Think of all the unauthorized copyrighted material you have in your head right now: Beatles tunes, Stephen King plots, images of Mickey Mouse.
Thief!
Well, you're not exactly a criminal — but give it time.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has just been amended again, and if the changes make the entertainment industry happy, that does not bode well for your future.
Tomorrow the law may be amended to prevent you from reading Doonesbury while moving your lips, since that's an unauthorized reproduction that shifts content from one form to another. It'll be Sing Sing for you — why, the very name of the prison taunts the copier.
The latest revisions allow a few exemptions. Ancient video games can now be copied if the required computer is no longer made, so all you people who've been meeting in dark rooms to trade your UNIVAC Tic-Tac-Toe simulators can come out of the shadows.
But you still can't rip your DVDs to make backups. Correction: You can't do it legally.
Then again, you knew that. There is no law more publicly displayed or universally ignored than the FBI warning that precedes all movies. (Especially amusing is the part where INTERPOL is said to have "expressed its interest" in the matter, as if Scotland Yard were planning a raid on a Kansas kid hacking his Wii so it plays a "Battlestar Galactica" episode he got off his TiVo.)
Just because it's illegal doesn't mean you can't do it. The Web abounds with hacker-helper programs. But is copying a movie inherently unethical?
Yes, if you're Jack Valenti, the ancient movie poohbah who's probably still fuming about people bringing Brownie cameras to the nickelodeon. But there are gray areas.
Is it morally permissible to make a backup of your kids' movies, knowing the original DVDs will end up scratched and unwatchable? Is it OK to rent from Netflix and rip the DVD for later viewing, even if you destroy the copy after watching it?
Is it illegal to download a song you bought in another form? If you've lost the vinyl version of Barry Manilow's "Copacabana" purchased 20 years ago, can you download a digital version free, or should you pay again as a "lousy taste" surcharge?
Is it OK to make one hundred copies and sell them on the streets of New York? All right, that last one's fairly clear: No.
But that's not what most people would do. People want to dupe a DVD so they can watch it on the plane without the optical drive sucking the battery dead; they want to put "The Office" on their iPod and watch on the subway on the way to, well, the office.
The Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, a bill from the noble tilting-at-windmills school of legislation, would let people duplicate digital material and move it around their various players as long as their use of the material is otherwise legal. It will be reintroduced in the next Congress, where a Democratic majority no doubt will regard it as an impolite bodily sound made during a quiet moment of a Streisand concert.
The folks on the other side of the issue, however, can be just as annoying. The anti-copyright people think Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain, because he's, like, old 'n' stuff. (Under this theory, everyone should be able to live in the house of someone 80 years old.) They bridle at any sort of digital-rights protection, and deride Apple's iTunes store for making it slightly difficult to make infinite copies of copyrighted music. They're generally high-minded, and have the unbending purity of people who never got over reading Ayn Rand in high school.
But people do steal copyrighted material. Too many college students hoover up tunes from peer-to-peer networks, believing that music is like knowledge: It should be free, or, barring that, paid for by the parents.
Few things are as bone-dry dull as copyright law, except for tax law, and both seem to be messy, clueless attempts to respond to human behavior. Expect no clarity in the years to come. Just remember when you buy an iPod for a gift: It's wrong to load it up with a movie you bought.
Clarification: It's illegal. Same thing, right?
