There’s been a lot of talk about copyright lately. For whatever small amount it was worth, I joined the SOPA blackout and wrote to my senators and representative, although given today’s events I’m not sure any of this was very convincing. I want to know when copyright became a trump card that allowed the copyright industries to interfere with anything and everything. Patrick Leahy claims that losses due to piracy are close to $250 billion. This is nearly 1/40 of household income in the United States, and roughly 14 times Microsoft’s 2010 profit. Since these numbers do not stand up to even the most cursory fact checking, they should not be used to justify Draconian enforcement measures.

Anyone who provides web hosting, file uploading, or even e-mail service is providing a tool for moving data, and the percentage of users who use the service in an unlawful way cannot be reduced to zero. Ever. This is simple probability. This should be considered no differently than any other tool. If a bill were to be introduced to Congress tomorrow suggesting that manufacturers of vehicles should be shut down and have their assets seized because some tiny number of motorists use their cars to rob banks, it’d be laughed out of committee. If by some miracle it didn’t, we’d all have to start riding horses, or bicycles. All that would be gained would be a pervasive odor of horse dung. By the same analogy, if hammer manufacturers were to be shut down on account of hammers being used in vandalism, I suppose we’d all be pounding nails with our foreheads. At least in that case, the brain damage might make us too stupid to care.

Putting aside the SOPA/PIPA/seizure debacle for a moment, the term of copyright needs to be revisited. The “creative” industries have no reason to be creative when copyright lasts as long as it does today. After all, where’s the incentive to try out a new concept when you can just rehash the same old ideas over and over again? Because old works effectively never enter the public domain, entertainment firms don’t have to compete with their own past. Therefore, we get lots of variations on successful themes, and little that’s truly original.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that copyright is a bargain we make. As a society, we choose to respect copyrights (and patents) as an incentive for people not to keep things to themselves forever. Without them, the incentive for creativity and invention would be diminished. However, the copyright holders currently aren’t holding up their end of the bargain, and the prevalence of copyright infringement can be seen as an indication that people don’t think they’re getting their fair shake anymore. Think about this: in what other industry can you do all the hard work once, then continue to turn a profit off it for a hundred years or more?

I create copyrighted software, circuit board layouts, photographs, whatever. Some of that is my livelihood, some of it just for fun. But in any case, in twenty years or so that stuff won’t even be worth paying me for. If I haven’t moved on to something better by then I’m doing it wrong. I respect the work of the truly creative (who end up signing away their copyrights to someone else), but Hollywood fat cats who want mailbox money for the rest of their lives should get their grubby fingers off our Internet, which sooner or later will cut them out of the picture.

P.S. I don’t pirate, and neither should you.