No straight lines in the digital age

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Sep 14, 2003 by Jay Evensen Deseret Morning News

In the digital age, it's getting harder and harder to draw straight lines.

A participant in a recent discussion on a Web site called Geek.com wondered why it is OK to copy an episode of Seinfeld or MacGyver off your TV without becoming the subject of a lawsuit, and yet it apparently isn't OK to copy a song from an album over the Internet.

Another wondered why he should be liable if someone else is downloading songs off his computer. After all, isn't this like storing all of your albums in your closet, and then having people come take it from you?

Others were filled with simple righteous indignation. CDs cost way too much in the stores. Why pay $15 for a CD that contains one good song? "Until a service is offered, I will continue to get my music for free," said one.

And still others were biting their fingernails, counting the odds and hoping for the best. "They don't plan on suing everyone," said one. Another speculated it would take over 2,000 years to do that.

A lot of ordinary computer users have become moral philosophers in recent days. But so have parents and grandparents who barely know how to turn on their PCs but whose homes contain children who do.

This was the week the record industry struck back. On Monday, the Recording Industry of America, the industry's largest trade group, opened fire with 261 lawsuits against what it termed, "major offenders." The list was surprisingly diverse. It included 71-year- old Durwood Pickle of Richardson, Texas, who insists his grandkids downloaded music onto his computer; Yale professor Timothy Davis, who admits to downloading about 500 songs; and 12-year-old Brianna LaHara of New York City, whose parents quickly settled with the industry for $2,000.

The recording industry points to a 25 percent decline in CD sales over the past four years. That was about the time the first widely disseminated file-swapping software became available. If you owned a grocery store and certain people were constantly stealing all your fruit, eventually you would get fed up and prosecute, regardless of how old or young they were.

They might complain that your fruit is too expensive. Well, I happen to think BMWs are too expensive, but that doesn't give me the right to steal one from a car lot.

But then, that would be using the old straight-line approach. Go ahead, pull a T-square out and see if you can line up the age of digital reproduction. Sure, the basic moral questions are easy enough. If a person composes and copyrights music, anyone who distributes it without permission is committing a crime. But there is little basic about the information age. The lines all go from a prism into a kaleidoscope.

Consider that at least one prominent band, Metallica, makes a practice of giving away its music for free over the Internet. Other, lesser known bands do, as well. Consider how computer manufacturers legally sell equipment that makes copying quick and easy. And consider how Apple Computers just signed a deal with the recording industry that allows people to download music at a minimal cost and legally make copies -- if, that is, they own a Macintosh.

Then consider the sheer numbers involved. By some estimates, 60 million people worldwide share music files illegally. These are, it is safe to say, music lovers, the industry's prime potential customers. Does it make sense to scare them with lawsuits, or to figure out a way to adapt the industry to new realities? Can Pandora's Box really be closed? Can either side win a digital arms race?

That race is on, by the way. Not long after the industry announced it was going to sue people, a service in Spain called Blubster said it had developed a cloaking device that would keep any third party from seeing who was downloading files. According to the Knight Ridder/ Tribune Information Services, this was only one salvo in the war. The industry has begun sending millions of dummy files to file-swappers. Some of these will attach themselves to computers and either cause them to freeze or scour their hard drives for pirated files, which they will delete. In return, the file swappers are developing software that would ferret out these dummy files, then blackball the computers sending them. And on and on.

Not long ago, Rep. Chris Cannon, a law-and-order Republican, met with our editorial board. The recording industry, he said, is being too stubborn. Why, indeed, should someone in this day and age not be allowed to buy a single digital song for . . . well, a song?

Amid all the discussion and the program-writing, only one thing seems certain: the times, they are a-changin'.

I'm all for teaching people to be honest. But sometimes, you have to move a little in order to draw more straight lines.

Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret Morning News editorial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com