Decriminalize File-Sharing?
Another country, and a vastly different response to the issue of file-sharing. Where U.S. members of congress are trying to increase drastically the penalties for file sharing, six members of the Swedish Parliament have published a paper calling for the complete decriminalization of file-sharing.
The English translation puts forth the following idea:
“Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet.”
Food for thought.
Should non-commercial file sharing be incorporated into the doctrine of fair use in the United States? Should we move our legal system in a direction that more closely matches our norms in the area of content use? Professor John Tehranian points out in Infringement Nation that the average American violates copyright almost constantly. So why then, do we permit our record labels and our movie studies such enormous freedom to sue even the most casual of infringers? Many of whom believe that what they are doing is perfectly OK.
In Free Culture-How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Lawrence Lessig posits that infringement was the beginning of the entertainment industry in the U.S. However, as more and more power has been concentrated in the media establishment, the pirates have now become the profiteers.
At some point, we as a society have to deal with the ease of content distribution through the Internet. Pirates should be stopped, but my 16-year old cousin should not do jail time for sharing an Alicia Keys track. Let’s start from there.
RSS
