A week and a half ago, I was at a family event, sitting, as it happens, next to a cousin of mine who works at the record label EMI. In an attempt at conversation, I made the (probably inappropriate) comment, “Oh, are you in the division that sends ‘Cease and Desist’ letters to 65 year old women?”

“You mean 65 year old women who steal music from us,” she retorted. It was on.

What was interesting about the discussion we had was that this was, in reality, the first discussion I have ever had with anyone who argued the opposing side. This isn’t to say I don’t understand both sides of the argument about copyright strength and reach. But in my experience, it’s exceedingly rare to find someone, face-to-face, who feels so strongly in favor of “strong” copyright. Among the circles I tend to inhabit–on campus, at work, at home–I am surrounded by academics, free software users and developers, and yes, even avowed pirates. It is certainly rare enough to find a college student who feels strongly about issues of intellectual “property,” but it is also rare to find one who has not downloaded something from peer-to-peer.

From my perspective, I was never a revisionist, a reformer, a radical. I was simply a utilitarian; when I have to write software, compose art, participate in culture, I don’t want to be hampered by commercial interests. But I am realistic enough to know that I want to profit from the fruits of my labors. To me, my view was simply rational; there was never really any question that the corporate content owners were the ones at play behind the extension of American copyright, not good-hearted advocates with the public interest in mind.

Yet my cousin, though her argument was indeed founded on the notion that, “Shouldn’t we deserve to profit from our investments?”, truly seemed to believe strong copyright was necessary, a point I found truly bizarre. I asked, “why should a twenty year extension [from the Sunny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act] be necessary?” The most profitable music, after all, is not seventy, 50, or 28 years old. Her response was that seventy years is obviously unnecessary, but when the term is already 50 past the life of the creator, what’s another 2 decades?

We never really made a connection, each of us, instead, simply rephrasing the same things over and over. She never understood why I thought it was better for culture to be free, why I felt that the value of “property” would go up and not down if anyone could sample it, copy it, and add to it (after, of course, a reasonable span of monopoly with which to reward and incentivise the author). And I suppose for my part, I can’t quite see the perspective of some content creators and artists who truly do feel that artists who make derivative works, rappers who sample, and tinkerers who improve code are somehow stealing. To these individuals, raised on the notion of ideas and expression as property, this “theft” is as real as a criminal breaking and entering.

But it occurs to me, I still have yet to meet one of those individuals, because my cousin is not a writer, a coder, or an artist. She’s a financial officer, who’s job it is to balance accounts, keep ledgers, and mind the bottom line. She doesn’t know about creation being a give and take, or about the ebb and flow of common culture. She knows how to mind the purse strings. Is that the kind of sensibility that should be guiding our laws?

Cory Doctorow did a talk at Microsoft on the topic of DRM. The full text of the talk is available as a wiki at www.commonhouse.net/wiki/drm/FrontPage.

In case you were wondering, the official FreeCulture.org position on DRM is that it is bad, for both users and businesses. Cory does a good job of explaining why

Microsoft has an interesting choice ahead of it: to DRM or not to DRM. Cory Doctorow has suggested that Microsoft pursue the latter course of action. However, Microsoft says that it doesn’t want to bully the RIAA into accepting DRM-less formats. If you force a bully to stop being an @$$h0l3, is that bullying? Or is that standing up for yourself, or at least standing up for the little guy?

I think that it would be better for both Microsoft and the world if Microsoft didn’t travel down the path of DRM. I know that Microsoft’s love of proprietary formats and DRM lock-in make me a lot more interested in using free software and Linux. Maybe if they weren’t so controlling I’d be lazier and accept our Microsoft overlords. Well, at least it would be one less argument that I could use to convert people to Linux. Unfortunately, if it comes to “bullying” the RIAA or bullying end users, it seems clear that, like all bullies, Microsoft isn’t interested in picking on someone their own size. Can anyone seriously imagine Microsoft becoming a champion of consumer’s rights? That’s just not in their corporate culture, methinks. Of course, I would love it if Microsoft were to prove me wrong.

But until it does, we’ll just have to do what we can to break their grip on the market, won’t we?

Ever since I started reading Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig I’ve noticed more and more examples of just how broken the current intellectual property laws are (even though here in Canada they are not quite as bad as in the USA since we export less IP and it is not as big a cash cow).

The most recent wide-scale, yet perfectly accepted by the crowd, instance of massive copyright infringement I can think of is a dance show my girlfriend performed in. She takes lessons of ballet and jazz and all kinds of styles and once a year they do a big show (and I mean big, they are about 400 performers and they do between 4 and 6 presentations over a few days, from what I understood) with all levels of performers, from the competitive to the beginners, from tap-dancing to gymnasts and breakdancers.

While I was sitting there watching the show, I wondered about the music that was playing. Lots of popular songs, pro DJ-mixes and obviously home-made mixes (some to great comedic effect). Did they clear the rights of every one of these songs? After all, it was not a non-commercial show. And did each and every one of the ~400 dancers (some less than 10 years old) buy a copy of each of the songs he dances on? After all, they all have to practice at home and need a copy of the songs.

If we tally up all the collective and individual copyright costs of making a show like that, it’d probably cost thousands and thousands of dollars, and most of that burden would fall on the shoulders of parents who are already paying insane amounts (I think that my girlfriend’s sister is paying something like $2000-3000/year) so that their kids can do something they like. Is that okay with you?

I found something quite insightful in an article about biometric DRM at The Register the other day, here it is:

“But back to the original question. How can you understand this mind? It’s simple really – it just depends on how you define the problem. Gary Brant’s iVue is a good solution to a particular problem: it’s just that many people identify the problem quite differently. The two have very different solutions. As your reporter sees it, music is created to be shared, so there’s little sense in finding technological solutions that try to stop people sharing. The real problem is that the artists aren’t being compensated, so rather than engaging in futile attempts to make people not share music, something we have always done and will not stop doing, the much simpler task of compensating the artist can then be addressed.”

The video of Lessig’s talk at the launch of FreeCulture.org is now up on the Internet Archive under the title Lessig speaks at Swarthmore. You can also get it on Bittorrent at http://wiki.elixus.org/lessig2.mov.torrent.

Once you’ve watched the video, please help us write a transcript of Lessig’s talk. Better yet, get involved! Join the SCDC or help organize a free culture group at your school

I will be appearing on the Al Franken show at 2pm EST on Tuesday, June 15, for about 15 minutes. I will talk about my legal run-ins with Diebold, the emails about the voting machines flaws, and the way copyright law is misused to protect corporate malfeasance.

Update: If you missed my spot on the Al Franken show, here’s an Ogg Vorbis audio clip of it.

Winamp should play Oggs fine in Windows, Mac users probably want the Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component, which should let you play Ogg Vorbis files in iTunes.

I am speaking at the Knowledge Held Hostage conference at UPenn on Friday, June 18th. If you would like to see me and other awesome people like Siva Vaidhyanathan, register and come check us out!

Update: You can see funny pictures of me in a suit, and you can see an article about the conference which mentions the Diebold case at eSchool News online.