When Copyright Met Privacy

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, I have broken copyright law and probably will do so again. I’ve made copies of books and articles–sometimes using the crude tools of the late 20th century (aka: the copy machine), and other times using far-easier tools like the “right click.” I’ve also copied “records” onto cassette tapes, burned CDs from store-bought ones, and received dozens of hours of music on flash drives from friends. Add to that the number of times I’ve grabbed an image from a website to use in a presentation of some sort. I know that these things are technically no-nos, but I don’t lose much sleep over them because my “piracy” is incredibly small, benefits only me, and doesn’t prevent me from spending a significant part of my income consuming art of every kind. If I were to stop “infringing” on copyrights tomorrow, I would likely spend the exact same amount each year on music, books, tickets to performances, and other arts products.

For most of my life, it has been nearly impossible for record labels and book publishers to detect my acts of copying, which is perhaps why they haven’t lost much sleep over it either (except while targeting technologies, like the VCR, the DAT machine and digital mini disks, RIP). They also haven’t seemed too concerned about used bookstores and the second-hand bin in record stores (for all that remain of those businesses), even though every sale of used music/book media could arguably be said to be one less of new media, with the profits of those sales not returning to the originators of the work or their publishers.

I have to pause here to mention that I do believe in copyright. I believe in the validity and purpose of intellectual property. Artists and creators deserve to get paid and should be able to pursue violations of their copyrights when it is appropriate, and when that pursuit is not unduly elevated over other valued rights, and especially when the rights-violation is egregious. That said, there have to be limits on what any rights-holder should be allowed to do in pursuit of the protection of their stake. This blog should never be construed to be some libertarian screed against intellectual property rights, or an apologia for ruthless entrepreneurs who happily dismiss well-designed business models (and the people they feed) in the self-serving name of “innovation” and something chimerical, though interesting, called the “sharing economy.”

The major rights-holders are now very motivated to prevent me and you from making copies of music and books and movies and so on. This has very little to do with the interests of working artists, but more to do with the technical ease with which we can now copy things, and also with the myriad ways that such copying can be observed and tracked like never before. The industry is also inventing new ways to control resale and personal sharing, and this is very novel. For example, books that you buy for a Kindle can’t be handed off to someone else. You can just barely “loan” a Kindle book to someone, but the terms suck. The enormous companies that control the majority of copyrights and eBook publishing are finding new ways to follow you into the formerly private spaces of your library and music collection–your home–to monitor and modify how you experience the creative works you may or may not have directly paid for.

I don’t blame them for wanting to do this: they are corporations, which are predatory organisms whose evolutionary mandate is to consume every ounce of profit that can possibly be consumed. But I can object to how they go about it. A feature of sharing, reselling and copying of books and music that we previously took for granted was that it was largely undetectable–it took place in the sanctum of your homes, your living rooms. Places, it seems, that are no longer truly private. Many “infringing” acts still are undetectable, as they should be. Just like historically unregulated acts like reselling a painting without paying a fee to the painter (or his publisher) or donating a book to your library book sale. With the advent of new ways to consume media, like the Kindle and iTunes, and due to the logging and tracking technologies embedded in internet and mobile device use, it has become very easy to detect and control all sorts of previously unrestrained activities over creative works, and rightsholders are very interested in doing just that.

Consider this: During a major lawsuit against YouTube’s parent company, Google, by Viacom, who sought to collect damages from YouTube claiming they were illegally profiting from hosting copyrighted content, Viacom won the right to view YouTube’s website logs revealing information about every user, every viewer, and every video on the site. Although they eventually conceded to anonymizing the user data, we know that anonymization doesn’t really work, and that evidence of my guilty-pleasure binge of watching old Journey videos (at work no less, identifiable by my IP address for sure) some years ago was handed over to someone without my assent. This may seem like a small thing, except that this really is the thin end of the wedge. Privacy protections for what we do with our surfing habits are already tremendously weak. Rights-holding corporations are going to exploit that, and their lobbying power is very strong. There is something very fucked up about my casual video viewing habits being scooped up and entered into evidence as part of a lawsuit that had nothing to do with me. And it really could have gone much farther:  Viacom specifically sought to view all of the videos on YouTube marked “private” by their owners. While that request wasn’t granted, I think it could have easily gone the other way. Do we own those “private” videos on YouTube? Should we have an expectation of privacy over our emotional outpourings, love-letters, and who-knows-what that falls into the category of a private YouTube video? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, the Viacoms of the world do not care. If they can demonstrate that our privacy rights are not as important as their copyrights, our already tattered privacy protections in the electronic worlds will be further eroded. Free speech, and even historical expectations of “ownership” are unimportant. What matters is that additional profits can be made or protected and all else is frivolous.

In the same way, and using the same logic that Amazon uses to control how we use eBooks, or that Apple controls how we use mp3s, or how media files are increasingly encoded with special signatures that govern whether or not or where they can be used, we should expect that, wherever possible, the industry is also watching our use, or could be forced to reveal that use to other interested parties from time to time, and that increasingly, what we do in our homes, with our art collections will no longer be our own damn business.

(Editor’s note: A version of this article originally appeared in Mike’s blog.)