Letter to Cory Doctorow on Big Media

Cory Doctorow is the author of several works of fiction and various essays on copyright. He’s also the coeditor of Boing Boing, a famous blog. His latest essay “Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It’s 1996” is an informative and well-written analysis that brings a very interesting point to light.

The media companies are their own worst sources of bad publicity. They act like gangsters, and the public believes they are gangsters.

The media companies are clearly on the losing side of the war against Internet users, and as Doctorow correctly states, they are clueless to the changes that have occurred since 1996. There is absolutely no way that the entertainment industry, even with its billions of dollars, will be able to overcome the social powers of the decentralized Internet community’s efforts. History has shown that even the most powerful of leaders cannot oppose a diverse opposition with no single weak point to exploit. The media companies will be defeated no matter what, eventually.

But they won’t go away any time soon either. Whether we like it or not, the media companies will continue to garner high profits with which they will use to their advantage. During the Great Depression, when the rest of the economy was in shambles, the entertainment industry continued to prosper. This long-lasting struggle between Internet users and the entertainment corporations will probably drag on for a long time, leaving significant collateral damage amidst the crossfire.

While it’s not the 1990’s, the laws from the 1990’s – “almost entirely designed by the entertainment industry” – continue to haunt us today. The No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1997 made noncommercial copyright infringement a crime (rather than an cause for a civil suit) by changing the definition of “commercial advantage or private financial gain.” “Perpetual copyright on the installment plan,” a slogan by critics of copyright extension, is most recently applicable to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998. This law has eliminated a potential public domain for future creative works by retroactively extending copyright, earning itself a nickname as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, in reference to its effect on the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons. Ironically, these same cartoons would have constituted copyright infringement had our current copyright law applied to works that the Mickey Mouse cartoons were based off, such as the 19th century fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. The Digitial Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed in the same year, has continued to harm free speech and market competition. This law makes any non-official implementation of a DVD player in the United States illegal, including free software implementations, and provides a loophole by which media companies can expand the powers of copyright to prevent competing technologies. It also has been widely used to silence political speech, including against critics of the Church of Scientology and against official campaign videos by the McCain-Palin presidential campaign. We can’t ignore the cumulative effects of these laws to date.