TMTOWTDI

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

No person can harbor any doubt that piracy is rampant on the Internet. Powerful tools such as BitTorrent allow the rapid sharing of files with ease. Sites such as the Pirate Bay allow BitTorrent users to find the files they seek. Limewire is still in widespread use. Media organizations looking to protect their rights are working as hard as ever. Ars technica, a technology news website, has an excellent article on the statistics provided by organizations such as the RIAA and MPAA on piracy. The article takes an in-depth look at the reported losses due to piracy and finds that the numbers are grossly inflated.

In my opinion, the media industry is being absolutely ridiculous in its attacks on piracy. While I agree that copyright holders have some right to enforce their ownership of works, the industry needs to embrace the Internet. The history of media has shown that while new mediums can have adverse affects on the incumbent media, like that of television on radio, the incumbent media can easily adjust their business models in response and then profit further, like radio’s embrace of the music industry after TV became the dominant entertainment medium. Media consumers are the media companies’ customers. Attacking these customers with accusations only further alienates them, no matter how true these accusations are. A better tactic would be to invest the necessary capital to move the anachronistic music industry into the age of YouTube, Garageband, and Facebook and thus attract customers back to the licit portions of the industry.

While some in the media industries have slowly embraced the power of the Internet, the laws have not been updated in such a way as to allow consumers to take advantage of the Internet using their media. For example, while digital music sales have taken off, there is no way for consumers to create content that utilizes that media and post it on the Internet. Copyright law, as it always has, favors the copyright holder. I do not wish to dispute that balance of power. Rather, in the age of the Web, I say that laws need to be updated so that consumers can pay some reasonable fee and utilize a song in a way that does not fall under fair use in a YouTube video or on their Facebook. Fair use evaluation today is too arbitrary, and the process too protracted, to allow for the embrace of the Internet. I exhort the media industries to wake up from their slumber and realize that they are in an age that could either be golden in the quality of its media production or gloomy in the lack of the ability of consumers to create new works using the user-empowering technologies of our age.