Ed Vaizey, this week’s minister for everything beginning with C, has a cunning plan. Ed often has cunning plans. Last autumn, he had a cunning plan to support net neutrality by making a speech saying internet service providers (ISPs) ought to be allowed to ditch net neutrality.
In December, he had a cunning plan to protect us from pornography – not illegal hardcore stuff, just anything vaguely smutty – by making ISPs block it. The plan was very popular with right-wing religious lobbyists, and less popular with anyone who had a clue how the internet worked.
Now Ed has a cunning plan to get ISPs (them again) to block websites that copyright owners reckon are infringing their intellectual property. ‘Copyright owners’ doesn’t mean the artists, writers or musicians who create copyright works, but the big businesses who make money out of them, which might possibly skew Ed’s policy ideas.
They’re disappointed that last year’s cobbled-together Digital Economy Act – a cunning plan that Ed Vaizey opposed, then voted for – will probably never be implemented and ordinary citizens won’t be threatened with having their internet cut off if somebody from a record company says they downloaded something. But not all that disappointed. After all, ‘three strikes’ was two more strikes than they wanted. A private scheme where they tell ISPs which sites not to let their customers see sounds much neater.
No individual users are targeted, so there’s no bad press about single mothers being fined $2 million. There’s no need for court orders to identify users – you just cut everyone off, all at once! And there’s none of that awkward ‘accountability’ to worry about. Spot something that looks like a copyright music track? Don’t ask questions, just kill the site. It’s as easy as scribbling it on a list and passing the list to another bureaucrat. Works well in China.
The reason why this is wrong is not that copyright is a silly, outmoded principle and everyone should be able to share content without paying for it. That’s the rather sweet position adopted by intellectual property abolitionists, or ‘freetards’, as others like to call them. But it’s unappealing because the idea that the right to claim credit for your own work and be rewarded for other people’s enjoyment of it is not a ‘natural right’ is patently false. Imagine no possessions; I wonder if you can? No, you can’t.
Human beings in every society we know of, Polynesian fictions notwithstanding, respect private property and are frustrated if their rights to it are infringed. Property isn’t theft, it’s a genetic legacy. How could we preserve the sense of self and identity that’s so central to being human without also claiming parts of the world as our own?
Those we create, rather than only annexe, are surely bound to be our most prized possessions, and it’s typical of us that what we create with our minds matters to us even more than what we create with our bodies. As is, of course, our ability and tendency to conceptualise those creations as if they were real property, just as we gain more from manipulating ideas than sticks.
So there’s every reason to preserve copyright if we can. But the way to do it must be to make sense of it and develop practical ways for everyone to respect it, not to use it as a stick to beat them with. Generally, people don’t look fondly on the sticks that beat them.
It’s long been the norm that copyright is respected rigidly by commercial organisations that seek to profit from it, and more loosely by individuals who merely want to appreciate it, as its creators, in a general sense, intended. We need to deal with that dichotomy, not pretend we can make it go away.
In a guest column, Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group makes his pitch for your vote against voluntary – that is, privatised – internet blocking. I hope you’ll read it and do something about it, whether it’s contacting your MP, writing to Ed Vaizey, or just thinking and talking about this. It’s time for consensual progress, not cunning plans.
Adam Banks
