The Generational Divide on Copyright and Its Multi-Headed Argument

A fascinating article on copyright surfaced on Pogue's Post at New York Times.  In querying a university crowd of 500 on some of the copyright infringement rules, David Pogue caused a flurry of reactions on many sides of the fence - youth (burn and rip away),  musicians (respect my rights), older traditional (we've lost our moral compass), older radical (the music industry has been abusive for years) and the intellectual (fair use doctrine and copyright lifetimes are a farce).

First the survey questions Pogue asked the crowd:
Raise your hand if you think what I’m describing is wrong:

#1 - “I borrow a CD from the library. Who thinks that’s wrong?”

#2 - “I own a certain CD, but it got scratched. So I borrow the same CD from the library and rip it to my computer.”

#3 - “I have 2,000 vinyl records. So I borrow some of the same albums on CD from the library and rip those.”

# 4 - “I buy a DVD. But I’m worried about its longevity; I have a three-year-old. So I make a safety copy.”

#5 - “I record a movie off of HBO using my DVD burner. Who thinks that’s wrong?”

#6 - “I *meant* to record an HBO movie, but my recorder malfunctioned. But my buddy recorded it. Can I copy his DVD?”

#7 - “I meant to record an HBO movie, but my recorder malfunctioned and I don’t have a buddy who recorded it. So I rent the movie from Blockbuster and copy that.”

#8 - "You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.”

and some additional questions that shine a wholly different perspective:

#9 -“You are a part time professional musician, who depends on revenue from your CDs and residuals from radio stations to pay your school expenses. Is it wrong for people to download your music and not pay for it?”

#10 - “You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you walk into a store, put it in your backpack, and walk out.”

In most of the responses to the first 8 questions above, very few students believed the action was wrong. Pogue leaves the reader with an interesting perspective. "Right now, the customers who can’t even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. Has something fundamentally changed here? or is the same behaviour at play w/ different technology that legions of students in the generation before them practiced with the "mix tape"?

And so how does this all square with recent debates on:

"A tax on the purchase of raw cds, flash and external hard drives, printers, scanners, mp3 players (including cell phones) and cds/dvd burners with the purpose of compensating artists for the revenue loss"

"RIAA Lawsuits posed against 6 years olds to grannies for infractions against copyright laws"

"Who owns the photograph? The snapper or the people portrayed in the picture"

"Is selling music for a "pay what you want" a la Radiohead a savvy intellectual business model of the future or a path to destruction?"

"Is Web 2.0 tantamount to the end of intellectual property?"

"The debate in Canada about the Fair Copyright Act  (on the heels of the U.S. Digital Millenium Act), pitting Entertainment against Joe Consumer and asking government to render a decision"

"The protection and access to Canadian heritage, with increasingly those rights bening owned, managed and handled by U.S.-based and international companies"

If you want my opinion, would these issues be so exacerbated if the music, TV and movie companies could provide what consumers really want? Examples - We don't want to buy a full album when we only like 2 songs. We don't want to watch 3 promos for other movies before the one we want to watch. If we buy your album, we want the first right to buy your concert tickets and not lose out to scalpers or corporate interests. We'd like to watch Conan O'Brien at 11:00pm not 12:30pm. We'd like to see a long tail of entertainment but only see and hear the same 150 artists, programs and movies  on mainstream radio, TV and theatres.

In an attempt to control, entertainment has become and perhaps has always been one of least friendly places to exist as a customer, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by an empowered consumer reacting against the industry.   

Regardless, the genie is out of the bottle and the economics of the entertainment business are a hornet's nest - only to be made more difficult by switching corporate power structures, a generationally divided approach to copyrights, consumerism, student debt, international expansion, technology, hacking, label-artist confrontation, user-generated content and  new forms of entertainment.

Who can crystal ball this change out 5 years, 10 years and a generation from now? Step up to the plate...