The NY Times' institutional contrarian Daniel Akst's latest 700-some-odd words, Where Nobody Knows You're a Music Thief, should be brought to the attention of the Gray Lady's accounting department: it's so fact-free, it barely qualifies as fiction, much less business news. Fortunately, I can bottom-line it for you far more economically.
Akst's columns are adjective-laden strings of half-truths and cheap deating union rehtorical manouvres looped round the simplistic arguments of his straw-man foes. For instance, an Akst column might say "Akst's columns adjective-laden strings of half-truths and cheap deating union rehtorical manouvres looped round the simplistic arguments of his straw-man foes."
His target, this time, are those pesky online file-trading pirates. His arguments largely rest on three key assertions:
- Anonymity makes you dishonest
- Even evil corporate pigs are entitled to protection of the law
- The intellectual property laws of today are essential to Freedom, Prosperity, and A Healthy Smile
That's the trouble with the Internet....Anonymity allows honest people to sustain a higher level of dishonesty without guilt....Nothing captures this phenomenon better than Internet music sharing. What's remarkable about the controversy over music sharing is not how many people are involved - although the number is certainly large - but rather their fervent rationalizing....It does not matter if the music business is tasteless, oligopolistic or foolish, as some of its critics contend. Even the greedy and the oafish enjoy the protection of the law....The reason we should all mind is that Internet music sharing represents a profound assault on the very idea of intellectual property. Today it's music, but tomorrow it will be movies and then books, and the justifications will be the same....A large group of mainly middle-class individuals are not just breaking the law, but also attacking the legal concept that is essential to freedom and prosperity in the information age.Of course, Akst's viewpoint is an uncritical retelling of Big Content's party line. There is, it seems, no chance that the intellectual property laws he defends are a bad bargain for individuals, enterprise, or democracy; that the draconian principle of a corporate copyright that extends into infinity is the Big Issue here. Rather, Akst focuses on the short-term skirmish over music file sharing.
Akst's limited-scope thinking leaves room for only one answer: Big Brother:
The answer is probably authentication. Sooner or later we will need to know who everyone on the Internet is, and who confirmed their identities. Internet access providers who admit unauthenticated users will have to be shut out, even if that means shutting out whole countries....In such a world, there would be no doubt about who was violating copyright laws or otherwise misusing the electronic commons.Dan, there's no doubt about who's misusing the commons. The IP regime you're defending is fencing off the last of the open space. Government is handing the people's land over to developers to build crass midways and empty amusements. You're just asking for the police to make sure everybody pays their entrance fee.
