Copyright Essay: Counter Hegemony or Cry for Freedom
For Winston, Orwell’s 1984 protagonist, freedom was anonymity, being able to read, think or express his opinion without fear; but everything he did was closely watched by a “telescreen”.
In the imaginary world of Orwell, like in “Machiavellic” philosophy, the hegemonic parties live in constant fear of loosing their power; and the only way to maintain their control is by making us ‘believe’ that most of what we do is illegal. Orwell’s world is becoming true to us through cyberspace, everything we do or say inside the Internet is recorded; our boundaries are strictly framed by computer “code” and recently by fear (Hetcher, 1925). We are “techonopoles,” who need, depend and are slaved by technology (Vaidhyanathan, 177). Because of the potential freedom that Internet has allowed to people, the hegemony is afraid of loosing their power; that is why they are constantly threatening us with law suits and imprisonment. They tell us to empty our pockets before we read a book, listen to a song or watch a movie; otherwise we are “thought criminals” stealing from artists (Lessig, 58).
Because the Internet has facilitated the copying and sharing of copyrighted material the US has developed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA regulates the information, not the devices in which the information is delivered; for instance, I may have bought a CD from a store on queen St; but this just makes me the owner of the physical disk but the content inside it isn’t mine; it is the property of the copyright owner. The DMCA has criminalized not only the unauthorized copying of copyrighted material but also the devices and services that facilitate illegal copying.
Copyright owners have extended their power by adopting laws outside copyright in order to protect copyrighted material. For instance if a copyright owner creates an access code that blocks unauthorized users from accessing the material inside the webpage, consequently everyone who accesses the information without authorization is breaking the law; this is the electronic equivalent of breaking into a locked room in order to obtain the copy of a book or a song. In this case the offence is not related to copyright but to breaking and entering (Nimmer, 686).
We all agree that robbing a CD store on Queen St is wrong; but for as long as we apply this same analogy to downloading an album of the Internet, we will keep the music distributors rich and powerful, the artists poor and hungry, and us (the consumers) stupid. One of Lawrence Lessig’s arguments is that cyberspace is a world, and that we cannot abide to the same constitutional laws that rule the physical world to rule the cyberworld (Hetcher, 1916). Computer Code as Lessig has stated is what changes the Internet from being a space of perfect freedom to one of perfect control (Lessig, 4).
According to Lessig, Americans believe that the world is best managed “when divided among private owners” and when the market perfectly regulates those divided resources (Lessig, 56). “There is no such thing as natural liberty. All Choices, including the choice that governments not regulate, are political choices establishing different political regimes” (Fried, 607). One of the recent problems is that governments by creating acts such as the DMCA have given copyright owners the right to police, prosecute and judge over how people uses copyrighted material. But the problem with this kind of corporate freedom is that consumers can be badly affected, because companies will tend to do what is convenient for them and ignore what is good for the general public. A good example of this is a study made by the tobacco company Philip Morris. As an attempt to squash proposed cigarette taxes in the Czech Republic, the tobacco company sponsored a study that claimed that the Czech government would actually save $147.1 million from the premature deaths of smokers (McLeod, 234). If we allow complete control of the arts to corporations, we as consumers will be like the smokers who died young, because our mental needs were neglected; and the only form of art alive will be the one manufactured, created not by artists but by human machines, made only to satisfy the needs of the corporates.
I believe that by living in a democratic society we are entitled to a number of rights that will enhance our ability to be free. For instance, the right to health, education and housing, all these basic rights will generate opportunities for us to live healthy, comfortable and ultimately free lives. Music, literature and cinema is closely related to education; these types of art forms live in parallel with the development of a healthy mind, they enable people to think critically and to understand more about the societies in which we live in. For all these reasons I believe that “illegal” file sharing of some forms of art such as music and videos isn’t a counter hegemonic act, but an outcry for people to gain access to a basic right, the right to a healthier mind. By giving total control of the arts to corporations we capitalise it; and by doing this we are excluding all of those who aren’t able to pay, and we need to remember that democracy is about inclusion and not exclusion. This is why it is very important for us to differentiate those who profit from illegal copyrighted material from those whose only intention is to share their knowledge with others; the law should prosecute the former and not the latter.
Internet is such a democratic space because the resources aren’t “divided among private owners. Instead, the core resources of the internet are left in a commons” (Lessig, 56). But because of external factors outside the arts, policy makers feel more pressure to change the current state of the Internet; external pressures such us commerce. Retailers can now sell their goods without spending large amounts of capital in order to open a shop on a busy business district (Fried, 610); this has allowed for the democratisation of small markets, since more people are now able to enter and compete with bigger companies, and prices have been greatly reduced to consumers without great effects on the quality of products.
