"If you didn't pay for it, you've stolen it!"

[Steve Schear]

At 10:43 PM 10/23/2003 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>  "What's the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship" launched last week 
> with a lesson plan that aims to keep kids away from Internet services 
> like Kazaa that let users trade digital songs and film clips: "If you 
> haven't paid for it, you've stolen it."
>
>The program appears to be working, with students in dozens of middle 
>schools announcing that they will not enter their school libraries. Said 
>one student: "These libraries let lots of kids read the same 
>books...that's like Kazaa lets lots of people listen to songs!"
>
>Another one added that they are joining a Christian Coalition program to 
>shut down parties that other students run. "They are, like, letting kidz 
>listen to music and stuff," said one banner-toting teenybopper.
>
>
>TM: the last two paragraphs were of course added by me. But the point is 
>still valid, that much of Hollywood's claims about "illegal listening" are 
>not really any different from "reading without buying" books and magazines 
>in libraries. The more urgent issue is this crap about corporations buying 
>time in public schools. If I had a kid in a school and it was proposed 
>that Nike, Time-Warner, Coke, or Intel would be buying teaching time, I'd 
>tell them to stop it pretty fucking quick or face the Mother of All Columbines.

Your tongue-in-cheek mention about libraries being hot beds of piracy set 
me to thinking about the mechanics of sharing copyrighted content and 
whether there might be a technical solution which addresses the letter of 
the law in abiding copyright but allows consumers almost unfettered access 
to the music they have downloaded.

Not long ago I found that my county library had contracted with a service 
provider to enable patrons to download electronic versions of books, which 
they could read at their leisure during a certain time window (usually from 
a few days to a week).  After this time the 'reader' software would no 
longer allow access to the book even though it was stored on the user's 
local disc. In this way it created a virtual 'lending' environment wherein 
the number of readers of a particular title being read was always less than 
or equal to the number of licenses the service owned for each work.

Why couldn't this be applied on-line to music.  Under current fair use 
provisions readers and listeners who have purchased a work are allowed to 
lend it out freely.  Surely the number of people who want to read or listen 
to a work are much smaller at any particular moment than the number of 
people who have ripped/downloaded a work (perhaps only 1 in 100 at 
most).  If some mechanism could be made part of the P2P systems purchasers 
of the work could 'lend' it to others to read, view or hear when they are 
not using it.  As long as the system gave some assurance to Hollywood that 
the works were not being enjoyed at any one moment by more people than had 
paid for the works then the spirit of a lending library would be maintained.

I'm sure some will jump in and say that because I purchased the music on a 
CD, then I must lend the CD, but it is already (I believe) considered fair 
use for purchasers to rip their CDs and transfer them to a PC, etc.  If the 
purchaser was willing to destroy the CD then they would only have one copy 
on their disc (perhaps its and .mp3 now).  why couldn't they lend this copy?

Someone else must have thought up this idea, but I don't recall seeing 
it.  Please inform me nicely if you have seen it proposed before.

steve