The ArtLab

Rick Carnes, President of the Songwriters Guild of America, responds to the Financial Times article, "Copyright laws threaten our online freedom", by Christian Engstrom, Pirate Party Member of European Parliament.

If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not "ours" at all.

If 99 cents for a music file restricts your access to culture you probably have larger issues to deal with in your life than listening to old Elvis Presley records.

Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down. This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform.

We had thousands of years without copyright. It's called the 'Dark Ages'. Copyright has undoubtedly encouraged culture. Just look back at the explosion of culture in the twentieth century. The major growth of American music didn't begin until the US began to enforce the copyrights of other nations and restrict the access of 'free' music into the US. That allowed the US songwriters to create what we now call the 'Golden Age' of American music.

File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people. [...] If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice.

To claim that 'Society has to make a choice' between total anonymity or totalitarian control is naive at best. The right choice is neither.  Instead, we need to find a some sweet spot in between. It is simple to conflate the ideas of privacy and theft. I could, for instance, claim that it is my right to wear a ski mask into a bank in order to keep my identity private from the prying eye of the bank security camera. The bank security guards might take exception to that... for good reason. Laws are passed based on history, common sense and hopefully the common good. The internet is a new medium and the world is still trying to come to grips with the balance between privacy and security on the internet. Let's give it a chance by toning down the rhetoric.

The world is at a crossroads. The internet and new information technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will change. But the direction has not been decided. The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail of our lives. [...]  The same technology could instead be used to create a society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture through one-way media, but are instead active participants collaborating on a journey into the future.

The world is not standing 'at a crossroad'. We will not face the apocalypse if people have to pay for music again. Uncontrollable forces of evil will not be unleashed if you have to subscribe to a digital music service and pay a few bucks a month. What could and already is causing some serious cultural damage is the failure to enforce copyright law on the internet. As a songwriter I have lived out that vision of a world where citizens aren't simply passive consumers. I made my own music and when people liked it they bought it and I created a career from it. Then my career was stolen by internet music looters. The real threat isn't from 'Big Brother' it is from your little brother stealing music on the family computer. He is destroying the future of music for all of us, including himself.

The internet it still in its infancy, but already we see fantastic things appearing as if by magic. [...] But where technology opens up new possibilities, our intellectual property laws do their best to restrict them.

It isn't technology that 'opens new possibilities' it is the people who create the technology, the very people who earn their livings from patents and copyrights. Computer code, songs, art work, and drug patents don't appear 'as if by magic'. People invest their lives, their dreams, their money, their time and all their hopes for the future in them.

We intend to devote all our time and energy to protecting the fundamental civil liberties on the net and elsewhere. Seven per cent of Swedish voters agreed with us that it makes sense to put other political differences aside in order to ensure this.

Before you start claiming 7% is a mandate I think I would consult the other 93% of the electorate. They might not be that enthused about in putting their differences aside, especially the artists and inventors and the millions who are working in IP based industries.

Will we let our fears lead us towards a dystopian Big Brother state, or will we have the courage and wisdom to choose an exciting future in a free and open society? The information revolution is happening here and now. It is up to us to decide what future we want.

Once again, the choice is not limited to dystopia or utopia. We just need a world of sensible laws where commerce and community can both survive. We will get there eventually but not by dividing the world into Us vs. Them. To find the solution we need practical people that will engage in a reasonable dialog, not ideologues who want us to read their Manifesto and join their revolution.

The writer is the Pirate party's member of the European parliament.

The comments are from an old broken down songwriter, member of no party, in fact, not even invited to the party...

- Rick Carnes, President, Songwriters Guild of America