On SOPA, piracy, copyright, etc.

I've been wasting too much time arguing about these issues today, so I thought that rather than blacking out my dreamwidth and livejournal (i.e. making it look much the same as every day I don't blog, which is most of them), I'd state my position here.

Writers, artists, actors, etc., have living expenses, and if they can't meet these through their art, they have to take other jobs, which mean they write/act/produce less, which leaves all of us poorer. Some entertainments are horrendously expensive to produce - opera, ballet, certain types of movie, etc. - and have to be paid for somehow. If we take this money away, then fewer of these will be available for us to enjoy.

Some of these can now be completely rendered into digital form and enjoyed on your monitor, TV, tablet, phone, etc., and downloaded at no cost other than what you're paying for bandwidth. If you do this rather than pay for a copy, you may be depriving the author/artist/producer of money they need, and are entitled to receive, and this is wrong.

This is NOT a defence of SOPA, nor of extending copyright for decades beyond the author/artist/etc.'s death, nor of amazon.com's right to limit the number of times you can read an ebook (not closely related issues, but they do seem to have crept into many of the online arguments about SOPA). It's a call for a cooler, more pragmatic approach to the issue.

Firstly, all of my books and many of my stories required research, often from the internet and/or books borrowed from libraries. In many cases, buying the books I needed would have cost more than I was likely to make from the sale of the story. We need more libraries, and better libraries, and the internet has the capacity to meet those demands, and we need a way for it to reward the authors who make their works available through libraries, through something akin to the Lending Right schemes currently in existence.

Secondly, I own thousands of books and hundreds of DVDs (including those of TV series and old films shown free-to-air), mostly bought new. And I go the cinema when I think the experience is worth the cost and inconvenience. The movie doesn't have to be new: I'd gladly pay to see Zulu or West Side Story or Star Wars or Forbidden Planet or Kagemusha on a large screen again, or to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show with a live audience. And there are live theatre and live concert experiences that can not be conveyed digitally, and are well worth the cost. But I do want value for money, and while I don't want to rip anyone off, I object to being ripped off. (If someone wants to reimburse me for The Phantom Menace and/or The Matrix Reloaded, I'm happy to settle for the cost of the tickets and not charge you for my time.)

Now, as many of you may know, I don't consume alcohol, though you may not know that a drunk once tried to split my skull with a cricket bat: despite this, I don't think Prohibition was a good idea, but I definitely approve of regulating the supply of alcohol and taxing it so that it compensates for any cost to society. And while I'm hoping the use of tobacco will eventually be phased out, I don't think Prohibition would work in that case, either, so regulation is probably the best compromise. Pirate sites (illegal download or copyright violation sites, if you prefer) keep count of how often a particular file is downloaded - okay, fine them accordingly, and compensate the copyright holders, and while you're at it, provide guaranteed virus-free, high-resolution, you-get-what-you-paid-for copies at a price that will make the majority of consumers less eager to go to the black market. (Maybe that way, you can dispense with those bloody irritating anti-piracy warnings on DVDs while you're at it.)

Why do the anti-piracy forces seem to be losing the PR battle this time around? Why are pirates popular? (and don't say, "They just arrrrr"). Well, Robin Hood has more fans among the 99% than John Galt and his devotees (and if you don't recognize the reference, then presumably you haven't read or seen Atlas Shrugged; if so, I envy you). It might also help to remember one reason why so many press-ganged sailors became pirates: pirate captains treated their crews more fairly than their law-abiding counterparts. When conditions improved for sailors, the 'Golden Age of Piracy' soon ended. If you think that analogy somewhat forced, consider this: would you be more reluctant to get a pirate download if you thought you were robbing your favourite author of 8% of the price of a book, than you would if you thought he received 40%?


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