by James Hrynyshyn
Two years ago, at 33 years of age, I went to back university for a second degree, bracing myself for a significant jolt of culture shock.
At first, the only obvious cultural difference was the fact that none of my classmates had the faintest idea who the Talking Heads were. But now I know there's a very real gap - call it the Digital Divide -- that threatens many of us unfortunate enough to remember when Pong was cutting-edge. A couple of international copyright showdowns last week showed me the truth.
First there's Napster and its analogs. Not a product, but software that allows anyone with a decent Net connection and few gigs of spare hard drive space to amass a musical collection at no charge and in a minuscule fraction of the time it took me to replace all my worn-out LPs with CDs. Some of my thirty- and fortysomething colleagues in the journalism game have dismissed Napster and the MP3 file format in which music is now stored as nothing more than a technologically sophisticated version of home-taping, which we all did 15 years ago, partly to preserve our delicate vinyl albums and partly to save money. But it's not. I'm afraid my generation just doesn't get it.
The difference is even the poorest of among us, way back when, could afford a few LPs. We all made tapes, but we also bought original recordings. Today's young music fans do not. Why bother paying for something when it's free and available at your fingertips? They were raised in a universe in which almost all information can be copied and shared ad infinitum. Paying for content just doesn't compute.
Industry has, of course, figured this out. That's why the transnational music companies, and just about everyone else in the information business, is busy "converging" with or buying, content delivery networks. Time-Warner, Disney, CanWest Global, Rogers, BMG - it won't be long before the field shrinks to two or three media behemoths. The corporate barons know they can make a heck of a lot more money charging for Net access than from selling content they have to pay for themselves.
My brother, Derek Hrynyshyn, now 33 and therefore another old fogie, learned this the hard way last week when he discovered his University of Victoria masters thesis for sale at Contentville.com, an online service set up by U.S. publisher Steven Brill, CBS, which is owned by the Viacom media giant, and a bunch of other powerful media acronyms.
The problem was, his thesis contained explicit instructions forbidding commercial resale of the document, as does almost every thesis published by Canadian universities. Not only that, but my brother's field of study - get this - is copyright in the Internet era. That's enough irony for the month, thank you.
How did his thesis ended up for sale on an American web site? It seems UVic gives its grad students' papers to the National Library of Canada, which contracts distribution to Bell & Howell, a Michigan-based outfit that sells its products through Contentville, which, like Napster, provides access rather than a product.
As you might expect, my brother's thesis isn't the only item for sale illegally at Contentville. So are countless other academic and popular works. Margaret Atwood, June Callwood and dozens of other writers have complained to Contentville of copyright infringement. There's even a piece I wrote last year for Maclean's magazine, which most certainly does not retain copyright for commercial resale of anything I have written.
Most troubled by all this, my brother e-mailed every company and institution involved in the chain of theft, pointing out that he has no objection to free distribution of his paper, only to unauthorized profit-taking. The responses amounted to little more than masterful attempts at buck-passing. ("We regret that there has been some confusion about our efforts to bring so much underused, valuable content to the consumer market place for the first time….")
But it's seems pretty obvious to me what went on. The cyberdrones at Contentville without doubt belong to the same "information wants to be free" demographic slice that's busy undermining the profit margins of both the record companies and their favorite bands with all their MP3-swapping. It never occurred to any of them to check for copyright.
Even if they did come across a legal notice, they didn't care. Neither did it occur to them that their boss would then be selling access to the databases that contain all this information-that-wants-to-free. (Our generation may not get the new world view on copyright, but at least we appreciate irony).
It's this disregard for the value of the creative process that's separates them from us. They're all about delivery, we're all about content. So, journalists, musicians and all the other "content providers" (formerly known as writers and artists) who want to survive the next few decades, we'd better get with the program, and figure out some way to make sure that information isn't free, no matter how hard the next generation and the transnational media barons wants it to.