An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the Senate Judiciary Committee

I used the first link there to send an email. My Senator (or at least someone in his office) actually sent a non-form reply, so I replied with my own followup (the rest of this comment):

Thank you for the quick reply. I wanted to comment on one issue.

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Sherrod Brown <do_not_reply@brown.senate.gov> wrote:

> Dear Mr. Mintern:

> Illegal file sharing and unauthorized copying of digital material prevents musicians, producers, filmmakers, software designers, and many others from reaping the fruits of their labor. Such activity has the potential to stifle artistic creativity and compromise electronic innovation. Ultimately, intellectual property theft costs our economy billions of dollars and can result in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs.

I acknowledge that this is a problem (more later), but law enforcement is not even doing all it can now to stop illegal file sharing. This overbroad legislature provides new tools, but at the expense of everyone's privacy. It does not make sense to encumber the US Internet for _everyone_ because of the actions of a relatively small percentage of infringers. Moreover, infringers will find a way around these measures; they always do. This is an unwinnable arms race where the main losers are those of us who are going about our daily lives without infringing at all.

Furthermore, I have not seen unbiased research showing that online piracy _actually_ hurts content producers. There are many valid arguments that infringement is often somewhat legitimate:

  1. To try a product out before buying it
  2. Because of poor DRM (digital rights management), some
     legitimate buyers have trouble using the product and
     are forced to use the pirated version anyways
     (something as minor as having the wrong display
     connector can prevent someone from watching a DVD)
  3. To replace a lost or stolen product
  4. To extract a portion to be used under Fair Use (e.g.,
     providing commentary)

Many argue further that those who actually are pirating would not have bought the product anyway (presumably they don't have the means at the time of pirating), and that by pirating they actually increase future sales through referring friends and buying similar content in the future. In other words, even if this legislature is effective at limiting piracy, it's not clear how big the benefit is.

One further point: even if we assume that eliminating piracy hurts the entertainment industry, we should look at who it's actually hurting. Content _producers_ (those who are actually making the content, as opposed to the record companies who treat content producers as sharecroppers) may not actually be hurt much at all. Musicians, for example, are more likely to have larger concert attendance the more people that have heard their music, whereas they only receive a few cents on the dollar for album sales.

In the end, my conclusion is that if there are any benefits buried in this legislature, they are mainly in propping up the current (arguably unfair) model in which music is produced. It is time for record companies to evolve with the times and find new business models, and to start treating their artists better. Pirates do far less harm to the average band than modern record companies do with their unfair deals. For more information, see Courtney Love's Letter to Recording Artists: http://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy2.html

Now let's focus on issues that actually benefit the American people instead of wasting our time kowtowing to the record company lobbyists who are grasping at anything they can to prop up their old-fashioned unfair business models. The American people deserve better than that.

Thank you, Brandon Mintern

This is lobbying.