American Disease – And No European Cure

A federal jury ruled Thursday that Jammie Thomas-Rasset willfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs, and awarded recording companies $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song. That’s what most Europeans would call the result of the “American Disease”. Or, to put it somewhat more mildly, these are American circumstances we would want to keep away from.

And be sure that’s not because people in Europe don’t think about copyrights. It’s just that there is a strong opinion that punishment can be appropriate but should alwas be proportional. $80,000 for a song that’s worth 99 cents and for an act of which we all know almost every citizen has performed it, that’s somewhat bizar.

No, we do care about copyrights. Although Europe at the moment is in total confusion about it. What was very clear in the old printed days, now all is pretty diffuse. Copying songs, movies and games has become as easy as doing your laundry. And as we all know, ease makes a man eager. Even makes him do things that he wouldn’t have considered in the old days, just because back then he had to go into more trouble – and would have been more visible as a violator.

By the way, as in every other field, in copyrights-cases Europe doesn’t act united. Not at all it does. Yes, there is a European law that protects the owner of copyrights, but above (or next to) that, every country has its own regulations. Recently the French government filed a law in which copyright-violators would loose their internetconnection. A very clear law in the way that it perfectly matches crime and punishment, but it shamelessly ripped the violator from two of his most important citizen rights: freedom of speech and freedom of information. Americans would call it “European cirumstances you would want to keep away from”. So it was not a big surprise when, last week, a judge banned the law. The French will have to come up with something new to protect the songwriters, the moviemakers and the gamesproducers.

Just a day later, last Wednesday, a Dutch Parliamentary commission advised government to declare the act of downloading as illegal. Strange as it may sound, at this moment downloading a movie for free is legally accepted in the Netherlands. Even if you know – or should know – that the distributor of this movie doesn’t want to give it away for free. Any citizen can download any movie, any game and any song from any bittorrent. The only illegal act in this field is uploading the content. It’s pretty much the same as in the infamous dutch coffeeshop policy: people can buy marihuana in a coffeeshop (“for your own use”, i.e. up to a limited amount per visit), but the coffeeshop owner is not allowed to grow or to buy the stuff himself. As long as nobody cares to ask how on earth the drugs pop up in his shop, everybody is happy.

With its advise the Copyrights Commission tries to shoot a hole in the strong dutch tradition of tolerating everything that’s not hurting somebody else. “Soundstealing“, as they called the unwanted downloading, should legally be what it morally already is: a criminal act. But at the same time the Commission built in a strong nuance: downloading can only become illegal after the industry has come up with an easy-to-use system for paying for content, it wrote. Conclusion: more than a year of studying and debating has resulted in an advise that won’t be of any effect in the next couple of years. That certainty didn’t stop the opponents to overload the commission with a storm of criticism, ranging from principle to pragmatic, from “this is an insult to human right to free information” to “it won’t ever be possible to find the offenders”.

It resounds the outcome of a recent poll by the popular TV-newsshow Een Vandaag, which found out that 93% of the young Dutch are active in downloading music, movies and games. The vast majority of them doesn’t feel any guilt in doing that; even worse, they consider it a triumph if they can watch a movie that even hasn’t entered the cinemas.

No European wants to be infected by the American disease, but does any American have a clue what these Dutch and French worry about?