From the Ditherati:
"If this was taking place in an inner-city, where kids were basically stealing other people's intellectual property, you'd see some movement. ... They're breaking the law. And it's a double standard."
- Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA (not quite Hollywood, but pretty damn close)
This quote is from the recent hearing on file-sharing held by a House Committee. It took me a minute to figure out what she meant...oh right, racism. We don't care that kids are stealing because they're white. If they were black, we'd have had them all arrested already.
'Stealing' intellectual property is of course very different from stealing any sort of physical object - I can still listen to my song/watch my movie/use my software even after you have made a copy for yourself (or even a copy for everyone else in the world). In fact, activists are constantly berating some other IP holders for 'exploiting' the poor by requiring that everyone pay for the IP. These IP holders, of course, are the pharmaceutical companies. This other 'outrage' was the main source of my confusion...
I initially thought maybe Maxine was saying that if poor kids were illegally copying music and movies, then we as a society would finally motivate to do something about our copyright system, which is clearly in need of an update. Alas, she meant exactly the opposite.
The other source of my confusion derived from our recent trip to Burma (Myanmar). Our guide in Rangoon was 21 and completely fluent in English. The citizens of Burma have no access to outside written media - no books, no magazines, no newspapers, no Internet. What they do have, in vast quantities, are 'pirated' VCD's. And that's how Min Min learned English and how he learns about the rest of the world - from watching a movie a day. His favorite move is Forrest Gump, which he can recite line by line (he does the accent perfectly). He also really liked the Matrix and the Truman Show, both of which resonated with his experience of living under totalitarianism (or as he put it, "living in a country run by the mob").
I asked Min Min how much a VCD costs, and when he told me sixty cents, I said that they must be pirated. He didn't know what that meant, so we started explaining traditional pirates, who would take over ships on the high seas, raping and pillaging (and still do in the Straits of Malacca and elsewhere). Before I had stated the connection between pirates and his VCD's, I realized the absurdity of the equivalence - how could I really equate his only access to the outside world with the brutal theivery and assaults of real piracy?
We all gain from the increasingly widespread distribution of information and knowledge; the world's poor benefit the most. While it is vitally important to maintain protection of intellectual property in areas such as pharmaceutical development, in order to ensure investment incentives, in other areas of intellectual property, the opportunity cost to society (of the existing laws and their associated enforcement activities) is growing, while the benefits shrink. I'm confident that we can find a way for musicians and other content creators to be compensated without locking down technological innovation. But that will mean changes - it's time for new laws and a new model.