Yesterday, in an attempt to counter the RIAA’s efforts to brainwash children to accept their greedily distorted interpretation of intellectual property, I took advantage of my dad’s offer to speak with his 6th grade students about filesharing and copyright. I wasn’t really sure how best to convey my message to them. I didn’t know what they would understand and what would be completely over their heads. Surprisingly, they understood much of what I talked about and actually asked some very good questions. It was very encouraging that when I asked them if they felt bad about downloading music off the internet not one student raised their hand. Deep down they realized that something was not quite right with the steady stream of greedy rhetoric the RIAA had been feeding them.

I started out by playing two songs for them, Where Is the Love by The Black Eyed Peas, and Owner of the World by Oysterhead. I asked them why they knew the first song so well but had never even heard of the second one. I was able to get them to agree that both songs were equally “good”. We came to the conclusion that the difference really just comes down to money. In retrospect, I probably should have used two songs of the same genre to avoid the requisite stylistic argument (hip-hop vs. jam-rock), but it really didn’t provide much of an obstacle. Then we talked a bit about copyright.

We discussed what copyright was, and I was happy to see that they had a basic knowledge of what it was. I explained that copyright was a law that was meant to protect and encourage creativity. Then I played Public Service Announcement from the Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse. I told them that that song was in fact illegal and that the reason was copyright. I asked them if it made sense for a law meant to protect creativity to limit it. They got the idea.

Then we talked about filesharing, specifically downloading music from the internet. I asked how many had downloaded songs and just about everyone raised their hand. Then I asked how many felt bad about it. Not one student raised their hand. We talked about why some people might think it would be wrong. The issue of stealing came up, and I explained the difference between rivalrous and non-rivalrous resources with the apple/idea example. (If I have an apple and you have an apple and we trade apples, then we still each just have one apple. But if I have an idea and you have an idea and we trade ideas, then we each have two ideas.) I asked if any had discovered a new band that they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Some had. I asked if they had supported that band in some way — buying a t-shirt or sticker, going to a concert, buying a cd. Some had done that as well. They began to see that the issue was not so black and white. I ended by playing one more song for them, Mix Tape by Jim’s Big Ego. I told them that this was a song they could go home and download and feel good about downloading. That the band actually wanted them to download it.

I may not have been able to explain the whole complicated issue of intellectual property to them. In fact, I didn’t even try. What I did accomplish was to plant a seed of discontent in their heads. My hope is that they won’t take everything the RIAA tells them at face value — that they will at least realize that there is more to the issue than meets the eye. If they grow up feeling even the slightest bit uncomfortable with the current regime of copyright, then I feel like my mission was a success.

This article from The New York Times (the full text has been archived by a blog) is a few weeks old now, but I thought it might interest some people on here, especially those particularly interested in the artistic side of the debate. A few choice quotes:

A 34-year-old video artist living in Baltimore, Mr. Routson has a very particular method of art-making, which will soon be illegal in Maryland, as it already is in the District of Columbia and five other states, including New York and California. Like the appropriation artists of the early 1980’s, who rephotographed existing photographs as a way of commenting on society, Mr. Routson makes movies of other people’s movies.

On a recent Saturday at Team, for example, three highly unstable recordings of Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” each made in a different Baltimore theater, were being projected simultaneously (but not in sync) on walls in the gallery’s three small rooms. One, shot from the front row of a full house, was steeply angled, with fragmented subtitles. Mr. Routson’s work, which is not for sale, is the latest to find itself in the murky zone between copyright infringement and artistic license, between cultural property rights and cultural commentary.

It does not matter whether you think that Mr. Routson’s work is good or bad art; it is quite good enough, in my view. It does matter that the no-camcorder laws may not do much to stem pirating while making it increasingly difficult for artists to do one of the things they do best: comment on the world around them.

One of the casualties of the DRM wars is clearly usability: unrestricted formats such as mp3 can be played on any device, while DRM’d files often can’t be played at all. Now you can check whether the music from a given online music service/store will play on the mp3 player that you bought with your hard-earned cash: MP3.com compares player compatibility with different music services. This is a brilliant comparison chart, we should definitely link to it in our reviews on our wiki. As Matt Morgan of Outward Sound put it, this is:

an nice, essential chart of service/player compatibility for consumers.
short on player models, but good range of download services.

this is a fine illustration of a huge problem facing both hardware and music
download sellers. CNET is quite effective at driving consumers to hardware
sales, and perhaps MP3.com will increase overall download sales as well. The
market for both would grow much more quickly if DRM-v-DRM choices were out
of the picture, I know the average hardware shopper is totally confused.
If hardware manufacturers other than Apple open their marketing purses up a
little bit, WMA services might have a chance, but I won’t hold my breath.

I very much like that a quick glance at this chart makes eMusic,
livedownload.com, audiolunchbox and Bleep look great in comparison to the
others.

Non-DRMed music is of course vital, and something we should support, but stores that sell copylefted music, such as Magnatune, are obviously superior.

I disagree with Siva’s statement on Lessig’s blog about the RIAA lawsuits, “I think that when you sue somebody, you’re at least giving that defendant a chance to due process, a chance to defend herself. ” That’s just not true. As Lessig put it, fair use means the right to hire a lawyer. Those who cannot afford to hire a lawyer can’t have the right to fair use, or many other rights for that matter.

Most people do not have the resources to fight a legal battle against a billion-dollar corporation, so they have to settle, and they never get the chance to defend themselves. See Jesse’s story. These corporations always prey on the weak. If you have the resources to defend yourself and you say, “come get some”, they won’t come after you.

We got lucky with the Diebold case, we kind of ambushed them. If they knew ahead of time that we would have the support of the EFF and the Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic, they probably wouldn’t have come after us. If we hadn’t had that pro bono representation, we would have just crawled into a hole to hide and pray for Diebold to not sue us, and that’s probably what they were expecting when they sent their DMCA notices.

With this kind of “legal activism”, you have to either take on a corporation that is so desperate that they HAVE to sue you no matter what the consequences for the industry, or you have to surprise them by being more prepared than they expect you to be. These companies don’t want to have a final showdown, because that generates bad press, and with good pro bono lawyers on the other side the companies just might lose. They don’t want a fair fight. They want to win, as quickly and quietly as possible. And that’s how we become criminalized, and our freedom slips away little by little; big business wins without a fight, and their course of action is never checked or questioned.