ztech/articles/10digital.html "Cyberspace Programmers Confront Copyright Laws" What Is the right approach? Yasser Shalabi

Copyrights What is it? - Copyright is the set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. – Wikipedia Remember from… RIAA – Recording Industry Association of America – The fight against Napster, Kazaa, lone downloaders, and centralized MP3 downloaders MPAA – Motion Pictures Association of America - The fight against leaks of premier movies.

The sides and possible solutions of the issue: The Musician, actor, and other various artists such as painters, composers, and orchestra members. The investor in the art – Wants to see his investment yielding highest profits The user of the entertainment – Wants to enjoy the entertainment at the lowest price possible The provider of the internet service – Wants to provide the internet but without angering such organizations, artists, or definitely not major investors. Solution 1: Pass a law that regulates ISP providers and holds them accountable for the content they share to other users.  Extreme. Artists are protected however in a very cut throat way. When a user violates copyright law and the copyright holder decides to sue at that point the user has already done many, many offenses and usually the cases settle high in favor of the artist. Of course the ISP is not going to shoulder this cost of consumer illicit behavior and will protect themselves through their license agreement with the consumer. This is worst case for the user because the content is still widely available and guess what: the content does not have a warning sticker on it. The central ethical question: are the users accountable for infringements that may not have been explained to them in depth or content that isn’t clearly marked as copyrighted? Solution 2 (solution discussed in article): write a program (free net) that encrypts network traffic and provides measures for anonymity so that illegal downloader's will be protected from ISP’s, recording industry and anyone who might be interested in preventing copyright infringement.  Extreme. The artists and investors will not be protected at all and their content will become very widely distributed and easily accessible. “global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, 71,060 U.S. jobs lost, a loss of $2.7 billion in workers' earnings, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues, $291 million in personal income tax and $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes”. This is statistics from RIAA.org, and obviously these losses are only in the music industry. There are questions into the integrity of these stats but even if the data is skewed by +50% that’s still $6.25 billion in losses. Solution 3: Pass a law that regulates ISP providers and holds them accountable for the content their users download, stream, and share by designing filters that warn users when they may be infringing on copy rights.  Compromise. Users are held accountable daily, and are very clearly warned when they are crossing the lines of what's cyber legal and what is cyber illegal. Laws and copyrights are no longer obscure and are very clear just like when you see a red traffic light you know that you need to stop.

Cases The artist: Worst case: The artist is poor, just started selling his music, and can barely sell albums because everyone is downloading them because of programmer “free net” solution. Best case: The artist actually increases his profits by capitalizing off his music being illegally downloaded. by the solution where liability is passed to the ISP – (which will of course then be bounced from the ISP to the consumer). This is, however, the worst case for the consumer because of the obscurity of what is copyrighted and what is not. The consumer: Best Case: The consumers goal is to enjoy the entertainment at the lowest cost, and that includes possible legal fallout due to infringement. The best case for the consumer would be the programming of an active filter by the ISP’s to warn users when they may be breaking copyright laws. This will undoubtedly raise the average cost for enjoying digital media but it will still protect the user from committing unintended crimes. The ethical question here is the murky line of user privacy, will these mechanisms be abused in the future? If you have a check point before each user transaction with the internet will data be collected and sold; if so who will regulate that kind of behavior? Worst case:The consumer still having the content available to him but with no warnings to illicit behavior and his actions are monitored and will eventually be punished. Even though the content is free he faces the possibility of a grand hammer slam from the lawyers of ISP’s, RIAA, or whomsoever owns the copyright. The investor: Best case: The best in the interests of the investor will be maximum yield on his investment. In this case the investor could care less about the consumers and if he can benefit off of their law breaking then he will. So if it is indeed more profitable to allow consumers to download illegal material then the investor will have no problem with it. Worst case: The worst case for the investor is the release of tools and services like “free net “ which will make the infringing of copyrights undetectable. The content providers (ISP’s): Best case: The ISP’s are not liable for what their consumers do by providing warnings in relevant situations. However, this responsibility means they will be responsible for holes in their filters which will cost them a lot of labor to maintain. Worst case: The programmers release tools like “free net”. I doubt organizations like the RIAA or MPPA will sit back and allow billions in losses and they may force the ISP to be liable for the encrypted traffic. The ISP’s may not be able to manage these programs and they may have to ban users who use things like “free net”. This will cause losses for them in labor hours, and lost sales.

Conclusion With the availability of cheap entertainment solutions like Netflix or subscriptions allowing infinite downloads of music it would be hard to argue for free online entertainment or the excessiveness in punishment of infringers especially when these infringements lead to more expensive movies for everyone else. I think the best solution would be to provide clear warnings whenever consumers are possibly infringing. This solution prevents, or at least significantly cuts back on losses suffered by companies while protecting the consumer from ignorant infringements. This is definitely best case for all. Stop downloading music, games, and movies. Get netflix and if you only like 1 song off the album then buy it on itunes.