Officials at the Ministry of Justice in Jerusalem are suppressing a
smile and preparing fresh arguments for the next meeting with US
representatives. The latter, on behalf of the US entertainment music
industry, have been complaining, for the past four to five years, of
blatant copyright infringement in Israel, and fitting us up for a high
rating on the list of copyright infringing nations. What appears to be the
most forceful argument was advanced by a federal court in San Francisco,
which ruled against record companies alleging copyright infringement on the
Internet network, by means of the magic "Rio" tool, for downloading digital
quality music from the Internet.
The Israelis counter the Americans with a simple argument: if your
court lends a hand to what seems to be so severe an infringement of
copyright and intellectual property, then who are you to complain of CD
pirates at Tel-Aviv's old central bus station?
The US court ruled, in that case, that legislation forbidding pirate
music had not been violated, as the law does not relate specifically to
music found in a cumulative state on a computer file. The court also
praised the "Rio" for making personal use easier and simpler. Arguably, the
"Rio" does not, in itself, differ fundamentally from a tape-recorder or a
video cassette. But that is only partly true, since the Internet is a
totally different degree of the same problem.
Record companies are horrified at what they perceive as the approaching
demise of music stores and the entire related industry. They allege,
briefly and simply, that "Pirates the world over will now start
celebrating". Organisations such as Israel's AKUM (Society of Authors,
Composers and Music Publishers in Israel) are also worried. The essence of
their being is monitoring and awarding scholarships to creative talent.
Many artistes, on the other hand, are exulting. This may simply be due
to resentment at the share the music companies take for themselves, or it
may be that they perceive the Internet, possibly even from an ideological
point of view, as a medium for doing away with unnecessary middlemen
between the creative artist and his or her public.
The first solutions advanced by experts in recent days are of a
technical nature. For example, encoding the composition in such a way as
to render it immune to copying. Of itself, this very ruling may lend a
strong impetus to high-tech industry's information security sector. It
doesn't seem to be much of a solution though. A code that a thirty-year-old
engineer develops today will be cracked by some sixteen-year-old tomorrow.
The ruling is significant in that it holds up for the world's
consideration the issue of intellectual property. Fundamental to any
humanistic and liberal approach is a deep-seated recognition of the
individual's title to his intellectual property. It acknowledges that a
human being stands before his Creator with nothing but his intellectual
property. It holds that creativity is what makes the world go round. It
seems odd to think, these days, that the social flag under which the
communist regimes deprecated intellectual property, is now giving way to
the global-digital flag.
There is nothing for it but to rethink, and arrive at some reasonable,
just and enforceable means of upholding copyright and intellectual property
in what the American judges referred to as "the brave new world of the
Internet".
The story is not without a smidgen of irony. The dozens of young, new
Internet industry millionaires got that way by being able to realise that
same spark of creativity. Yet they are the ones who are posing, for people
of a different creative persuasion, the biggest headache since the
gramophone turntable spun for the first time. The Internet, one might say,
has turned on its maker.
Published by Israel's Business Arena June 17, 1999