Open Access, Piracy, and the Public Domain - Essay Example

Open Access, Piracy, and the Public Domain Information has a long history in terms of the rights to access. In the historic times, protection of information had far serious implications than just financial implication. Governments and kingdoms protected their information in order to protect their territories from espionage. The modern information copyrights were however as a result of commercial interests. With the invention of the printing press, publishers would publish a lot of information and sell the information for financial gains. As a result, they would require to have much control on the information so as to have a monopoly on the information. Times have, however, changed and in a modern world which is full of computers, it has become ever so difficult to contain information in discreet units which can be protected (Members of The Pirate Bay and Piratbyran, 1 Min, 14 Sec.). The invention of the internet, which is the largest public access network, has not made things easier for those willing to protect their bits of information. Publishers, movie producers and music producers today face the same issue of copyright infringement. As Wikstrom (152) says, music producers feel a need to protect their products when they feel that online file-sharing is a threat to their aggregate sales. While the internet is also useful to these information producers as a way to distribute their creative information products, it has also worked against them as it makes it possible for the public to get hold of the same data without having to pay for it. These mass producers of information today incur losses of up to millions of dollars every year due to illegal access by the public to the information they produce. This means that there is a serious issue to be addressed in this area. New information model To deal with the current copyright issues, new models have been suggested by different people. There are those who argue that things will never be the same against and that the only way forward is for everyone, including the mass producers of information such as the movie producers, music producers and book publishers, to embrace the new era. According to these new models of information access, the older model cannot work in this information age. The war between those who believe in the new ideas of information access and those who prefer the older model of information protection has gone on for a long time. This can be seen in the development of peer networks such as pirateay.com, napster and many others. For instance, in the case of pirate bay, the founders were engaged in battles, both political and legal, by Hollywood producers who believed that piratebay.com was infringing on their copyrights by facilitating the distribution of materials without the necessary copyrights. Modern day information thinkers believe that the old model of information access rights cannot survive and will need to be changed. This can be seen a postulated by the producers of the documentary about information access, called Steal This Film. This documentary not only supports the idea of free access, but also implements it as the producers made it a free documentary and distributed it through peer networks. The question that then follows is; if the producers give the information for free, how do they get back their investments especially considering that producing this information can be very expensive? The case of Aaron Swartz is one that specializes the issues which face the modern day information producers (Cohen, para 8). For people like Aaron Swartz, information is supposed to be fluid and easily accessible. People like Aaron Swartz and others such as the developers of the peer networks (piratebay.com, Napster, bit torrent) view information and information rights in a different way. For people like these, monopoly on information is a dead thing which only belongs to the history books. However, the main beneficiaries of the traditional information access model, such as movie producers, publishers etc are the ones who have the interests in making sure that the status quo is maintained. This can be seen in the trial of Aaron Swartz where the court applied very strict measures on him for illegally accessing copyright materials from JSTORE. These stern legal battles are mainly done in the interests of the traditional mass producers of information. These was also seen in the piratebay.com saga where delegates from the Hollywood went to Sweden where piratebay.com is geographically located to be able to front a battle with the developers and maintainers of the piratebay.com site which is a peer sharing network. Pressure from stakeholders The government is facing more pressure from these organisations to clamp down on these people who violate the copyright laws. In this regard, those who find themselves in the crossfire, like Aaron Swartz, are used as examples to teach the rest of the world a lesson. The suicide by Aaron Swartz was seen as connected to his criminal charges which could have given him up to thirty 5 years in jail and more than $1 million in fines (MacFarquhar, Para. 5). This is interesting because Aaron Swartz was never prosecuted for selling the materials he accessed but rather for accessing, and traditionally, this is not a criminal case but rather a civil case. In some cases, the reason for the legal battles waged by the information producers is to scare away other people who might be having similar ideas of infringing on their information. Old versus new information model It is good to note that the differences between the old-fashioned information producers and the modern information-age information producers is not whether or not the producers of this information should benefit from their work, but rather the model which will facilitate that. A good example of this is the above discussed Feature Film called Steal This Film. The producers of Steal This Film delivered the film for free but made money from donations by the public. While not every other mass producer of information can use this model to reimburse themselves, it is an indication of how different models can be used to manage information in a modern world. The modern technologies available have not only made information protection difficult for mass producers, it has also brought with it a paradigm shift in regard to the information produced. Those who were traditionally consumers of information are today the producers of the information. The equation of information production and consumption has changed, and in a modern world, the consumer is also the producer. Works Cited Cohen, Noam. The New York Times: How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture. 20 January 2013. 11 October 2013 . MacFarquhar, Larissa. Requiem for a Dream. 11 March 2013. Web 11 October 2013 . Steal This Film. Dir. Jamie King. Perf. Members of The Pirate Bay and Piratbyran. 2006. Print. Wikstrom, Patrik. The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Print. Read More