Most Americans know stealing is wrong. But like President Clinton a decade ago, sometimes the definition of the act is what trips us up.
As children, we learned stealing meant taking something from someone else without his or her consent. To deprive people of what was rightfully theirs for our own benefit is generally agreed upon as wrong.
But what if taking something does not reduce the supply? What if the property we are taking is easily instantly copied? What if there is no one to catch us?
Intellectual property difficulties have plagued content creators, conduits and consumers alike, particularly over the last decade with the exponential expansion of the Internet.
The basic concept is clear - intellectual property is still property. No one has the right to take it without permission.
Regardless of what people are able to convince themselves, music, movies, books, pictures and other media content are not entitlements.
I have visited other places in the world where the majority of people and even businesses treat all kinds of copyrighted media as if it belonged to the public at large.
The mentality went something like this: I like this music, movie, or software, but I don't want to pay anything - er, I mean, as much as the sellers are asking - so I'll just take it. It's the providers' fault for making it so expensive.
Daily, people openly offered to let me copy "their" material and demanded I do the same for them.
No one was legally persecuted for "sharing." Being the good little citizen I was, I rejected them, bought legitimate copies from stores, and glared at the "thieves" for effectively making me pay for their copies.
Why do I think of it this way? Simple. Producers would not provide content without people to purchase it, in one form or another. The honest people who buy it are creating the market for all the people who choose to obtain it without contributing to that market incentive (the cost).
And of course, they are simply stealing the work of others - which not only takes the rights away from those who produced it, but the act also damages the economy and the country's reputation.
There is a reason the United States is the copyright center of the world and the place creative minds come to make, protect and distribute their work.
Copyright is taken seriously here. It means something. It is acknowledged and enforced.
As a militaristic, rule-obsessed nutter, I have no problem with the persecution of people who willfully break copyright laws.
I do have a problem, however, with laws that do not work and the foolish practices adopted by many media companies. Companies who cannot figure out how to handle pricing and tap into the vast demand for their product and the many ways to deliver it get little sympathy from me.
And as with everything surrounding technology, if the law does not keep up with the times, it creates problems for everyone. Costly problems.
How many lawsuits will it take before Congress figures out a decent policy?
What is fair use? Where does copyright infringement begin? No one knows, really.
People are allowed to give samples of copyrighted work, but the conditions are not clearly defined by law. Thirty seconds of a song or 200 words of text are OK sometimes, but not others. What about recording something off of television or the radio (time-shifting)? What about TiVo? Or Google's book search? Is YouTube responsible for user-generated content?
The "it depends" that my law professor continually uses to explain such legal questions is not enough to protect consumers or media conduits from unreasonable persecution. "It depends" is not enough to guarantee the rights of content producers.
"It depends" is the product of a court system constantly trying to derive narrow enough standards from a vague set of copyright laws that no longer fit the world they are supposed to define and protect. Congress should be the one creating these laws, not the courts.
If everyone is trying to define "stealing" to suit themselves, no one wins.
Reach the reporter: francesca.vanderfeltz@asu.edu.
