Author: Shoshone Johnson
Three weeks ago, a single mother from Minnesota named Jamie Thomas lost a lawsuit to the Recording Industry Association of America. There were records showing that in 2005, she had downloaded 24 songs from the file-sharing program Kazaa. The RIAA did not need to produce proof that the songs were on her hard drive at the time they inspected it, nor did they need to prove that she downloaded the songs herself. The jury decided on a penalty of $9,250 per song. In total, she owes $222,000. Her yearly income is about $35,000.
As you may already know, 19 students have been slapped with RIAA settlement letters at Oxy. Some of these amount to over a semester’s tuition.
Are you intimidated yet? If it weren’t for the title of this article, you might think it was a warning sign to “filesharers” (whom, I guarantee, constitute the majority of readers of the Weekly). You might think it was an addendum to Ethan Bearman’s terrifying email last week, which told us to “take this seriously!” With all due respect, Mr. Bearman, if you were our age, you would be downloading all the files you could get your paws on, as long as you could find safe ways to do it.
But it’s not Ethan Bearman’s fault. In an interesting way, it’s not even the fault of the RIAA or the MPAA (the RIAA’s movie industry counterpart). It’s just a symptom of the way in which power has become concentrated and isolated recently, and the way in which that concentration suffocates innovation and creativity.
People have a tendency to ignore the current firestorm over file sharing. I have to admit that I used to be one of these people. I used to think that stealing could be justified only if the things stolen were bare necessities (food, water, clothing). But the controversy that emerged over Napster and its protégés seemed, to me, to be too petty to be political—at first glance, there’s nothing “necessary” about music, movies and software. It’s “just art.”
This hierarchy (necessities art first and creativity later) may apply to the very poorest people, although I’m not so sure about that when I think about how almost every type of music, and many other art forms, have their roots in impoverished communities. But we can say only “art isn’t necessary to life” because we’ve never lived without art. When it comes right down to it, the prosecution of filesharers is nothing less than the suppression of creativity and thought. Banning the consumption of art is no “better” than banning the production of art.
“YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR,” one MPAA ad blares. The ad argues that downloading is the same as stealing someone else’s property. But this is a gross distortion. If someone could duplicate my car, I would have no problem with them “stealing” it.
It denies artists money, another tired argument says. This makes sense only if you ignore the fact that musicians receive less than 5 percent of revenues for each CD or song they produce and that copyrights are very rarely controlled by artists themselves. Artists, legal scholars such as Lawrence Lessig have argued, might even make more money without copyright laws. In any case, does any great artist do art for the money?
If you share files, you should continue. It helps the world. If you don’t know how to share files, you should check out zeropaid.com. It has excellent guides on how to get started with BitTorrent, the most effective method of downloading, aside from campus hubs. Both of these methods contain options to safely share files. Additionally, download PeerGuardian, an open source program which helps to block the RIAA from accessing your computer.
Zeropaid.com also has some helpful tips on how to avoid getting caught if you use a p2p program: “Make sure there are no potentially infringing files in your shared folder. This would ordinarily mean that your shared folder contains only files 1) that are in the public domain, 2) for which you have permission to share or 3) that are made available under pro-sharing licenses, such as the Creative Commons license or other open media licenses, and remove all files names that may potentially be confused with the name of an RIAA artist or song (e.g., “Usher” or “Madonna”) from your shared folder.”
If you’re one of those unlucky few who has already been sued, you should check out www.eff.org and www.subpoenadefense.org. They both contain information on how to fight the case without becoming a Jamie Thomas.
Shoshone Johnson is a junior CTSJ major. He can be reached at shoshone@oxy.edu.
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