Written computer codes such as cookies made this possible, but with it negative effects came into being; take for instance, spam email, which has caused a lot of criticism by Internet users and this has helped to shift the demand for more Internet control from being solely from top to bottom to bottom top; now, not only merchants and copyright owners call for more control but average internet users have began to demand more control. For this reason governments are pushed to place stronger regulations over the Internet, and the best way to regulate the internet is by code, blocking access to information to people and at the same time criminalising those who break these codes in order to access the protected information. As I mentioned earlier these varieties of code can change the Internet environment from one of perfect freedom to one of perfect control: every thing you send or receive can be monitored, or your access to sites can be blocked or conditioned depending on who you are or what you are willing to pay (Fried, 613).
The question we need to ask ourselves is that if the benefits of more control outnumber the consequences it may have on people’s freedom? As I mentioned earlier, downloading free videos and audios of the internet is a beneficial activity that helps in the development of education and culture, it isn’t so much an illegal act but more of a statement claiming a basic human right, the right to a healthier mind. Because “democracy” gives similar rights to people and corporations the act of “illegal” downloading affects corporate’s right to freedom, but perhaps governments shouldn’t oblige so much to the rights of corporations and place more consideration on the democratic rights of the greater public. If we go back a couple of hundred years in history, we could see how industrialisation killed many forms of commerce that are no longer practiced today, this shift from pre-industrial to industrial has changed the world dramatically; arguably, in favour of the masses. Perhaps the Internet has opened the doors for a new shift in the world and in order to move democracy a step forward we will need to generate new set of rules that will enhance our freedom.
Bibliography
Fried, Charles. Review: Perfect Freedom or Perfect Control? Harvard Law Review, Vol. 114, No. 2. Dec, 2000, pp 606—638.
Hetcher, Steven. Review: Climbing the Walls of Your Electronic Cage. Michigan Law Review, Vol. 98, No. 6, 2000 Survey of Books Related to the Law. May, 2000 pp 1916—1940.
Kahle, Brewster; Prelinger, Rick; Jackson, Mary E. Public Access to Digital Material. D—Lib Magazine, Vol. 7 No. 10, October2001.
Link: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october01/kahle/10kahle.html
Lessig, Lawrence. Code Version 2.0. New York, USA: Basic Books, 2006.
Lessig, Lawrence. The Internet under Siege. Foreign Policy, No 127. Nov.—Dec., 2001 pp 56-65.
Lemley, Mark A. Private Property. Stanford Law Review, Vol. 52, No 5, Symposium: Cyberspace and Privacy: A New Legal Paradigm? Many 2000, pp 1545-1557.
McLeod, Kembrew. Freedom of Expression, Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. USA: Doubleday, February 2005.
Nimmer, David. A Riff on Fair Use in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 148, No. 3. January 2000, pp 673-742.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights & Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity. New York, NY, USA: New York University Press, 2001.
In the imaginary world of Orwell, like in “Machiavellic” philosophy, the hegemonic parties live in constant fear of loosing their power; and the only way to maintain their control is by making us ‘believe’ that most of what we do is illegal. Orwell’s world is becoming true to us through cyberspace, everything we do or say inside the Internet is recorded; our boundaries are strictly framed by computer “code” and recently by fear (Hetcher, 1925). We are “techonopoles,” who need, depend and are slaved by technology (Vaidhyanathan, 177). Because of the potential freedom that Internet has allowed to people, the hegemony is afraid of loosing their power; that is why they are constantly threatening us with law suits and imprisonment. They tell us to empty our pockets before we read a book, listen to a song or watch a movie; otherwise we are “thought criminals” stealing from artists (Lessig, 58).
Because the Internet has facilitated the copying and sharing of copyrighted material the US has developed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA regulates the information, not the devices in which the information is delivered; for instance, I may have bought a CD from a store on queen St; but this just makes me the owner of the physical disk but the content inside it isn’t mine; it is the property of the copyright owner. The DMCA has criminalized not only the unauthorized copying of copyrighted material but also the devices and services that facilitate illegal copying.
Copyright owners have extended their power by adopting laws outside copyright in order to protect copyrighted material. For instance if a copyright owner creates an access code that blocks unauthorized users from accessing the material inside the webpage, consequently everyone who accesses the information without authorization is breaking the law; this is the electronic equivalent of breaking into a locked room in order to obtain the copy of a book or a song. In this case the offence is not related to copyright but to breaking and entering (Nimmer, 686).
We all agree that robbing a CD store on Queen St is wrong; but for as long as we apply this same analogy to downloading an album of the Internet, we will keep the music distributors rich and powerful, the artists poor and hungry, and us (the consumers) stupid. One of Lawrence Lessig’s arguments is that cyberspace is a world, and that we cannot abide to the same constitutional laws that rule the physical world to rule the cyberworld (Hetcher, 1916). Computer Code as Lessig has stated is what changes the Internet from being a space of perfect freedom to one of perfect control (Lessig, 4).
