Aren’t commercials great? Who doesn’t find a used car salesman promising, “I won’t lie to you,” while staring intently at the ground to be the most entertaining thing on the planet? Surely advertisements cajoling us to buy mysterious little pills that clearly make our lives perfect are necessary to our lives.
At least, that’s what the Intellectual Property Protection Act (IPPA), currently under consideration by the Senate, says. If the IPPA passes, skipping over commercials using a VCR or TiVo will become illegal-an absolutely ridiculous affront to both consumer and privacy rights. It demonstrates the paranoid attitude that characterizes the act’s supporters, including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
The RIAA and MPAA treat consumers as unscrupulous children to be taught how to act through punishment, and now they’re attempting to use the government as their disciplinarian. Of course, for such a law to be effective, the government will have to be able to know what we are watching-a clear invasion of privacy rights.
Ironically, advertisers have been arguing for years that their advertisements are speech and thus deserve protection under the First Amendment. The IPPA now goes to the other extreme.
There is more to the IPPA than mandatory commercial watching. As Wired News’s Michael Grebb points out, it redefines copyright infringement to include currently legal distributions, such as iTunes and Internet radio, that offer “… for distribution to the public by electronic means, with reckless disregard of the risk of further infringement.” In other words, electronic distribution is copyright infringement because it allows other people to infringe. This is similar to claiming that sports stores are responsible if their baseball bats are used in a fight.
Of course, distribution by “electronic means” is allowing more and more artists to cut out the middle man between their audiences and themselves. In music, that middle man is most often the RIAA, which often forces artists into stringent distribution contracts that give up their rights to their own works in return for greater exposure and circulation. So it’s not surprising that the RIAA wants to eliminate such a distribution means. Since the Internet allows artists to distribute their music at lower cost, the electronic distribution dooms the RIAA’s bloated corporate infrastructure.
Of course, the RIAA rightly claims that electronic distribution enables copyright violations through file sharing, but then it wrongly claims that copyright violation is theft. As Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy said: “A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that’s it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it’s just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience.”
Doomed by progress to change or die, the supporters of the IPPA are attempting to avoid both through legislation such as the IPPA. Instead of giving way to a better way of doing business, they will trample consumer rights and personal freedoms to stay alive.
The IPPA destroys fair use, the principle that in legally obtaining a copy of a work, there are certain things we are allowed-such as making backups or using the work for academic or personal purposes. The IPPA’s supports want to reap the benefits being able to sell works as “property” without giving consumers the rights they have after purchasing “property.”
In general, any attempt to assert ownership on ideas represents a threat to freedom of expression. Fair use is the delicate concept that allows the commercial concept of “intellectual property” to coexist with the fundamental right to free expression.
Ironically, not only do the IPPA and similar legislation erode free speech rights, they also stifle innovation. For instance, electronic distribution, a better, faster, cheaper method of selling music, is exactly the kind of innovative concept that copyright and patent law exists to foster, yet the IPPA will make it illegal.
The IPPA presents a ridiculous threat to both personal freedom and common sense fair use rights-such as being able to use the fast forward button on the VCR. Amazingly, the Senate is seriously considering this legislation.
Nathan Alday is a senior aerospace engineering major. He can be reached at [email protected].