Consider this current state of affairs…
We live in an age where large corporations or their associations (think RIAA) are suing individuals and file sharing services for millions of dollars, while not making it any easier to actually, ya know, buy their copyrighted material. There are millions more dollars being spent on developing ever more complex DRM to secure said copyrighted material. Joel Tenenbaum got hit with a $675,000 ruling (note: the judge later took a zero off of that) for illegally sharing 30 songs. RIAA unsucessfully sued the Russian allofmp3.com for $1.65 trillion – yes, with ‘T’.
I don’t want to even get into the fact that this state of affairs is a shaky business strategy, that ultimately technology makes it impossible, or that the value proposition of suing everyone in sight is dubious at best (and nevermind the fact that file sharing is a free distribution channel…). Instead, let’s compare it to the flipside…
Individuals are sharing their data like crazy. More than at any point in history, people are sharing their thoughts, photos, social graph, fiction, music, videos (yes, even their porn). While many people are choosing to take advantage of better privacy settings at sites like Facebook, a lot of people are taking full advantage of how easy it is to get material into the public space. However, when indviduals do want to control the distribution of some of our content, and something goes wrong, how does the reverse look? The people who sued Google over privacy issues with Buzz? They got $2500.00 each (that’s without a ‘T’… or a ‘B’ or and ‘M’). Granted, several million dollars in the Google ruling is going to privacy organizations, and that’s a good thing, but the point is that this disparity is so totally, absurdly out of whack.
Corporations are spending gobs of money on technology, lobbyists and legal proceedings to protect themselves from (I would argue perceived rather than actual) damages. Now, of course, there are a lot of people in the technology and speculative fiction world who just sort of “get” how retarded this is and that the sell-a-physical-thing-or-sue-the-world! business model is going to eventually die and move to some sort of whuffie-based economy (assuming, of course, we aren’t all thrown back the 18th century cause of an energy crash, in which case this is all academic and hopefully I remembered to print this blog post before the lights went out).
However, that doesn’t really help the individual out right now. Individuals need better, easier to use tools to protect themselves. They also need better recourse and education. Facebook’s updates to privacy controls and industry efforts like OAuth are steps in the right direction, but we still aren’t there. Think about this: the single best set of keys you have right now to protect your online identity? Your smartphone.
Now, what would happen, for me, if this blog post was stolen a million times? How would I sue all those – wait what? Are you crazy? It would be fantastic. Please, by all means share the shit out of this.
