Copyrighted Dragon

Back in my home country of Finland a group of 20 young men who were responsible for operating Finreactor P2P web service were convicted in court and ordered to pay well over 500 000 euros (around 700 000+ $) in compensation for the damages of the holders of the IP of the products that were available in their website.

The court rejected the argument from the operators of Finreactor, who claimed they were not liable as media was exchanged directly between users, ruling instead that defendants willfully encouraged copyright infringement, requiring its 10,000 users to maintain a minimum ratio of uploaded to downloaded content to maintain their accounts.

This has sparked a huge discussion in Finland over whether the sentencing was fair and are the Finreactor boys heroes and martyrs or thieves and criminals?

Arguments for both sides are interesting: defenders of Finreactor cite the freedom of information, fighting against the greed of the big companies that control much of the IP of the entertainment industry, and a chance for less-known artists to get exposure and the fact that it was the customers of the Finreactor, not the operators themselves were distributing the copyrighted material.

On the other hand, arguments against are robust: spreading the material without the permission of the IP holders is illegal no matter how you look at it, and even in the case of less well-known artists products it is not very nice in my books to spread their work without any permission.

The whole thing, like so many others boils down to money: do the artists and the companies publishing these works lose any revenue over this or not?

For someone like me who makes a living by producing content, this offers a tough dilemma. I like many of the arguments that P2P advocates have, and yet I also need to make a living. If all the products I’ve done in past 11 years would be available free of charge, I very much doubt I could have ever put any bread on my table. I also believe that Youtube-style snipped videos truly help the popularity of music, games, movies etc, as does the fansubbing of Anime series that I love. Products that you simply cannot buy in the area you live in, I have myself downloaded in the past. Indeed responsible fansites take such torrents down once the product gets licensed in their home country. I always buy these products when I can get them, as long as I enjoyed them at least a little. This my conscience can live with. The trouble is, I think I am part of a tiny minority.

If someone can explain to me how I am supposed to make a living if the worth of my work is 0 (as apparently many people believe since they keep downloading stuff I’ve made even though it is available to them in a shop around the corner) then I might be more inclined to defend these boys. Lots of people cite the examples of rich people in the entertainment and software industry as proof that we, the providers of the content don’t need any more money. For the vast majority of us who make all this music, written words, code and art, situation is not that rosy. We live from pay check to pay check, worry about bills and rent, just like everyone else. Any potential loss of revenue cuts directly into our pay and bonuses in a very real way. It makes it really hard to have noble ideas about the freedom of spreading information. But I do try. As long as it is not the full product that is made available to the consumer for free, I am cool with my stuff appearing on the public domain.

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