The SIAA (formerly SPA) have resurrected, brushed down and revamped for Gen Y their “It’s Not Just A Copy” campaign circa 1992 for 2009.
See the video below. The idea is to slickly put it towards the community at large that it’s a crime to copy, which includes hacks, cracks, torrent files, serial or serialz, keygenz and share via peer to peer networks, intellectual property you do not have rights to distribute.
What’s significant to my mind here is that they sidestep entirely that old “red herring” semantic argument of “it’s theft/is too/is not” which proponents of this crime use to justify their activity. The argument tends to go “it’s not actually theft because…”. By not using the word “theft” the SIAA are focussing on the fact – to paraphrase from the song – that’s it’s a “crime in any language.” Which, if your country is a Berne Copyright Convention signee, as are most nations in the IEC then it’s a crime to not pay for and distribute intellectual property you do not own (you did not produce or have not acquired the right to distribute).
Effective as a campaign?
While I applaud the SIAA for this effort, support their concerns and whole-heartedly agree with them I have to say I don’t think it will make any significant impact at all. The people who break Intellectual Property Law don’t care, won’t care and won’t stop because of a commercial campaign of this nature. The reason is very simple.
Cause And Effect
Yup. It’s the “cause and effect” scenario. If you’ve read any child development psychology by the likes of Piaget you’ll be familiar with the idea that very young children believe in something termed “retributive justice”. Basically it means, to them, if you hurt an inanimate object (a rock, a tree etc) it will hurt you back. As we grow older we pass out of this phase and realize that “cause and effect” are much more complex and do not apply at all in this respect and so the “cause” does not have an “equal effect”. It’s a learned behaviour. We learn stealing that trinket from a shop will get you put in jail if you are caught – and the chances of being caught are actually quite high. For most higher than they are prepared to risk – unless they are suffering a compulsive disorder along the lines of Kleptomania.
However.. Taking without paying Intellectual Property, Distributing without “rights” intellectual property has very little risk comparatively. No matter how many images of police storming the premises a video like the one above shows. We’ve “learned” police don’t really like to get involved (ask a local police Sgt in the area I live in here in Melbourne and he’ll glibly inform you it’s a “civil matter” – he’s wrong, but you try and get him to read the statutes). The courts are lenient, the community tends to empathise with the criminal and a whole sub-culture with more power than the SIAA in respect of influence thinks it’s “totally kewl” to engage in piracy.
Stick It To The Man
It’s the whole “stick it to the man” philosophy” that is at the crux of it for many, though not all. That “the man” is often a small business person, man or woman, escapes them and if it does not – they don’t care. “Collateral damage” it seems, to be, is the attitude.
What the SIAA is missing here, to my mind, is a far greater issue. That the whole piracy issue is linked to the distribution of bots and Trojans for the purposes of organized crime. That’s what they need to target. During America’s flirtation with prohibition one Al Capone provided something the masses wanted. Booze. The example here of Capone is not so much that booze running was rendered dead by abolishing prohibition but that how the law approached Capone. They saw him for what he was – a piece of garbage. A crook, a career criminal.
That’s the mindset they need to take with combating software piracy. Not going after Joe and Jill public. It’s impossible to win that, we saw that with Capone. Go after the source and put them away (or shut them down) by any means necessary. A digital Elliot Ness I suppose is required. But this time the whole international community has to be engaged, it’s a global issue, not a problem festering in a single city like it was with Capone and Chicago. Things have changed.
Scott Kane
Quote of the day:
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything. – Frank Dane
