New Platforms, Ease of Use, and Popularity

The desire of individuals and companies to protect the expression of their ideas, has lead to the formation of copyright laws. Due to the increasing access to data and information in today’s world, largely due to the World Wide Web, it has become increasingly difficult to enforce copyright laws (Albanese, 2006). Albanese goes so far as to suggest that the twenty-first century will likely be characterized by fraud and piracy. Fraud is defined as purposefully taking the property of another through deception or secrecy. If copyright infringement is clearly a form of fraud, then why has it grown so popular? Additionally, why has a greater social stigma not become apparent? In this post, I intend to answer the questions stated above, and expand upon digital copyright infringement in the new media environment.

Today, there are platforms which make the acquisition and movement of new media extremely easy (Albanese, 2006). In years past, copyright, fraud, and theft laws were targeted at those who stole physical goods or inefficiently (by today’s standards) reproduced goods. Today, those involved and the platforms that people use have greatly changed; the distinctions between a unique work and a copied work have been blurred by the ever-changing new media environment. This fuzzy line has resulted in greater ambiguity about what is legal and what is not. Furthermore, history suggests that there is typically a lag between the law and law makers, and the techniques and ideas of law offenders. Albanese gives the example of a street light to prove this point. In a town, street lights are frequently added after there have been a number of robberies in an area. To date, the same is true of copyright infringement. Millions of people infringe, yet the law has not caught up with the techniques used by these offenders to successfully stop this mass fraud. The social stigma of an action directly coincides with this lag.

Devices such as the VCR, audio recorders, TiVO, and scanners have lowered the barrier to commit copyright violation. In turn, this has allowed the everyday person to infringe. These platforms have greatly reduced the difficulty to acquire media. Today's killer application, which has allowed offenders to move and download media easier than ever, is peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. P2P started in 1991 with IRC Channels, and eventually rose to prominence and success of services like Napster, Morpheus, Kazza, and BitTorrent.

These new platforms, which have alerted the perception of copyright law, has made the movement and acquisition of new media tremendously easy. Professor Tracy Mitrano from Cornell University states that “the ease of downloading songs, the micro-mastery of utilizing the file-share programs, and the flexibility of accessing single songs…render file-sharing nearly irresistible… (Mitrano, 2003).” Those who partake in the DCI Debate (Digital Copyright Infringement Debate), point to a “lack of real penalties and convenience, and no other choice” as reasons why people infringe on copyright.

This ease of use, brought upon by new platforms, has lead to tremendous popularity of copyright infringement. Every year, millions of internet users illegally download music, movies, televisions shows, books, etc. Due to the vast number of people participating on these networks, individuals feel detached from social/ethical obligations of obeying copyright laws; this ‘diffusion of responsibility’ makes others believe that since everyone else is not going to oblige, why should they? Offenders believe others won’t oblige because of there is only a limited social stigma. Similarly, the bandwagon effect suggests that people act or think a certain way strictly because many others act or think that way. This directly applies to the popularity of copyright infringement. So many people download music, movies, etc, that a bandwagon effect has occurred. Additionally, there is a third person effect at play. With such popularity, people feel as though another person, but never themselves, is likely to get in trouble. This “it will never happen to me” mindset is very adolescent, yet very prevalent throughout infringement literature.

There must be a reason why there is a limited social stigma attached to the illegal act of copyright infringement. I believe the answer is due to the fact that platforms make acquiring and moving new media extremely easy. This ease of acquisition and movement has resulted in tremendous popularity of copyright infringement. From there, basic social theory explains that due to the popularity of copyright infringement, it has become so widespread that though it is illegal, it is not perceived by society as wrong (or it is perceived as wrong, but not at any cognitive level) and thus has only a limited social stigma.