Online Shoplifting, continued

Originally published April 20, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1431

Well, this has been interesting. Since my earlier column talking about net thievery and Harlan Ellison’s fight against same, I’m pleased to say that the majority of feedback I’ve received on it has been quite positive. At the very least, folks seem to be understanding why the current electronic assault on copyright is A Bad Thing. Some of the emails, however, have gone in some interesting directions. The first is from S. Drescher in Austin, Texas:

In your column in CBG #1428, you ended with the statement that “right is still right, and wrong is still wrong”. I take it that you feel that it is right to misrepresent what the encoding on DVDs does? CSS doesn’t protect DVDs from being copied–anyone with the right equipment can make an exact duplicate of an encoded DVD, which can be played just like the original, just like a copy of an encoded paper document can be made and then decoded just like the original.

What CSS does do is to control how consumers can watch DVDs which they have purchased. Imagine if you purchased a book which could be read in the United States, but is unreadable if you take it to Germany, or could be read under incandescent light bulbs but not under fluorescent bulbs? That’s what CSS does. If you purchase DVDs in the United States, and move to Germany, you’ll have to purchase another copy of most of your DVDs if you want to watch them there–not because the DVDs are worn out, but because CSS will prevent them from playing on German DVD players. And if you want to use the DVD drive you purchased to watch the DVDs you purchased under the Linux operating system, forget it, because CSS ensures that only software companies that have paid the appropriate kickbacks to the DVD CCA can play the DVDs, and that software was only available for Windows and MacOS. For some silly reason, some people felt that they should be able to play the DVDs which they had paid for, and the only way to do that was to crack the encoding.

I neither upload nor download pirated audio, video, or text, but as long as the DVD CCA insists upon controlling where and upon what equipment DVDs can be viewed, I won’t be watching any DVDs. I hope that in the future I can depend upon your honesty to refrain from repeating the myth that DVD encoding is intended to protect the contents, when it is truly intended to control the consumer.

All I know in regards to the encoding and duplication of DVDs is what I read in the newspapers, and they basically presented it as simply an anti-duplication code. It’s really more of a side issue to what I was really talking about, namely that no matter how many built in safeguards one produces to prevent copying, someone, somehow, will crack it.

That said, I gotta tell you, I understand your being torqued on this matter. My guess is that variation in DVD playability (not to mention VHS playability) extends from copyright concerns, release dates in various countries, and other legal concerns. But man, it bugs me as well. For years the only reason I was able to have Return to Oz and Song of the South on laserdisc was because I obtained Japanese editions. Nothing was being stolen from anyone or infringed upon as far as I was concerned: I paid for them fair and square, including the pricey import costs. It’s bad enough they’re coming out with new DVDs in America that older players won’t play; but if you buy DVDs on the up-and-up from aboard, it bites the big one that they don’t play here. (Although for what it’s worth, Pioneer finally agreed to give me a free upgrade on my DVD player.)

In any event, I appreciate the clarification, and although I’m not intending to boycott DVDs (it’s not practical; laserdiscs are being phased out and I sure ain’t going back to videotape) I certainly feel your pain.

And then there’s the following letter from P. Darcy (actually, two letters, the initial and a follow-up, which I’ve edited together):

I feel that the issue that you wrote about is not quite (as) black and white as Mister Ellison believes. I should also say that I am a Napster user, but I have never and would never download an entire book. The library is up the street. Which leads to my main question: When is it stealing?

If I buy the latest issue of Captain Marvel (BTW, I enjoy and am really looking forward to the Starlin issues), I read it and then lend it to my friend, did I steal from you? What if I sell it on eBay for $1 or $100? Did I steal from you, or Marvel, or Jim Hanley’s Universe? Since comics and sci-fi are considered collectibles, there will always be a resale market. Hasn’t the internet just opened up a new mechanism for delivery?

It’s my belief that the original online “sharers” of the books, music, whatever, were probably a close-knit group of friends and/or fans trying to expose each other to other works. For sci-fi books, it may be that the book is out-of-print, and the potential buyer may want to get a copy. Is it stealing from the creator if he/she downloads the book as opposed to buying it at a used bookstore, where the creator gets no piece of the pie?

I thank you for the perspective that you provided in your column. I don’t want to be thief, so I will stop downloading songs. But I would like to know if you think that there is a line between stealing and sharing and where it may lie.

Quest Communications even has a not-so-farfetched commercial where a guy goes into a dingy bar with one beer on tap and only peanuts for food, but he has access “to every song ever recorded by every artist, ever”.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do remember this from my graduate MBA communications classes. Every time there has been a new introduction of technology, there has been the screams of bloody murder from “content providers.”

Movies were to be the death of theater.

Radio was to be the death of newspapers.

TV was initially to be the death of radio (and eventually the movies.)

Cable was to be the death of broadcast TV.

The VCR was to be the death of the movie industry (they did not want them to be able to record).

In each instance, the existing technology had to have an adjustment period, while the new technology found its niche. Perhaps what will happen in the not so distant future is that a regulatory body will be established, not unlike the FCC, to govern and lay ground rules.

