Reply #111: we're having two different arguments

[realcountrymusic]

Inarguably, the technology (BitTorrents) exists and has legitimate uses. The fact is that the majority of people using it (like other file sharing technologies) are using it to illegally defraud artists and companies that DO "choose" to be compensated for their work. The solution is to enforce the laws that exist without suppressing useful innovations (I wonder whether the technology used in BitTorrent is patented or licensed?) and work to change laws that we don't like through the legal process.

But it is absurd to consider the massive use of file sharing to enable the theft of intellectual property as conscious political action in defense of a liberal ideal of freedom of expression or common cultural right.

Anyone who holds that the owners of stolen intellectual property have no right to legal recourse directed specifically at the use of particular technologies for which it can be shown that the dominant use is the theft of that property must, to be consistent, oppose gun control as an approach to reducing gun violence, since guns have legitimate uses. I assume you also would oppose the rights of cities to sue gun manufacturers for the costs guns entail for those cities. And to be a little extreme, why should there be restrictions on the purchase of chemicals biological agents or particular encryption technologies?

In theory the technology and its uses are separable. In practice, common sense tells you they are entwined. This makes it all the more imperative for those of us who believe in rational progress enabled by technology to use technology in legal and responsible ways. Every time you download copyrighted material illegally, you help impede the future of that technology. Think about it.

If we don't like intellectual property law, a legal mechanism exists to contest it, and a legal doctrine ("fair use") exists to test its constraints. Either one believes in the rule of law or one espouses anarchy and ends justifying means. I'd save my radical fervor for something much more important, like genocide, the atrocities we are committing in Iraq with perfectly useful technologies, and the freedom of information from *political* restriction which is the dominant issue of our day. Having all the episodes of The OC on your hard drive is not radical. It's probably just theft.

RCM