Measures like the infamous music tax will hopefully never gain serious purchase among copyright lobbyists and those within government (even Feargal Sharkey thinks it’s an unworkable idea). But the increasing efforts of the content industry to capture the internet (or at least take greater control of it) with the help of government, should be viewed with alarm and suspicion, in my view.
I’m reminded of the old joke in which a young man is talking to a friend and says:
“When I was fourteen, I thought the old man was so ignorant I could barely stand to have him around; now I’m twenty-one and I’m amazed at how much he’s learned in the last seven years”.
I’m beginning to feel like this with regard to Richard M Stallman’s views on copyright. When I first read some of RMS’s writings, probably around the turn of the century, I thought that they were ahead of their time at best, extreme at worst. Now though, his views on the destiny of human-kind to use computers to their full potential, on the essential incompatibility of traditional copyright notions and digital technology, on why so much “piracy” is not theft, and his views on the attempts by copyright holders to lobby for enforcement measures that erode our civil liberties and even damage our civic society, no longer seem so far fetched at all. In fact, the last time I read “Why software should not have owners“, an essay the thesis of which I once rejected as too extreme, I just found myself nodding at each claim, as if it were a statement of the obvious and largely a matter of common sense.
With each new copyright-related news story, I’m increasingly coming around to the view that we can have an information society, but not an information economy, at least not where the latter implies the primacy of powerful copyright trolls and enforcers, sitting in glass and steel towers, remotely monitoring the digital equipment in, and data flows to and from, citizens’ homes. Combine this with the increasingly pervasive government surveillance and extortion-masquerading-as-punishment of citizens, those tracking devices in our pockets AKA mobile phones, DNA databases and other Orwellian developments besides, and we’re rapidly creating a society that given the choice, few sensible people would aspire to live within.
I’m beginning to think that the day is not far off when admitting selling digital equipment or services to a government department or to major copyright holders will be about as socially acceptable as admitting to being a developing world arms dealer. Extreme? Check back in seven years and let’s see.
UPDATE: Underscoring the timeliness of this post, here are the latest proposed measures by the UK government in its attempt to introduce the same degree of surveillance of the Web as many other of the UK’s public spaces currently enjoy. Next stop: On-the-spot fines for writing “offensive” blog articles? Freedom of expression was overrated anyway, wasn’t it?