Now that we’re all copyright law intelligentsia, we can have fun thought-experiments! While the following isn’t exactly one of those (I kind of just wanted to say thought-experiment) it’s food for thought and could potentially spur some thought-experiments.
Copyright law has expanded in duration and in scope since it’s inception, which has lead to the inevitability of more people interacting with copyright law. However, it wasn’t until the advent of the internet until consumers began to deal with copyright law en masse. So what about the internet has led to wide scale interaction with copyright law?
On some level, that’s kind of a softball question. The internet has allowed for more people to communicate more often. The digitization of copyrighted content has allowed these more people doing more talking to also share copyrighted digitized copyright material. While that’s true, and probably the easy answer, I think there’s a more nuanced understanding to be considered.
I think this more nuanced idea has to do with what all of the people enabled to communicate want to talk about. The internet isn’t it’s own thing; it’s epiphenomenal. What people want to talk about it what is going to appear on the internet. The main differences between real life conversations and internet ones is that the internet variety are fixed and permanent, and generally involve more actors (Yeah, that’s a bold statement, but this is a blog. Feel free to take issue with that one).
So let’s imagine your mom is real into celebrities. Imagine your mom used to hang out with her friends and talk about celebrities, maybe she bought some magazines too, or watched a TV show. Now she probably does what she did before but probably does some new things, maybe posting on a message forum, visiting perez hilton, and watching youtube videos about her favorite celebs. Maybe she even makes one of those weird youtube mashup videos that’s just pictures of Johnny Depp set to “My Heart Will Go On.” OK, it\’s set to the All American Rejects, but you get the point. So what’s the difference between your mom’s old practices and her new ones? Mostly it’s participation. TV kind of “makes itself” in that when you turn it on it’s just there, and unless you’re in the business of making TV you don’t have to do anything to make it show up in your living room. The internet, as we considered before, is epiphenomenal, it’s very existence demands participation. Before your mom and her friends would have conversation around the content that was fed to them. Not only was the content pre-programmed, but their conversations around this content was never fixed into anything tangible, even if it was, it probably wasn’t public. So now you’ve got a regular mom who is an active participant in producing content about the culture she’s interested, and some of the things she generates are both public and fixed into hard drives spinning in Greenland somewhere.
You’re probably getting the picture, so here’s the point. Blogs, youtube, messages boards and the like are a public view into (micro)cultures. They can be about celebrities, BMW’s, vampires, or chocolate chip cookies, but the important thing is that in order for these things to exists people have to share content that somebody put online as a prerequisite to participation in their culture. The problem with that, from a copyright law standpoint at least, is that “sharing content” is a really broad term and it encompasses non infringing things like your grandma’s cookie recipe to very infringing things like a leaked screener’s copy of your favorite vampire movie. The other interesting thing is that most people aren’t content producers themselves, meaning most people will align themselves around other people’s intellectual property (BMW’s, Twilight, Hilary Clinton’s chocolate chip cookies) and that just increases the chance that they’re going to be running into copyright law.
The conversations about Tom Cruise that would have happened on the phone after watching him breakdown on Oprah 10 years ago are now part of a larger conversation that necessitates participation in some way. (Oprah and LucasFilms might object to that one) Digitized content has allowed participation that runs into copyright law in all kinds of ways.
So why does your mom care about copyright law? Well, she probably doesn’t, but copyright law cares about her. It’s the larger trend of how, not simply “that” people are communicating on the internet” that’s bringing more people in contact with copyright law.
Don’t buy it? Start a thought-experiment to prove me wrong.
Personally, I think it is the fluidity of the internet that allows for so much copyright infringement. So much information passes through so many hands that it is simply inevitable.
I think another characteristic of the Internet that leads to the prevalence of copyright infringement is the almost instantaneous flow of information. Before the Internet, people had to wait until the newspaper came out the next morning or to go home and watch the 6 o’clock news to get their information about the world. Now newspapers and network news stations can produce instant updates on their websites so that people don’t have to wait.
As soon as someone finds a clip of a movie or a new song that has yet to come out and posts it on youtube, hundreds and thousands of people who are on the Internet at that precise moment can watch the video before it is often taken down due to copyright violations. Email can be sent in a few seconds, while snail mail takes a few days. People can check emails on their phones at any point in the day.
The Internet produces a fast-paced world that wasn’t imaginable during our parents’ generation. As a result of the speeding up of information, copyright is now in the midst of reacting to these changes with the DMCA take-down notices and the such.
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