Pricing copyrighted materials fairly (First of two parts)

A federal jury in Minneapolis ruled last Thursday against Jammie Thomas-Rasset for sharing illegally 24 songs over Kazaa, a popular Internet peer-to-peer (P2P) network, and was ordered to indemnify the recording companies of $80,000 per song or nearly $2 million!

Jammie is not the first to be caught and convicted for sharing copyrighted material since the P2P frenzy. Napster (another file sharing service like Kazaa) also paid a huge amount to recording companies for facilitating uninhibited exchanges of copyrighted music among its members and a number of others including a high school cheerleader who was also caught downloading via P2P Mariah Carey, The Police and Eminem's recordings while doing her homework on her computer.

Since the proliferation of P2Ps, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has had filed 30,000 similar lawsuits against individuals and file sharing networks for copyright infringement which they hope would serve as a lesson and deterrence to violators. But unlike the RIAA, the Philippine Association of the Record Industry (PARI) is not as litigant. For obvious reasons, PARI doesn't have the resources to launch a campaign of such scale inasmuch as they will never get any indemnification anyway if they ever caught some newbies sharing videos or music to another fellow from miles away.

But even if they had the resources to litigate offenders, our law enforcement is also ill-equipped to pursue cybercrimes let alone understand how felons do them over the Internet, techwise.             

So in countries where law enforcement is not technically mature to deal with cybercrimes coupled with an industry unwilling to spend for legal representations, they all the more render the global campaign against piracy a wasteful and toilsome pursuit. Thus, illegal file sharing will be here to stay for long -- and we can only wish not for good.    

But it is not the only reason why illegal file exchanges happen everyday in the Internet. Users like teenagers (who by the way, comprise the heavy bulk of file sharers) are now more sophisticated to hide their identities online. Users who are also dead mad with the RIAA keep their contents away from their noses by hosting them in servers to countries with little or no intellectual property restrictions.                

In spite of these long and arduous chase against these online delinquents but for so long as content remains accessible to a few can-affords, there is no wisdom running after illegal "cybersharers". They did not choose to be born that way but were made to be like that and will remain perpetually so if and when their originators insist a heavy tag price on their contents.

Inasmuch as we don't want to condone copyright infringement, we shouldn't condone overpricing of copyrighted material equally either.

The availability of freeware such as those in the Open Source community is an example that applications and even digital products (like videos, photos, music and etc) can be made available to the public even without paying for them. Users are even encouraged to share them to others. So why are we paying a hefty sum for copyrighted material when it is now possible to give them away for free?     

(to be continued...)

Send emails to [email protected]