Socially acceptable copying

By Ashok Argent-Katwala

Copying television programmes and music tracks around is a very social thing. Not so many people do it using their computers just now, but I'll wager that's because it's fiddly, rather than because it is socially terribly unacceptable.

We've been copying and sharing media around for a long time. You can go back to home taping, which plainly never managed to kill music. But you can go back a lot further than that: to the fireside, to the cave wall, to an oral tradition of storytelling and art that far outstrips today's commercial structures for copyright.

Lots has changed since then, but storytelling is still at the heart of it.

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Copying is the one thing computers are good at. Almost everything a computer does involves making a perfect copy of something, and perhaps modifying it as instructed.

If the media companies want to stop ad-hoc copying – so often 'theft' or 'nicking' in their language – they need to make it socially unacceptable.

If I felt that my friends judged me when I recorded television as it was broadcast and passed copies to friends I believe would enjoy it – I'd stop. That extends pretty readily to taking a copy from someone who recorded it last night, if I missed it myself – especially if a friend recommends it to me. Right now my circle of friends are miles away from that situation. We treat television and radio we love as a cherished thing; something we care about enough to recommend – often with all the data – to one another.

If using a PVR to record a show is acceptable, then so is handing a USB stick to a friend who missed – say – the last couple of episodes of Lost. That happened to me twice this week. I wouldn't dream of saying 'No, you should have wrangled more technology at the moment of broadcast'. Beyond live politics, news and sport schedules are dead to me.

This kind of social interaction: a hearty recommendation and everything you need to act upon it, should be a boon for producers of interesting content. They should care that the copy handed around is good & true, but there's perfectly good mathematics for that.

This isn't about how the technology works – DRM plainly doesn't, without outlawing all manner of general-purpose computation – or about how we can reinforce the attempted restrictions of DRM using the law. That is the path we have been on for a while, and – quite frankly – the people who are well acquainted with the art of the possible seem to be a very long way from the decision-making process.

A good friend told me a while back that whenever he sees one of those MPAA ads that says (in booming movie-trailer voice):

— You wouldn't steal a car.

— Why would you steal a movie?

They are asking just the right question, and reinforcing, to him at least, that copying a movie isn't the same thing as theft. He's happy doing the copying, and happy to chat about it.