Since the dawn of general purpose computers, software developers have been trying to find a way to prevent their beneficiaries and other tech-savvy individuals from duplicating original content owned by those developers and distributing them. Early versions of the Digital Rights Movement sought to prevent those measures, but eventually, programmers found ways to successfully navigate around those barriers. Cory Doctorow mentions in “Lockdown” that process of selling and distributing a copyright file is not the problem, but the duplication and allocation of that copyrighted item is. The example of a solution the author mentions is the encryption of files and requiring programs to unlock that file. Encryption of files is an obsolescent solution that led to an extension of problems, which was counterintuitive to what developers wanted to achieve.
Along came the WIPO Copyright Treaty in 1996, which basically put an end to the whole mess. The law put a stamp on stating that extraction and distribution of these encrypted files was illegal. But once again, just like bacterial pathogens, no matter what solution is used to get rid of the problem, more and more advanced problems arise. The solution is not always as easy as limiting individuals from performing a certain action, because the same individuals will find ways to resist those prohibitions. Instead, developers should focus more on regulation – selling appliances that are safe to use, without having the developers worry whether or not those appliances will be used in other ways than they were originally intended. The question is, “What constitutes this sort of regulation?” “We're not making a computer that runs only the ‘appliance’ app; we're taking a computer that can run every program, then using a combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer—it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box”, Doctorow states. Limiting applications and personal computers will not work – this prevents information from reaching the masses. If someone decides to buy an appliance or a computer, the person should not be worrying about what invasive technology that the appliance might have installed in it. Businesses and developers should follow other models of making money (see last week’s readings) if they are concerned about illegal distributions of their products. Technology should be owned by individuals, and not the other way around.
In chapter 4 of James Boyle’s “The Public Domain”, Boyle discusses issues of internet and delves deeper into the specific groundwork of digital copyright. After accessing the reading, a lot of the policies that apply to copyright and the internet are unbalanced. The argument is that the cheaper it is to copy media, the more control the media should have.
The heart of the chapter is defined by these sentences “[…] some of these expansions may indeed have the practical effect of reducing rights that citizens thought they had, such as fair use, low-level noncommercial sharing among personal friends, resale, and so on. But without an increase in private property rights, cheaper copying will eat the heart out of our creative and cultural industries. I call this story the Internet Threat” (Boyle 60). Individuals should be entitled to create or innovate so that life can be more efficient – that is the ultimate goal of new technology. However, creating something entirely new cannot be met without some sort of obstacle, as exemplified by industries that will opportunistically jump in and cause a stir when some sort of copyright infringement is occurring. Furthermore, Boyle supports more control over technology (61). How can individuals express their creativity without violating copyright and at the same time not have an encroachment on their freedom of speech by creative industries? The U.S. Congress is trying to pass a bill that will regulate the internet without censorship, thus removing peer-to-peer networking sites such as Pirate Bay, and other websites which stream copyrighted content. Voting on SOPA and PIPA were postponed, but an alternative bill, OPEN, was proposed shortly thereafter. Boyle argues in his book that if online piracy and distribution of copyrighted material continues to circulate on the internet, we will all become poor. Will we enter an era where illegal downloading/sharing is prohibited? We shall see.
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