The phrase "intellectual property" can be many things to many people. For some people, the concept is offensive. After all, how can a person own an idea? Doesn't an idea become the property of the whole human race once it's been transmitted from person to person enough? Or is it a case where if I invent a new idea/pattern/method then I should have an ownership of that idea, at least for some amount of time?

The latter is the view of the business world. After all, what motivation could a drug company have for spending valuable R&D dollars on developing a new drug when another company can then make a generic version of the same molecule and market it for a fraction of the price that the inventing company must cahrge to recoup it's investment? More to the point, what about the latest summer blockbuster that 20th Century Fox spent $50 million producing? How will they make their money back if you download the DIVX version and watch it on your computer? What if you download that song that you've heard that's been stuck in your head, instead of buying the CD for $18.99 at your local chain retailer?

If you listen to the establishment view, the world will crumble.

As a result of this, a number of organizations have recently been pushing the concept of Digital Rights Management. These organizations include the RIAA, the MPAA, and all of the largest media conglomorates in the world. Digital Rights Management is a scheme whereby everybody involved in the production of media and equipment to play the media will conform to a system whereby unauthorized access or duplication will be impossible. And who sets the rules for these rights? The content owners, theoretically. But imagine this scenario:

I am in a band. I want to make a cd (or whatever format might come next) to sell at my band's shows. So I have all the music, I have everything ready, but if I burn a cd on my computer, I wouldn't be able to play it on any other machine but mine. If I wanted to reproduce it to sell, I'd have to pay a licensing fee to the DRM provider to ensure that anybody else could play it. But what if that fee is in the thousands? Or even the hundreds. It means that the barrier to entry is far higher for independent artists. It means that even more than now, we would be able to consume only what the major media conglomorates were selling. We'd be locked in to a content oligarchy. It means that we'd live in a world where girl scouts can't sing campfire songs. It means that our culture is not our culture any more, but rather a product of Disney or AOL/Time Warner. It means that I couldn't buy a general purpose computer any more, but specialized devices to fulfill the same roles. This is the world that awaits us in the near future.

Because of the profiteering nature of the Digital Rights Management movement, and the lack of respect and understanding shown towards the time-binding, mythological nature of human culture, the Digital Rights Management movement this this week's conspiracy. As one group of artists put it, "Copyright infringement is your best entertainment value."
posted by Ian Monroe on 12:58 PM