According to Lessig, Americans believe that the world is best managed “when divided among private owners” and when the market perfectly regulates those divided resources (Lessig, 56). “There is no such thing as natural liberty. All Choices, including the choice that governments not regulate, are political choices establishing different political regimes” (Fried, 607). One of the recent problems is that governments by creating acts such as the DMCA have given copyright owners the right to police, prosecute and judge over how people uses copyrighted material. But the problem with this kind of corporate freedom is that consumers can be badly affected, because companies will tend to do what is convenient for them and ignore what is good for the general public. A good example of this is a study made by the tobacco company Philip Morris. As an attempt to squash proposed cigarette taxes in the Czech Republic, the tobacco company sponsored a study that claimed that the Czech government would actually save $147.1 million from the premature deaths of smokers (McLeod, 234). If we allow complete control of the arts to corporations, we as consumers will be like the smokers who died young, because our mental needs were neglected; and the only form of art alive will be the one manufactured, created not by artists but by human machines, made only to satisfy the needs of the corporates.
I believe that by living in a democratic society we are entitled to a number of rights that will enhance our ability to be free. For instance, the right to health, education and housing, all these basic rights will generate opportunities for us to live healthy, comfortable and ultimately free lives. Music, literature and cinema is closely related to education; these types of art forms live in parallel with the development of a healthy mind, they enable people to think critically and to understand more about the societies in which we live in. For all these reasons I believe that “illegal” file sharing of some forms of art such as music and videos isn’t a counter hegemonic act, but an outcry for people to gain access to a basic right, the right to a healthier mind. By giving total control of the arts to corporations we capitalise it; and by doing this we are excluding all of those who aren’t able to pay, and we need to remember that democracy is about inclusion and not exclusion. This is why it is very important for us to differentiate those who profit from illegal copyrighted material from those whose only intention is to share their knowledge with others; the law should prosecute the former and not the latter.
Internet is such a democratic space because the resources aren’t “divided among private owners. Instead, the core resources of the internet are left in a commons” (Lessig, 56). But because of external factors outside the arts, policy makers feel more pressure to change the current state of the Internet; external pressures such us commerce. Retailers can now sell their goods without spending large amounts of capital in order to open a shop on a busy business district (Fried, 610); this has allowed for the democratisation of small markets, since more people are now able to enter and compete with bigger companies, and prices have been greatly reduced to consumers without great effects on the quality of products.
Written computer codes such as cookies made this possible, but with it negative effects came into being; take for instance, spam email, which has caused a lot of criticism by Internet users and this has helped to shift the demand for more Internet control from being solely from top to bottom to bottom top; now, not only merchants and copyright owners call for more control but average internet users have began to demand more control. For this reason governments are pushed to place stronger regulations over the Internet, and the best way to regulate the internet is by code, blocking access to information to people and at the same time criminalising those who break these codes in order to access the protected information. As I mentioned earlier these varieties of code can change the Internet environment from one of perfect freedom to one of perfect control: every thing you send or receive can be monitored, or your access to sites can be blocked or conditioned depending on who you are or what you are willing to pay (Fried, 613).
The question we need to ask ourselves is that if the benefits of more control outnumber the consequences it may have on people’s freedom? As I mentioned earlier, downloading free videos and audios of the internet is a beneficial activity that helps in the development of education and culture, it isn’t so much an illegal act but more of a statement claiming a basic human right, the right to a healthier mind. Because “democracy” gives similar rights to people and corporations the act of “illegal” downloading affects corporate’s right to freedom, but perhaps governments shouldn’t oblige so much to the rights of corporations and place more consideration on the democratic rights of the greater public. If we go back a couple of hundred years in history, we could see how industrialisation killed many forms of commerce that are no longer practiced today, this shift from pre-industrial to industrial has changed the world dramatically; arguably, in favour of the masses. Perhaps the Internet has opened the doors for a new shift in the world and in order to move democracy a step forward we will need to generate new set of rules that will enhance our freedom.
Bibliography
Fried, Charles. Review: Perfect Freedom or Perfect Control? Harvard Law Review, Vol. 114, No. 2. Dec, 2000, pp 606—638.
Hetcher, Steven. Review: Climbing the Walls of Your Electronic Cage. Michigan Law Review, Vol. 98, No. 6, 2000 Survey of Books Related to the Law. May, 2000 pp 1916—1940.
Kahle, Brewster; Prelinger, Rick; Jackson, Mary E. Public Access to Digital Material. D—Lib Magazine, Vol. 7 No. 10, October2001.
Link: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october01/kahle/10kahle.html
Lessig, Lawrence. Code Version 2.0. New York, USA: Basic Books, 2006.
Lessig, Lawrence. The Internet under Siege. Foreign Policy, No 127. Nov.—Dec., 2001 pp 56-65.
Lemley, Mark A. Private Property. Stanford Law Review, Vol. 52, No 5, Symposium: Cyberspace and Privacy: A New Legal Paradigm? Many 2000, pp 1545-1557.
McLeod, Kembrew. Freedom of Expression, Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. USA: Doubleday, February 2005.
Nimmer, David. A Riff on Fair Use in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 148, No. 3. January 2000, pp 673-742.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights & Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity. New York, NY, USA: New York University Press, 2001.
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