Where I'm At

I just got a message asking whether I'm still blogging. The answer is yes, but . . . not for a little while longer. I've spent the summer (almost) completing a book project that's under contract with a publisher I really like. I was just interviewed about the book, and realized that this answer would also function as a quick and dirty explanation for those who wondered why I haven't weighed in since Grokster decision day . . . Yes, I do have more to say. Oh, so much more.

The book is called Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates and it examines what, in my view, is a shockingly poor debate we're having about an important public policy matter. We need to decide, as a culture, whether we are going to have a content-rich Internet, in which most of the information in print is also available online at roughly parallel costs, or a content-poor Internet, in which the rules we established for copyrights in print spaces seal up information and leave it largely inaccessible.

Because the first U.S. copyright law announces itself as "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning" my position is that we ought to be leveraging peer-to-peer technologies, especially in educational contexts, to broaden access to information. In many cases, there are opportunities for dramatic financial savings by encouraging university communities to commit the bandwidth they're now wasting to sustaining virtual libraries filled with not just print, but media of all types. Peer-to-peer technologies could make it possible for the whole of the Library of Congress to be online, and then some. The technologies are in place. Now all we need to do is figure out when and how to pay the people who deserve compensation when the material is accessed.

The debates over peer-to-peer technologies show advocates for broader public and educational access to information failing to make headway against a coordinated effort by the motion picture and music industries to describe all peer-to-peer downloads as "theft," "piracy," and "war." The rather weak response from peer-to-peer advocates has been to characterize peer-to-peer downloads as "sharing." All of these analogies are grounded in projecting physical experiences into virtual spaces, and none take into account the special nature of digital media. When a peer-to-peer technology allows a user to copy a music file off of somebody else's hard drive that's not stealing or sharing. It's an altogether new challenge to the ways we've been thinking about property. My book is directed at encouraging more reasonable and ethical arguments than those we typically see in the peer-to-peer debates.

So, once this beast is good and done, I'll be back to venting here on a more regular basis.