Downloading editorial, short version
January 2004
Roger Bohn, rbohn@ucsd.edu
University of California at San Diego
In all the publicity about the downloading of music from the Internet, the view that it is immoral has gone mostly unchallenged. The two main moral arguments advanced by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are that downloading is theft, and that it harms the music industry and its employees. Yet polls show that downloading songs from the Internet is widespread, with up to half of teenage Internet users doing it. And for the most part the practitioners have few qualms about the morality of their actions. Even many who don’t download music engage in similar behavior, such as duplicating CDs and ripping music from CDs to their computers.
Most commentators conclude that downloaders are moral illiterates, who either don’t understand what they are doing is wrong or just don’t care. But a better explanation is that the RIAA’s arguments against downloading, although they have been implicitly accepted by the press, have little moral validity. Downloading may be immoral in some cases, but not for the reasons claimed.
The argument that downloading is theft derives from the position that music is “intellectual property.” RIAA ads claim an explicit parallel between downloading a song and shoplifting a CD—the implication being that intellectual property is no different than physical property, and therefore the wrongness of physical theft that we learned in childhood applies directly to electronic data files. But intellectual property is actually very different than physical property and should be treated differently. The key distinction is that intellectual property, unlike physical property, can be used simultaneously by multiple users without interfering with other users. Therefore, our natural concept of theft does not have an obvious or automatic extension to the use of intangibles like music. Walking out of a store with an album under your shirt deprives someone else of the chance to possess and use that physical album; downloading a song has no such effect, and therefore must be evaluated differently.
Societies choose certain types of ideas and turn them into “intellectual property” by artificially restricting the rights of people to use them. To phrase it concisely, “Intellectual property is created by Man, not God.” Society chooses rules for defining and controlling the uses of intellectual property based on its collective interests. The purpose of intellectual property laws is to encourage creation of new ideas, without going so far as to overly restrict the ability of non-creators to use and benefit from those ideas. Intellectual property in music is created by copyright laws, and the rights of music copyright owners exist only because they are defined by laws. The Internet and accompanying technologies have created revolutionary ways of distributing music, and the appropriate balance between encouraging idea creation and encouraging idea re-use should shift. Just as the then-revolutionary technologies of photography, the Xerox machine, and broadcast radio did, when technological revolutions occur they create new possibilities that society must choose how to deal with. The RIAA’s simplistic assertion that downloading is theft amounts to claiming that it alone has the right to choose how society handles musical intellectual property.
And what of the music industry’s other main argument—that downloading is immoral because it hurts the industry? Even if true, many technological changes hurt individuals, companies, and industries, yet that is no reason to hobble them. Americans understand that new technology should not be forbidden merely because it is disruptive.
There is also a more subtle error in this argument about economic harm. Even if we accepted the premise that technological change should be forbidden if it causes such harm, looking only at the music industry would be the wrong way to do the accounting. The overall economic impact of downloading is almost certainly a net positive. Digital music is a big driver of personal computer upgrading, broadband Internet use, multimedia hardware and software, and the like. It is not facetious to say that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate, and even Cox Communications and Sony lose more from strong laws on digital copying than the music industry stands to gain.
Thus the music industry’s two arguments that downloading is immoral are distorted and invalid. The basic principle behind copyright—that society will be better off if artists have some legal rights to profit from their art—is still sound. But society is also better off if the benefits of new technology are allowed to flow. There are various ways to meet both objectives, such as the new Canadian system of collecting fees on music hardware. Another approach would be modest centrally collected subscription fees for broadband Internet connections—analogous to cable TV fees.
The music industry’s insistence that it should have veto power over what people do with their computers is not good for the economy or society at large, and we should not take its claims seriously. Our children are not virtual shoplifters. They have a better understanding than some members of Congress that revolutionary technology causes disruption and requires adapting codes of behavior—and it should.
d. 1/13/04
|
