What do file sharing and plagiarism have in common?
Controversy over copyright legislation changes focus, remains anecdotal
Tessa Vanderhart, Staff
Photo by David Lipnowski.
The debate over file-sharing in Canada has taken a detour with the release of statistics that suggest young people who download music are unethical, tied in to the larger controversy over the future of copyright law in Canada.
This fall, the federal government plans to hold public hearings on file-sharing legislation — as represented by Bill C-60, set to go before parliament — a debate the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) says can be reduced to intellectual property issues.
“The way that people approach material accessed on the Internet is tangibly different from how they treat physical property,” said CRIA President Graham Henderson. “If you can go on the Internet, and download a movie — it’s okay, fine. If you can find somebody’s writings and cut and paste big chunks of it into your essay, no problem.”
To that end, CRIA has publicized two national polls on the recording industry, which conclude that younger Canadians — aged 12 to 24 — are responsible for nearly all unpaid file-sharing activity, the levels of which are much higher in Canada than in other nations. The studies, conducted by Environics and Pollara examine the ethical foundation of young Canadians — though Henderson emphasized that the links between plagiarism and illegal downloading are only for anecdotal purposes.
Even then, Henderson said that CRIA is attempting to start a debate about what it considers to be a system that fundamentally reduces innovation, favouring instead the “mass acquisition” of media from the Internet — something which does not involve being a fan, attending concerts, or supporting the industry — but rather, makes record companies less willing to gamble on new acts.
He added that, although CRIA is attempting to garner recognition for Bill C-60, music is only one part of the issue — but given the impact of music on culture, it provides a useful framework for legislating copyright change.
He said that a more important issue is that by drawing these unethical conclusions about the way the music industry should work, many young people are “opting out” of shaping the music scene — something that may also stifle an industry that is dependent on people’s interest and tastes.
“Culture is a business,” noted Henderson. “And in all those years I worked for artists, I never met one who just wanted to be famous. . . . Touring in crappy bars, sleeping on people’s floors; if there wasn’t going to be some upside of it, some payback for it, why would they invest their time in it?” he asked.
But Canadian copyright lawyer Michael Geist has called the conclusions drawn about of Canadian youth by CRIA “laughable.”
“Frankly, I think it’s irrelevant — the data is almost silly,” said Geist. “This has nothing to do with file-sharing; it has to do with being a teenager.”
David Fewer provides legal counsel for the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa, Canada’s only technology law clinic. He countered CRIA’s claims about file sharing on the basis that many are unsubstantiated and more detailed information on the study is not in the public domain.
Fewer noted that while both CIPPIC and CRIA support the same thing — the best public policy — there must be a middle ground between innovation, or delineated copyright laws, and CRIA “hasn’t gotten a lot of mileage” out of the all-or-nothing argument.
He noted that documentary filmmakers are not pleased with the idea of expanding copyright — there are already laws governing copyright, he said, and too much protection is harmful to the output of Canadian culture.
“The chances of the interests of four big shareholder conglomerates lining up with Canada’s interests are pretty slim,” he noted.
“We’d really like to see the promise of the Internet fulfilled,” said Fewer. “We’d really like to see an Internet that isn’t controlled by these market powers.”
He said that, despite the legality of personal copying on levied media, file sharing could still be de-legitimized —“kept in the ghetto” — very easily under the federal bill.
Michael Matthews is a composer, and professor in the Faculty of Music. He noted: “downloading itself is not the same as plagiarizing” — rather, he said, the comparison is a simple mistake, like comparing apples and oranges.
He compared the debate to any other type of sharing: “If I have three coats, and you need a coat, I can give you a coat. If you come into my house and take the coat without asking me, that’s different,” said Matthews.
As a composer, he said that he uploads his music online — although, he noted, contemporary classical music is not in particularly high demand among teenage downloaders.
“These borderline areas, where things like that stop being quotation and where they start being theft — that’s very difficult to codify.
“As with any law, some people will respect it and some people will break it — that’s just the way it goes.”
Derek Hogue, a collective member of the G7 Welcoming Committee record label, said that there are problems with the recording industry — but he thinks the model of good music and good fans will have no trouble preserving.
“I guess I don’t really care what happens to the music industry, whether one model is better than another — because most of it is garbage,” said Hogue.
“It’s highly unlikely that it will lead to the total abolition of the music industry — unfortunately,” he said.
Hogue added that very few of the label’s bands are able to make a living off of music, but in this debate, “it’s not the musicians that have to worry.”
He also noted that in attempting to create music with meaning — and not be “just another arm . . . to create profit for shareholders” — there is little worry about a lack of support. As long as there are musicians and good music, he said, there will be support — and Hogue emphasized touring as the future of Canadian music.
John Bearrie, one of the founders of Turnitin — an American company that sells plagiarism detection software to many Canadian universities, including McGill, U of T and UBC — said that under American law, file sharing and plagiarism are one and the same: a violation of the law. He added that Turnitin software has the potential to be applied to preventing the illegal sharing of files — and it seems like an appropriate direction to take, to combat what he sees as a “massive cheating problem.”
“If students are downloading other peoples’ words and ideas and turning them into their own, why would it stop there?” he asked.
Bearrie associated the financial cost of buying music to the intellectual cost of preparing an essay — but added that he sees the potential for a much greater social price resulting from the “shaky ethical foundation” on which plagiarism is justified.
Gerry Miller, the executive director of information services and technology, noted that the U of M limits the bandwidth of file-sharing programs, to discourage its use — if widely used on the university’s connection, it could “overthrow” the connection by using too much bandwidth. Miller also noted that information services sometimes receives tips that uploading is occurring on university computers — which is not illegal, but would be under Bill C-60 — and removes the computer from service until file-sharing programs can be removed. Students can be punished for violating the university’s policy on acceptable use of computing policy for downloading music.
