From a discussion on the O’Reilly article, copyright and policy, on the EFF-Austin mailing list, Doug Barnes wrote:
Although the O’Reilly article is certainly thought-provoking and raised a number of good points, I think it’s a mistake to try to reclaim the term “piracy” from its conventional meaning of “bad, illegal copying” to include “justified, but nonetheless illegal copying.”
Except for those holding to the farthest extremes of “information wants to be free”, we still need a word that means “bad, illegal copying.”
The catch is that the relevant industries are in the process of creating new forms of “illegal copying” that are seriously at odds with both
traditional and intuitive notions of “bad copying.” I seriously doubt that Steve thinks he’s committing theft when he sells a used book, gets up from in front of the TV during the commercial, or installs pop-up blocking software on his computer.
If we allow copyright holders to continue to vitiate fair use and the first sale doctrine through legislation like the DMCA, this is where we’re headed. Intuitively, we don’t feel like we’re “stealing” when we sell a used book, loan a book to a friend, and so on. We cheerfully get up from the TV during commercials. And — for now — we can still do these things.
That’s hardly a given for the future, however, as both the technology and the willingness of our government to impose draconian solutions are expanding the ability of copyright holders to micro-police what would previously have been allowed under traditional legal approaches.
To my mind, the proper role of copyright enforcement is to add enough friction to the process of obtaining content for free so that content creators can be rewarded. Where that’s not possible, mandatory licensing schemes are vastly preferable to having little policemen in every electronic device you purchase. See [this proposal from UT Law School] (and various other proposals out there.) I don’t think that content creators should be able to micro-manage their content to a level of control such as “may not be read aloud.”
I agree with Adina and O’Reilly that what this is ultimately about is control by publishing conglomerates, not about providing proper
incentives to content creators.
Reprinted with permission.