Canadian Gov Withdraws DMCA Bill—Can They Withdraw Ours?

[sapi]

There's plenty of anti-DMCA support here, and I admit I lean that way too, personally. Let's trot out the Devil's Advocate to consider more angles:

Last summer, here in the backroom, we tried out the idea of a bookclub. A book was voted on and selected that participants would obtain and read, then discuss.

Some readers bought it new, some bought used copies, others found one in their public libraries (in effect, having 'bought' it with their taxes).

No one thought to scan the 300 page book to share it with the dozen or so others for free. Everybody paid, one way or another, for their own copy, although getting it was for a group project.

Why? How is that experience different from downloading a song or movie or game from the 'net?

Well, in reality almost all piracy is a matter of convenience.

People will download mp3s because they want to put music on their iPods; people will download movies because they want to watch the content on their dvd player; and so on.

The key thing here is that all these things are digital. There's no need for conversion, or for someone to move outside their comfort zone in order to make use of the fruits of piracy; instead it's all there right in front of them, ready to use.

By way of contrast, we're all used to reading books on paper. To 'pirate' a book would require it to be scanned (that is, transferred into a digital form), downloaded, and then read on an alien and uncomfortable medium (a computer monitor).

Compare this to a piece of music, which requires next to no effort to procure, and is convenient to use, and you can pretty clearly see that there's a huge difference in the amount of effort required to make use of the material, and that that's an important factor in the different rates of piracy for each form of content...

Besides, a book is tangible. It is intrinsically a lot harder to justify the amount of money that the various industry groups want to charge the consumer for what is essentially a collection of bytes - sorry, the right to use them - than it is for a bound collection of paper that you can hold, touch, and ultimately attribute a value to.