Stealing DVDs vs. Downloading TV Shows
Ever wondered how much worse the penalty is for stealing a DVD than for downloading it? You might have seen this article if you read Slashdot regularly, but if not, you might be surprised at the answer: apparently the penalty for downloading a season of the popular TV show Alias could be as much as 33 times as much as that for stealing a physical DVD. What does this say about our priorities as a society?
Are we willing to say that stealing something from a brick-and-mortar store is much worse than sharing a show that anyone can watch for free on network television? This demonstrates just how out of control copyright law has become, and why people need to learn about these issues. Many artists, such as those who distribute their music under a Creative Commons license on sites like Opsound, would be pretty angry if somebody stole physical CDs of theirs, but don’t mind people downloading their music (or other artistic work).
To play off of Opsound’s Attribution-ShareAlike CC license, which allows for commercial use, we’re planning to sell some CDs of Opsound music as a fundraiser at the Swarthmore charity fair in April (the site sadly seems to be broken at the moment). Selling these CDs doesn’t hurt the market for Opsound’s music: in fact, we’ll bringing their music to an entirely new audience, the families that live in the town of Swarthmore and who probably would never hear of Opsound without our help. If only the major labels were as enlightened as the artists at Opsound.