You would be shocked if a banker were taking to social media to urge the public to rob a bank and send him the proceeds. No less striking is when a person whose income depends on copyright urging others to steal someone else’s intellectual property.
Very few look to Justin Bieber for his thoughts on public policy, but it’s shocking when he sends out a tweet to thousands of fans asking them to send him a pirated copy of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
A couple years ago Bieber sued to protect his trademark from being violated, so the most likely reason for flip-flopping is ignorance about intellectual property. For example, a couple years ago he tried to upload one of his songs to YouTube and was blocked from doing so. Apparently he had forgotten that the copyright was owned by his label, not unlike most work owned by the employer.
As we have mentioned previously, a high percentage of copyright violations occur because of ignorance of the law, and the Bieb’s actions demonstrate that even those dependent on the copyright system have trouble understanding the boundaries. His high profile gaffs are one more example of how important the Copyright Alert System (CAS) is to the intellectual property protection ecosystem.
CAS is designed to be an educational approach to dissuade the casual or unknowing copyright thief from thieving. The system’s centerpiece is a series of notices sent by content providers but forwarded by the Internet service provider to its customers if those customers are alleged to have engaged in peer-to-peer copyright infringement.
The content owners are charged with monitoring the Internet to spot illegal downloads of their property and start the notice process. The notices, or alerts, are all about education: alerting recipients that someone has used their account for illegal downloading, and to help them understand the laws, terms of service and copyright in general.
For too long too many only fixated on the “punishment” for copyright violations. Understanding that many are truly ignorant of the bounds of copyright, content providers (and also copyright critics) can now move from punishment fixation and together seek increasingly better ways to educate the public, and focus on the increasingly important role that copyright plays in our economy.
Next week’s hearing is a great time to start that critical collaborative work.
July 19, 2013