Orson Scott Card needs a wake up call. There is no such thing as a public conscience. In fact, just as I finished reading his proposition to educate people that it’s not okay to copy protected music as a solution to copyright infringement in the digital domain, I opened my email to find a letter from a fictitious “PayPal” trying to scam me out of my identity and credit card information. Don’t mistake my realism for pessimism; we’re simply not all good people.
If what George Scialabba says is true, the panacea to all of our copyright issues in the digital realm may come by taking somewhat the opposite approach. Speaking of the end-to-end “architecture of freedom”, Scialabba points out that the wide open network of the Internet has guaranteed progress but not profits. “Gratitude, the pleasure of discovery, the impulse to self-expression, and devotion to a common enterprise motivate creators quite as much as lucre.” So it was in the miraculous development of the Internet. Can we not expect that it will be so with the arts? The money-hungry recording studios are becoming more and more obsolete anyways as recording software becomes more professional and ubiquitous. Those who truly love what they do -- and love doing it even if they don’t grow rich from copyright laws -- they will keep recording.
Technology has opened doors that allow us to access ideas and information to an infinite degree. Will we close those doors of progress because of pride?
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