Thanks for your time. I know that I’ll continue to enjoy your “stuff” and will GLADLY pay for it.

You raise a couple of interesting points definitely worth addressing.

If you lend out your one copy of a book, there’s only one copy to go out, and (theoretically, at least) it has to be returned. Same deal with a library. Neither of these activities is going to have an impact on the bookshop down the street. But now picture if you will a library that opens up which has infinite copies of every book. And once the book is removed from the library, it never, ever has to be returned. It becomes the property of the person who took it out. How long do you think the bookshop is going to last?

Don’t believe me? Look at the real world. If you run a small, independent bookshop, and a Borders opens down the street, the odds are that you’re going to be kissing your business goodbye. You simply can’t compete with the massive availability and range of services the Borders offers. But at least Borders is still generating income for writers and publishers. Now imagine that down the street from Borders opens a store—Interstore—that has everything Borders provides, plus it’s all for free. Borders is pretty much screwed. The downside is that Interstore doesn’t generate so much as a penny for writers and publishers, but hey, that’s not your problem, right? You’re just the customer, and heck, information should be free (or so the chant goes). Except it becomes your problem when the writers can’t make a living at their craft, and the publishers go out of business.

If you want to lend out your copy of Captain Marvel, go right ahead. It’s your book, you paid for it, and on the one-to-one basis that such loan-outs involve, you’re not doing anyone any damage. If you can get big bucks for it on ebay, God bless you, knock yourself out. That’s hardly going to bring entropy to Jim Hanley’s Universe. But the kind of one-to-one interaction you’re talking about is simply not comparable to a Napster or a webpage theft of a manuscript, which thousands of people can seek out simultaneously, all of them download at their whim, for keeps, and engage in this practice in lieu of supporting the artists who produced it.

Artists, writers, musicians, don’t have wealthy patrons anymore, outside of corporate grants and government sponsorship, and there’s always someone advocating that government has no business supporting the arts (sooner or later enough people will believe that, at which point say good-bye to PBS.) They need the support of, as PBS says, “people like you.” But if people like you are engaging in routine and widespread downloading of that which once provided the bread and butter of the artist’s life, then you’re participating in a practice that can, and will, drive people and publishers out of the field.

As for the predictions of gloom-and-doom that you listed above, all of which purportedly turned out to be merely alarmist, the quick answer is that virtually none of them—with the exception of videotapes—had a thing to do with copyright infringement. But let’s take a quick look at the list:

Movies were to be the death of theater? They haven’t exactly helped. Once upon a time, the stage was a source of dramatic ingenuity, daring and reinvention of the form. But now, rather than stage new and original shows, producers are rehashing movies in order to open with a guaranteed audience: The Lion King, Saturday Night Fever, Footloose, The Producers, the proposed Jailhouse Rock. And when movies are made of shows that are still running, the movie invariably kills box office.

Radio was to be the death of Newspapers? Since the advent of radio (and TV news), newspapers have shrunk in quantity and quality. Hundreds of once-great newspapers have folded as more and more people get their news from sound bites off TV and radio. New York City once had nearly a dozen major newspapers; it’s now down to three (two if you don’t count the Post.)

TV was initially to be the death of Radio (and eventually the movies.) TV did kill radio. Once upon a time, radio was the home of the greatest entertainment available. Variety hours, dramas, mysteries, westerns, sporting events. Go watch Woody Allen’s Radio Days to get a feel of what it was like back then. The pathetic thing that sits in your car dashboard or wakes you up in the morning pales in comparison.

Cable was to be the death of broadcast TV. Too soon to tell.

The VCR was to be the death of the movie industry (they did not want them to be able to record). Producers underestimated the power that a big screen still has to offer in terms of storytelling, not to mention that the movies remain a good place to go on a date. But it wound up skewing movies to appeal to those audiences: Lovers of spectacle that will look crappy shrunk to a small screen, or teens looking for a date movie. And again, it’s too soon to tell the full ramifications of these changes.

Just because a change doesn’t incur the ultimate penalty—the demise of a form—doesn’t mean that it doesn’t wind up having some sort of negative impact. The degree of that impact depends upon just how dramatic the change. And believe me when I say that wholesale theft with worldwide, instantaneous availability, is extremely dramatic. Just as dramatic is the need to protect the interests of those who created the work, which is why I again urge both fans and, particularly, people in the creative community, to support Ellison in his court case.

As for the question of why shouldn’t out-of-print books be available for free on the internet: Howling Mad, one of my early novels, went out of print some years ago. Penguin Putnam, the publisher, brought it back into print about a year ago. That generates income for me. But if the book were available for free to anyone who wanted it off the internet, to a sufficient degree that no one was going to bother buying the book when it was reissued, how likely would the publisher have been to reprint it? Not very. And the income internet distribution would have netted me? Zip. That’s why it’s called copyright “protection.” It’s designed to protect writers from exactly this sort of situation.

Will internet theft cause the death of creative endeavors as we know them? Too soon to tell, I suppose. But it sure may send the patient into life support.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)