Copyright Schmopyright

Siva Vaidhyanathan reports on his blog that he returned from a Harvard symposium on fair use in the digital era with a clear sense that "[r]eal copyright -- both public faith in the system and the democratic safeguards embodied in it -- is in danger." This put me in mind of a recent survey by Ipsos-Reid Research, that I learned about from Slashdot's Your Rights Online section. The striking statistics in the survey are:

91% percent feel that file trading is OK, but only 39% feel that making copies of music and passing it on to friends is OK.

This suggests that the "anti-piracy" campaigns mounted by the content industries have, to date, been colossal failures. While these industries might take some solace in the partial recognition that burning CD copies for pals might not be playing according to Hoyle, the overhwelming belief that peer-to-peer file transfers are reasonable cuts at the heart of the industries' plans to capture the peer-to-peer revenue stream. The danger for the content industries is that these consumers are, I suspect, no longer unaware of the industry's interpretation of copyright law with respect to peer-to-peer transfers. The consumers simply disagree with this interpretation strongly enough that they are willing to ignore it.