MEP letter on promoting creativity, by Cory Doctorow, doctorow@craphound.com

This letter is in the public domain.

Sent using the action centre provided by the Campaign for Creativity:

http://campaignforcreativity.org/camp4creativity/action.htm

June 3, 2004

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Preserve speech and foster the public interest through balanced copyright

I am writing to ask you to seek an equitable solution to the P2P wars. It's one
thing for our cops and our courts to be used against actual pirate gangs --
criminal counterfeiters using the infrastructure of failed states to commit
consumer fraud in distributing high-quality fakes -- but it's another thing
entirely to lump in noncommercial, home file-sharers in with that lot.

File-sharing is part of the traditional cycle of new technology development:
from the phonorecord to the VCR, from the radio to the satellite service, every
new technology that lowered the barriers to reproducing and distributing
copyrighted works has had to make use of the popular media of the day to conjure
itself into existence -- usually over the howls of protest of rights-holders who
were merely the legitimized pirates of from the last fight. 

When the phonorecord people bitterly fought radio, they conveniently forgot that
they'd built their business through widescale infringement of the sheet-music
publishers. It's no different today: filmmakers (who enthusiastically violated
Edison's film patents), broadcasters (who played records without permission or
payment), cablecasters (who pirated free-to-air signals for their networks) and
even hybrid entertainment/electronics companies (like Sony, whose piratical VCR
was characterized by the motion-picture people as the certain death of the film
industry) are all standing shoulder to shoulder in the fight against programmers
and ordinary citizens who have, once again, discovered a better way to
distribute and reproduce creative works.

It's no surprise that these pirates of the entertainment industry want to pull
the ladder up behind them and dog the hatch. After all, the traditional role of
inventors has been to create massive new revenue opportunities for the
entertainment industry, and the traditional response of the entertainment
companies has been to seek legislative relief from those opportunities.

To the extent that the world's governments have listened to the entertainment
companies, they've created unmitigated disasters. In the USA, mathematicians and
computer scientists have been rounded up and tossed in jail for discussing
numbers at learned conferences. In Norway, a teenager was charged with
trespassing on his OWN computer, for writing software that let him watch the
legitimate DVDs he'd bought on the legitimate PC he'd bought. Thousands of
lawsuits have been threatened and brought, scientific inquiry has been chilled,
and for what?

None of this has put one cent in the pocket of a creator. None of this has
slowed or stopped the infringing P2P networks. 

In a world where 80 percent of the music ever recorded isn't available for sale
anywhere, the P2P networks have revived what is, quite literally, the largest
library of human creativity ever assembled. They did it for free, and the
library has resisted the best attempts of the most powerful entertainment
companies in the world to burn it to the ground. 

Your role as lawmakers should be to help us keep the library standing.

Instead of disasters like the IPR Enforcement Directive (whose Anton Pillar
orders make a mockery of due process) and the EUCD (whose anti-circumvention
provisions chill speech and innovation), give us balanced IP laws that take into
account the public interest in allowing technology to flourish.

If rights-holders are indeed financially challenged here (and that's a big if --
every audit of their claims of economic harm has found nothing but hot air and
funny book-keeping behind those claims, and the film studios just had their best
box-office year in the entire history of their industry) then solve the problem
in the traditional manner: 

Give the public the opportunity to buy a blanket license like those employed by
radio stations, a license that, for the payment of a simple fee, would grant
Europeans the right to go on using the best tool ever devised for disseminating
and reproducing creative works without facing prison and fines for building the
biggest library ever assembled.

That's how to promote creativity. That's how to preserve the public interest.

Thank you.