Again on piracy and copyrights

Yesterday I've had a curious conversation with one young gentleman. In two days he made two postings in one forum. In the first post, he was talking about some anti-piracy lawsuit, totally supporting it. The very next day he posted a review of some movie and offered to share a copy of the movie he downloaded from one of these services where you pay thirty bucks a year and have access to tons of "not-so-legal" music and video files. I was curious and asked him to clarify his position on copyrights and piracy. His answer totally shocked me:

" Well - said he - since I am giving the movie for free - that's not a piracy. It's like giving a book to a friend; you wouldn't call it a piracy, would you? If it's a piracy, then the whole eDonkey network is a great piracy act with millions of pirates. And, speaking of the place from where I've downloaded the movie, they charge for access, not for content, so that's not a piracy either. "

As I said, I was flabbergasted. I never thought that in our time so naive people would still exist. Of course, I did my best to explain the real situation to this gentleman, and then I had several thoughts.

First - it seems like the idea of copyright education ("Captain Copyright" etc.) is not as useless as I thought. This guy badly needed some kind of copyright education.

And second - the position of this gentleman has its own logic. And, alas, it seems to me much more reasonable and natural than the current copyright laws. And the copyright laws themselves become more and more absurd: it seems that merely having a shared folder on your computer might become a reason for a lawsuit against you (here is a very interesting Lifehacker article about it). The copyright laws are long overdue to be replaced with something realistic and reasonable.

Technorati tags: copyright, piracy