Last week Peter Chernin, president of News Corp., told attendees of the Progress & Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit that the Internet has become a “moral-free zone” full of pornography, spam, and piracy. Threatening that unless new laws are enacted and technologies developed to stop Internet piracy, News Corp. may never make its movie library available in digital format. “The vast potential of broadband has so far benefited nobody as clearly as it’s benefited downloaders of pornography and pirates of digital content,” said Chernin in his address. “The truth is that anyone unwilling to condemn outright theft by digital means is either amoral or wholly self-serving.”
Whining about the moral turpitude of the Internet from someone like Chernin just has to raise the eyebrows of any thinking customer of electronic media. After all, News Corp’s Fox Television business unit is responsible for such cultural gems as Celebrity Boxing. As Dan Gillmor wrote in a recent column, “News Corp. has done more to bring down the level of journalism and entertainment than perhaps any other organization on the planet.”
Kevin Werbach nails the analysis when he writes that this typifies the conflict between the entertainment and technology industries. The entertainment industry sees content as something so important that it must be protected at all costs; even if that protection alienates customers, with the Internet as just another distribution channel. The technology industry on the other hand, sees the entertainment industry’s precious content as mere bits — no more or less important than any other bits — with connectivity being the primary mission. “For the Peter Chernins of the world, content is a calling, while distribution is just a business,” writes Werbach. “[For] the tech community… networking is a calling, while commercial activity riding on the network is just business.”
Chernin told CNET that News Corp. supports all three of the most controversial pieces of intellectual property legislation floated this year:
- Senator Ernest F. Hollings’ (D-South Carolina) Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA);
- Representative Howard Berman’s (D-California) Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act;
- Senator Joseph Biden’s (D-Delaware) soon-to-be-introduced bill that would make it a felony to make electronic devices play unauthorized music or run unapproved computer programs.
Call it the screw the customer trifecta.
What seems to have been lost on these Democrats is that the intent of intellectual property law in the United States is a delicate and precarious balance of rights between the creators of works on the one hand, and the public good of access to those works on the other.
Things aren’t going so well on the other side of the pond either. Stand has an excellent analysis of the European Copyright Directive (EUCD) that promises to be the European Union’s version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).