Property Is Property, Regardless of the Web
New technologies are creating tremendous opportunities for businesses and consumers. But like many innovations throughout history, today’s digital technologies are also spawning serious and fundamental challenges. The opportunities that lie ahead are without question immense. But I want to sound a different note by addressing the challenges, specifically combating the dangerous and misguided notion that property is not property if it’s on the Web, and the piracy that that notion perpetuates.
There is a very real difference between privacy and anonymity. In the blurred vision of speed and innovation, those two separate values have become indistinct, and that lack of distinction is having--and will continue to have--a deleterious effect on our culture, our society and the long-term growth of the Internet.
New technologies have much to offer both the creators of entertainment and those who enjoy and consume it. We live in an era in which a few clicks of your mouse will make it possible for you to summon every book ever written in any language, every movie ever made, every television show ever produced and every piece of music ever recorded. Music is on the leading edge of this revolution, and because of that it has become the first product to illuminate the central--and I believe the most critical--challenge for this technological revolution: the protection of intellectual property rights.
Property rights are well understood and universally accepted. You own a home. You own a car. They’re yours; they belong to you. They are your property.
Your ideas belong to you too. And intellectual property is property, period. But there are those who believe that because technology can access property and appropriate it, then somehow that which is yours is no longer yours because technology has made it simple and easy for someone else to take it from you.
If intellectual property is not protected, in every case, with no exceptions and no sophistry about a changing world, what will happen? Intellectual property will suffer the fate of the buffalo. For the great ferment of works and ideas, if taken at will and without restraint, has no chance of surviving any better than did the buffalo.
Universal is engaging in five areas to defend and promote the works of the great talents with whom we are privileged to be associated.
First, we are focused on creating and launching a legal system for consumers to access the media they desire beginning with music. We will launch a secure downloading format later this summer that will be the start of making our content widely available in digital form. We want downloadable music to be easy to find and its delivery to be fast, convenient, dependable and secure.
The multimedia product we will launch will be more than just music. We are providing artists with a broader canvas on which to express themselves, and we are creating a far richer experience for the consumer. Last month, Universal Music and Sony Music announced a joint venture to develop subscription-based services that will include music and video offerings across every possible platform.
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Second, we know that going into a record store and removing a CD is wrong. It is stealing. We will reemphasize this truth in an educational effort with our industry allies, targeted to the great majority of people who want to do the right thing yet may not fully comprehend that accessing copyrighted material without proper payment or permission in the digital world is as wrong as it is in the physical world.
The Internet is a brave new world. But it could only have been created and it will only survive in the context of our civilized world, which has taken humanity centuries to construct.
Universal’s third initiative is with the use of technology. As technology enables crime, so can it be used to protect us from crime and criminals. We have available to us growing arsenals of technological weapons that will be brought to bear on inappropriate access to material on the Internet. Whether it is better and more robust security or tools to track down those who ignore right from wrong, technology will offer the owners of property at least as much comfort as it may currently offer hackers and spies, pirates and pedophiles. Technology exists that can trace every Internet download and tag every file. These tools make it possible to identify those using the Internet to improperly and illegally acquire music and other copyrighted information. While adhering to the principle of respect for individual privacy, we fully intend to exploit technology to protect property.
The fourth route we have already pursued is to utilize existing laws to bring to justice those who demonstrate contempt for law and copyright and seek to profit from that which is not lawfully theirs. We have already seen some major successes: In late April, a U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that My.MP3.com was liable for copyright infringement. In mid-May, U.S. District Court in Northern California ruled against Napster. The court denied Napster’s claim that it was a mere conduit and determined that Napster had not taken adequate steps to keep repeat infringers, who use pirated material, from using the site.
These rulings illustrate the legal process that is defining the boundaries of right and wrong as intellectual property rights are applied to a new technological era.
All of us who believe in the right to own property, and therefore in the sanctity of copyright, will be fiercely aggressive in this area. We will fight for our rights and those of our artists whose work, whose creations, whose property are being stolen and exploited. We will take our fight to every territory, in every court in every venue, wherever our fundamental rights are being assaulted and attacked.
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Let me now turn to my fifth point. We must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide to commit crimes. Anonymity must not be equated with privacy. As citizens, we have a right to privacy. We have no such right to anonymity. Privacy is getting your e-mail address taken off of “spam” mailing lists; privacy is making sure some hacker doesn’t have access to your social security number or your mother’s maiden name. On line, privacy is assuring that what you do, so long as it is legal, is your own business and may not be exploited by others.
Anonymity, on the other hand, means being able to get away with stealing or hacking or disseminating illegal material on the Internet--and presuming the right that nobody should know who you are. There is no such right. This is nothing more than the digital equivalent of putting on a ski mask when you rob a bank. Anonymity disguised as privacy is still anonymity, and it must not be used to strip others of their rights, including their right to privacy or property rights. We need to create a standard that balances one’s right to privacy with the need to restrict anonymity, which shelters illegal activity. We cannot suggest that the ready and appropriate distinctions we make between privacy and anonymity in the physical world are irrelevant in the digital world. To do so would be to countenance anarchy. To do so would undermine the very basis of our civilized society.
In the appropriation of intellectual property, My.MP3.com and Napster are the ringleaders, the exemplars of theft, of piracy, of the illegal and willful appropriation of someone else’s property. What individuals might do unthinkingly for pleasure, in my view, they do with forethought for profit, justifying with weak and untenable rationale their theft of the labor and genius of others.
They rationalize what they do with a disingenuous appeal to utopianism: Everything on the Internet should be free. Other than the gifts of God and nature, that which is free is free only because someone else has paid for it.
Some of the donors may regret their generosity when they are confronted with their children’s college tuition and orthodontic bills, but yes, they have given, and they have given freely.
There is a difference, however, between giving and taking. Had those donors been compelled to do what they have done, it would be a tale not of generosity but of coercion, not of liberality but of servitude. Those whose intellectual property is simply appropriated on the Internet or anywhere else are forced to labor without choice or recompense for the benefit of whoever might wish to take a piece of their hide. If this is a principle of the new world, it is suspiciously like the old world principle called slavery.
It is against this that we have initiated legal action. It is not because we wish to suppress ingenious methods by which our products may be delivered but because we wish to maintain rightful control and receive fair compensation.
We are right with the Constitution, in which protection for intellectual property is founded, right with the common law, right with precedent and right with what is fair and just.
This is our notice to all those who hold fairness in contempt, who devalue and demean the labor and genius of others, that because we have considered our actions well and because we are followers without reticence of a clear and just principle, we will not retreat.
This is not only a fight about the protection of music or movies, software code or video games. Neither is it a fight about technology’s promise or its limitations. This is quite simply about right and wrong.
