Copyright v. Freedom
I’ve been a bit delinquent in my blogging lately (it does tend to come in phases), but I have encountered a number of items worthy of an entry. A week-and-a-half ago, for example, the Institute for International Education (IIE) invited me to meet with a delegation visiting from China. I met four Chinese “scholars,” though it was not clear to me that they were all scholars. Two were from the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau; they said little or nothing. Wang Yefei, the deputy director of the Copyright Bureau, did most of the talking (actually, I did, but among the four of them, he was responsible for the lion’s share of the dialog). Zhao Hongshi, also from the Copyright Bureau and somewhat Mr. Yefei’s junior, also asked several questions. (The whole thing took place in simultaneous translation; none of the visitors spoke English).
The topic of our conversation was copyright enforcement—which was, apparently, the theme of their entire trip.
It seems that I was odd man out in their American itinerary—perhaps a bit of iconoclasm saved for the end of their visit. Most of their speakers were from either police departments or the FBI, and all were concerned with China’s lax policies for copyright enforcement. I presume that most of their hosts took the official American line encouraging China to crack down on “piracy.” I took a different tack. I discussed the extent to which copyright law is irredeemably broken, and explained that though enforcement was possible, it mostly reduced to delaying new technological advances.
We also discussed the potential for individual litigation vs. pushing for government enforcement. Without putting down the trustworthiness of China’s commercial courts (at least not too badly), I did point out that the large content-owning corporation were lobbying heavily here in the U.S., as well. After all, litigation can’t overcome technology without saddling the litigants with significant costs. Effective enforcement hinges upon increasingly draconian laws.
I found the entire incident rather troubling. Setting aside my own well-documented problems with the current state of the copyright system and its globalization under TRIPS, I am offended that the U.S. government would encourage the Chinese government to monitor content and to increase enforcement activities governing any sort of content circulation. The Chinese government remains, above all, authoritarian. Authoritarians have many reasons to monitor and to regulate content, almost all of them illicit and nefarious. Content monitoring is the best way to restrict free communication, and consequently an important step towards perpetuating authoritarianism.
The U.S. government—and all of its corporations—should take every possible opportunity to chastise the Chinese for monitoring content. If the cost for freer communication in China is increased diligence and monitoring of Chinese exports into the U.S., so be it.
As I (and many others) have written elsewhere, a legal regime that works against technology will have numerous consequential ripples—nearly all of them negative. Here is one more such ripple. Our insistence upon propping an archaic copyright regime in place serves the interest of an authoritarian regime rather than that of its dissidents.
So. . .
Unless Disney or Microsoft asks us to help your government monitor the content of your communications, in which case all bets are off.
Shame on us.
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