. “Who will they be? Will your favourite nephew be among them?
“The convergence of technological know-how and a passionate interest in contemporary music has created this phenomenon. And while file-sharing is an infringement of copyright, many people argue that it shouldn’t be illegal. It has become a way of communicating that should be facilitated. Indeed, some artists have joined the debate on the side of preserving the free exchange between artist and audience opened up by the Internet, which allows musicians who are shunned by the labels an alternative route to an audience – and vice versa.”
File sharing per se is not, of course, an infringement of anything. Millions of people around the world freely share files of all kinds, including music and movies, every day.
Only if the files are unauthorised does it become an infringement – and even then there are quite a few arguments that question whether or not copyright owners can continue to ‘own’ once their creations have been legitimately bought and paid for.
Nor is ‘infringement’ a criminal activity. However, the entertainment industry, with the music companies to the fore, have been able to deliberately create the impression that anyone who shares, uploads or downloads an unauthorised digital file is, somehow, a hardened criminal.
And this has in turn enabled them to bamboozle legislators and the media into supporting their efforts to sue people who use p2p software to enjoy their music by themselves (downloaders), and to pass it on to other people who might similarly enjoy it (uploaders and sharers).
If people didn’t listen to the music and pass it on, there’d be no music industry.
“Yet, in this tug-of-war between file-sharers and music companies, artists actually find themselves identifying with both sides,” says Crean. “We are rights-owners after all, and therefore not at all keen on encouraging loose respect for the rules. But we are also major users of other people’s work; our own depends on it. For this reason, we worry about things like the health of the public domain, and trends that seem to be making access to the cultural expressions of the past more difficult and ever more costly.
“File-sharing may be piracy, but it is also a consumer revolt and an explicit demand for change. [There's that, 'file sharing' is piracy again - Ed] People want more choice and flexibility in the way they “consume” music, which is to say, for example, they want access to single songs and permission to compile their own CDs. This is not an unreasonable request from a writer’s perspective.”
What would reasonably be expected as recompense for a job, and what creators accept for their work is an old dilemma, but one that is highlighted by the digital revolution, Crean says, going on, “Talk to any teenager and you’ll hear not only how CDs are way more expensive than need be, but that 95 per cent of the profits bypass the artists anyway, so downloading can hardly be damaging to anyone.”
But, “the problem for creators is that the figures are not actually wrong. Creators do command a tiny percentage of the monies flowing through the cultural industries, the economic maxim seeming to be that the farther away you are from the act of creation, the more money there is to be made.”
However, copyright isn’t just about money, she concludes: it’s also about the moral rights that give artists the right to be credited and to protect the integrity of their creations, and to give the public the means to verify information.
“Remove moral rights from the web and anyone can change whatever they like with virtual impunity. Then no one will be able to distinguish the truth from an X-file.
“It is not news that copyright law financially benefits creators last and least, but it may be time the cultural industries did something about it. Which is not an argument for abandoning copyright, but for restoring it to its original purpose – encouraging creative people to keep on creating.”
