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cory doctorow
cough), they’ll take the occasional
pro forma
step to enforce U.S.
copyrights, no matter how ridiculous and totalitarian it makes
them appear. But with the monthly Russian per-capita GDP hov-
ering at $200, it’s just not plausible that Russians are going to
start paying $15 for a CD, nor is it likely that they’ll stop listening
to music until their economy picks up.
But the real action is in China, where pressing bootleg media is
a national sport. China keeps promising that it will do something
about this, but it’s not like the U.S. has any recourse if China drags
its heels. Trade courts may find against China, but China holds all
the cards. The U.S. can’t afford to abandon Chinese manufactur-
ing (and no one will vote for the politician who hextuples the cost
of Wi-Fi cards, brassieres, iPods, staplers, yoga mats, and spatulas
by cutting off trade with China). The Chinese can just sit tight.
The futurists were just plain wrong. An “information economy”
can’t be based on selling information. Information technology
makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you
have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the
world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy informa-
tion from here on in. The information economy is about selling
everything
except
information.
The U.S. traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its enter-
tainment industry, hoping that
Police Academy
sequels could take
the place of the rustbelt. The U.S. bet wrong.
But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the
U.S. doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its enter-
tainment giants, asking how U.S. foreign and domestic policy
can preserve its business model. Criminalize 70 million Ameri-
can file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside
down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted
infringement? Check.
It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an en-
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