One of the great but largely ignored battlefields of 21st century politics is intellectual property. The relentless march of technology ™ means copying data today, in whatever form it takes, is as hard as it’s ever going to be, to put it in Cory Doctorow’s words. Cheap harddrive storage, fast internet and easy to use filesharing technology has made it much easier to find, get and store any kind of media you’d like, from this weeks comics to bootleg recordings of 1970 pop festivals to the latest Hollywood blockbuster to whatever weird hybrid some kids have thought up in their bedroom yesterday. Any company or person whose business depends on controlling the right to copy is therefore fucked. The monopoly on copyright has been irrevocably broken, at least technically.
How do you deal with that, as an industry built on the assumption that copying is hard and is therefore worthwhile to control? Letting go of this control is hard, when you’ve spent your entire life fighting to get it and keep it. It’s no wonder then that Hollywood, the music industry and the various other industries built on this assumption have instead chosen to make copying harder legally, the more it became easier to do technically. Before we had tape cassettes it was so difficult to copy your favourite record it was pointless even trying, so no legislation was needed to stop home copying. Once Philips made copying music as easy as putting on an album on your home entertainment system and then press “record”, suddenly we get increasingly Draconian legislation making it illegal. This process has obviously only accelerated in the internet age, which brings us to our current situation.
Technology not only makes copying easier, but also surveillance — if it’s easier to download, it is also easier to see what we’re downloading… What the big content monopolists now want to do is to use technology to retake control, by getting governments around the world to spy on us to make sure we’re not getting things we haven’t paid for and then punishing us if we have. The way they do that is through ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Intended to stop both commercial and home copying, it’s being negotiated in secret by the content industries with our governments, but without any legislative oversight or input from us. It’s purely intended to serve the interests of Hollywood and co, by making it very very easy to get copyright “infringers” taken down, but hard to appeal and in which no balance has been struck between the legitamite desire of content producers to make money of their work and the public interest in having information freely/easily available. As you know Bob, originally copyright was set up as a state given monopoly to encourage authors and publishers to, well, publish, while recognising that this monopoly should be finite in order to enable dissemination of information. This last consideration has almost entirely disappear from modern copyright, thanks to monopolist lobbying and ACTA is the ultimate expression of it.
Because the negotiations about it have been held in secret, it has been difficult to know what ACTA will entail. There have been rumours and a few leaks, but nothing concrete, until recently. The entire text of the current draft proposal has been leaked and even better, has been wikified.. With this leak it finally became clear just how dangerous ACTA is for us, as Margot Kaminski explains: for example, if ACTA is passed in its current form, it will making copying.downloading not just a civil, but a criminal offence….