For use: February 2, 2000

Future Shoes: "A Pirate's Life for Me?"

by Michael Finley

Computer User Columnist

Last week's column about burning CDs as presents for friends generated some good mail. My Australian pal Rob took me to task for violating copyright laws.

ROB: Mike, you are a brave man. Anyone who owned the copyright for those songs you admit to copying has a prima facie case of copyright infringement.  If I were you I'd be a little less specific in my public admissions. You know, you're a radical at heart!

I responded with a limited modified endorsement of The Napster Way, using the example of guitarist Larry Coryell, whose best recorded work, back in the 70s, has been unavailable due to contractual tie-ups.

ME: I'll bet Larry Coryell is more focused on why his publishers have squelched his best work for 25 years than that fact that a couple dozen fans have tried to keep his modest legend alive.

ROB: So it's OK for me to publish your material on my website to "keep your legend alive"? (Don't worry, I won't charge for it!)

To which I made the following extended reply:

ME: Rob, I think you should go for it. You may think I'm a big beneficiary of copyright protection, but in fact I'm not. My work is often published without me being paid -- I'm told I am a hit in Brazil and Korea. I can’t police what people out there do with my stuff. It's like a snake in a can -- open the lid and that sucker is gone.

So what can a poor boy do? I take it on the chin, in the spirit of Coryell!

I try to be philosophical. I believe there will soon be very little intellectual protection for anything -- books, music, pharmaceuticals, anything reproducible. I know this is an outlaw stance, but the law that was once reasonable just isn't reasonable anymore.

It is illegal to show a rented video in a bar, for instance, or a live major league baseball telecast. If I am writing a book review I can quote a 10-line excerpt from a book, but not an 11-line excerpt. The old protections were founded on enforceability. But with everything sloshing freely around, enforceability is nil.

It isn’t fair, but what is? I can be bombarded with torrents of spam, con-men whoknow everything imaginable about me can disguise themselves a million ways to sundown, predators can engulf me in a kazillion illicit schemes without fear of detection or reprisal, but I am enjoined against using an encryption method not sanctioned by my own government, or copying a song from a Hansens album.

Am I a pirate? Not technically. The law is explicitly against unlicensed commercial copying, which I don't do. My robust collection of MP3s is mainly outtakes, live bootlegs, and works that have passed out of print. I have sometimes taped commercial albums that I bought and then made copies of them for friends as presents. I've been doing this for 30 years. It's why Target sells 100-minute audiotape by the 10-pack. I don't believe that is illegal or wrong.

I want to say, as further rationalization, that I am probably in the 99th percentile for people who buy intellectual property -- books, newspapers, magazines, records, software. And I take a tax deduction for much of it. I figure, when you're a poet, your whole life is deductible.

My metaphor is radio. We are all free to enjoy material off the radio, and even to record it. It is, by definition, a free exchange medium. In the early years music companies opposed radio, much as the motion picture industry feared TV, fearing it would dry up sales. Instead the opposite happened -- the music industry and motion picture industries took off with the arrival of new "competition."

The last three years have been so-so by music industry profits standards, but I think that is because commercial music is at low ebb right now. Get a new Jolson out there, friends, something even bigger than Eminem, and money will once again rain from the skies!

What the Recording Industry Association of America hates is the loss of control. But loss of control is the hallmark of the digital age. We're all struggling with it -- loss of privacy, loss of certainty, the notion that everything we think is nailed down could go flying into space at any moment. It's the price of newness, and it often seems very stiff.

Why should the RIAA alone, of all the organizations and individuals on earth, be exempt from this shock -- a shock that in so many ways benefits it!

A radical at heart? I suppose I am. But after all these years of ranting and whining -- is that such a surprise?