Information Just Wants to be Free

David Pogue raises a question about Copyright "morality" in his recent piece in the Times. This is a big issue, and one that Lawrence Lessig brought up early-on. As a lawyer, Lessig talks about what it does to the legal system and the moral climate of a society based on laws, when the system starts making things illegal that most of its citizenry don't find *wrong*.

In grad school, one of my professors was into moral reasoning. That body of research suggests that even young children differentiate between actions that are morally wrong and actions violate "social convention." This seems to me to be what is operating in the area of copyright and file-sharing. For a digital immigrant, the DV or MP3 is the *same* as the LP or videotape versions. For those in the digital native group, the nature of pixels and electronic information is obvious. These files are not *things* -- they are not physical embodiments. I think business models are going to have to change because otherwise, you have an emperor's new clothes situation, where some "enforcers" go around saying that bits and bytes are the same as physical instances. The child among the crowd will see this for its patent falsehood. Justify the payments as you like, but don't try and make a bunch of electrons into a lacquer platter.

I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies' problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can't even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?

Source: nytimes.com

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Tags: copyright | generational | morality | online | program | protection | PyMusique | Technology