The uproar created by Napster’s continuing retreat highlights the Internet community’s puzzling disdain for copyrights. Why won’t Netizens admit that, while intellectual property protections are a nuisance to MP3 junkies, they are good for the Internet itself? The answer lies in the evolution of online culture.
In the 1980s, before the Internet blossomed into a commercial engine, copyright protections marked the border between Internet inhabitants and the establishment that spurned them. Then, the Net was largely a forum for disenfranchised adolescents to express their anger by violating the electronic boundaries around companies and government agencies. The mystique afforded these hackers, bolstered by movies like "War Games," spawned Internet culture’s founding myth: a high-tech version of David vs. Goliath in which gimpy geeks battle big business and bad government.
In the early1990s, a new myth took hold. As the high-tech sector flourished, scientific savvy and techno-wizardry changed from alienating hobbies to liberating forces. Netizens now dreamed of being one of the "two guys in a garage," hammering out the next lucrative breakthrough. Reflecting the rise of commerce, Netizens began defining themselves as Libertarians, but few truly embraced the ideology beneath this title. The anarchist myth remains online culture’s dominant narrative, and this helps explain Napster’s popularity.
The Napster movement flourishes precisely because the company’s battle, a storybook scenario, offers this narrative a powerful, symbolic climax. The main character, company founder Shaun Fanning, is a handsome whiz kid who left college to write Napster’s source code – the hero every Netizen dreams of becoming. From the Anarchist point of view, Napster is General Fanning’s war machine. His enemy, the record companies, have long been youth culture’s favorite icons of the evil establishment. Defeating them in the courtroom would have been a symbolic victory of the highest order, the formal triumph of the Internet’s oldest ethic.
Online culture’s obsession with this triumph, and the narrative beneath it, has spawned a cultural norm that is fundamentally anti-copyright. Anyone who supports copyrights is automatically labeled the Internet’s enemy. But in fact the opposite is true.
Intellectual property protections are far more than just establishment symbols. By providing incentives to invest and innovate, they are the foundation beneath the Internet’s commercial growth - they make the 90s dream possible. And copyright laws promote diversity of expression online by maintaining a legal framework that allows artists and composers to take credit for – and profits from – their work.
Reverence for Napster becomes irrational bias when it outshines these facts. The problem is, this bias reigns among even the most respected Internet advocates and commentators, who typically invoke two arguments in Napster’s defense.
First, that copyrights should not apply online because it hard to enforce them there. Second, that copyright laws limit incentives to create Napster-esque technologies, thereby hindering innovation. But a nation should never abandon key laws simply because citizens break them. And innovation would surely suffer more if copyrights were protected only until someone figured out how to profit from breaking them.
The Internet will – and should – always provide a safe haven to those who oppose these ideas. But, for the online realm to truly prosper, its leading advocates must escape the conformist pressures behind their opposition to intellectual property. Until we openly admit that respect for copyrights signals respect for the Internet, and not an opposition to it, online culture will remain hindered by its own damning contradictions.
Justin Matlick is a Senior Fellow for the Center for Freedom and Technology at the California-based Pacific Research Institute.
