Not Intelligent Property
Posted on
Monday, October 16, 2006
by Gary A. Ballard
Something occurs to me about the arguments emanating from the corporate copyright police house about their need for restrictive DRM to protect their "intellectual property." We're told over and over again by the RIAA and the movie industry and the video game executives that downloading music or movies or games through P2P is "stealing intellectual property."
But what is intellectual property? It's not the CD, it's what's on the CD. It's not the physical DVD media, it's the movie or the game. It's not the DVD stamped with the X-Box or PS2 logo, it's the game stored on the physical media. After all, you couldn't just sell a DVD with the name Halo on it, while in actuality it contained a slideshow of Bill Gates thimble collection. A DVD labeled Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith couldn't contain images of George Lucas's colonoscopy, though I'm sure Star Wars fans would gobble it up like candy if it was rumored that there was a tattoo on the inside of the walls of his rectum that showed Han Solo shooting first. So if the contents are the property, the media they are stored on does not matter.
And yet, my ownership of EA's FIFA 07 for the X-Box does not mean I am entitled to a version of the game that also works on a PC. My ownership of the cassette tape version of Slayer's South of Heaven does not entitle me to a version of the same music on CD media. As I understand the byzantine labyrinth of copyright law, I'm not allowed to transfer my copy of South of Heaven to a working CD version, or even a working digital version. I'm only allowed to make an exact copy for backup purposes, on the same media in which I first owned it, again as if the media were the property and not the contents of that media. When my CD collection gets washed away in a hurricane, the money I paid for it goes washing away with it. Even if insured, I still must put out new money to replace a product that has no physical form and could be easily transferred to many other forms of media.
But that's where the hitch is. The self-proclaimed protectors of copyright don't care to protect the intellectual property. What they care about is extracting maximum profit from minimum expenditure. They want to redefine ownership of their products to be a kind of unspoken lease, whereby your rights to enjoy the intellectual property are contingent upon the original media it was purchased on. And that's not intellectual property, that's a rental.
I might as well rent underwear. I'll feel less violated by the crust of someone else's inner armor than the two-faced bargain the copyright cops want to chain me to.
But what is intellectual property? It's not the CD, it's what's on the CD. It's not the physical DVD media, it's the movie or the game. It's not the DVD stamped with the X-Box or PS2 logo, it's the game stored on the physical media. After all, you couldn't just sell a DVD with the name Halo on it, while in actuality it contained a slideshow of Bill Gates thimble collection. A DVD labeled Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith couldn't contain images of George Lucas's colonoscopy, though I'm sure Star Wars fans would gobble it up like candy if it was rumored that there was a tattoo on the inside of the walls of his rectum that showed Han Solo shooting first. So if the contents are the property, the media they are stored on does not matter.
And yet, my ownership of EA's FIFA 07 for the X-Box does not mean I am entitled to a version of the game that also works on a PC. My ownership of the cassette tape version of Slayer's South of Heaven does not entitle me to a version of the same music on CD media. As I understand the byzantine labyrinth of copyright law, I'm not allowed to transfer my copy of South of Heaven to a working CD version, or even a working digital version. I'm only allowed to make an exact copy for backup purposes, on the same media in which I first owned it, again as if the media were the property and not the contents of that media. When my CD collection gets washed away in a hurricane, the money I paid for it goes washing away with it. Even if insured, I still must put out new money to replace a product that has no physical form and could be easily transferred to many other forms of media.
But that's where the hitch is. The self-proclaimed protectors of copyright don't care to protect the intellectual property. What they care about is extracting maximum profit from minimum expenditure. They want to redefine ownership of their products to be a kind of unspoken lease, whereby your rights to enjoy the intellectual property are contingent upon the original media it was purchased on. And that's not intellectual property, that's a rental.
I might as well rent underwear. I'll feel less violated by the crust of someone else's inner armor than the two-faced bargain the copyright cops want to chain me to.
posted by Gary A. Ballard @ 4:52 PM
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