I was in Cairo during the 2010 Winter Olympics and I downloaded an NBC iPhone app which promised live coverage of the games. When I engaged the app I was informed I could not watch the Olympics—the most global assembly on earth—outside the U.S. The app was free, but I would have gladly paid $10 or $15 for live, mobile access to Olympics coverage in Egypt. I’m not sure who was ultimately responsible for this decision or who specifically suffered from it (in the end I paid nothing and didn’t watch a single event in Vancouver or any ads pitched by promoters), but money was lost.
It is true that money is being lost to digital piracy, but plenty is also lost to narrow thinking. Moral indignation won’t counteract global piracy; only convenient and rationally priced offerings will. One commenter on a blog post that Bilton references in his book put it brilliantly: “Lesson to content providers: You make it easy to own, or we’ll make it easy to own.”
I find it interesting that the reason you give for depriving your students of an educational experience is, "I teach journalism ethics." Would you care to expand on your ethical reasoning here?
In terms of the reasoning behind copyright law, this situation is a clear failure of such laws. Copyright law is (or was, originally) designed to make more and better content available to the public by setting up an economic system to reward the creators, thereby encouraging them to create and disseminate such content; that you didn't get access to this content means that the system didn't work.
Economically, the owners of that particular film don't come out better either way in a situation such as the one you describe; whether you show the film or not, they don't get and can't get paid. In fact, in such situations, they may come out worse since if you'd shown the film to the students at least there was a chance one or more of the students might have liked it enough to later buy his own copy.
It seems to me there's an argument to be made here that the ethical thing to do in such situations, where a copyright owner refuses to sell you access to his material at any price, is to find a copy through whatever other means you have available.
(That said, there are some pretty interesting reasons as to why we have these sorts of content restrictions; I leave researching this as an exercise for the reader.)
(cjs@cynic.net)
#1 Posted by Curt Sampson, CJR on Tue 12 Apr 2011 at 03:39 PM