ABOUT 10 pages in the middle of the S volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica in our school library were well-worn from much reading. When you closed the volume the tattered edges of those pages formed a thin brown line. The pages were, of course, the entries on sex. Teenagers will be teenagers. The librarian could hardly dismember (literally) the S volume after ruling that damaging books was a capital crime. Nor could he remove the whole volume, lest someone had an assignment on Scotland.
And that was before photocopiers would have made censorship attempts even more hopeless. Nowadays we not only have copiers, but the Net. There has been a fair amount of fear and loathing recently that teenagers will use the Net to get all sorts of smut. And the usual range of vote-trawling, knee-jerking politicians have demanded it stop.
The greatest knee-jerker of all, NSW Premier Bob Carr, said he would introduce the toughest penalties in Australia for using the Net to transmit child pornography. For an intelligent man Carr really does allow the latest base pop opinion to guide his conduct. Life for drug dealers, penalty auctions during election campaigns and so on. But huge penalties on the statute books do little to change conduct, especially if perpetrators know they have little chance of being caught. When it comes to the Net, enforcers are almost as helpless as our school librarian.
None the less they try. The US is about to pass a law providing two years’ jail for anyone sending any comment, suggestion, request, proposal or image which is lewd, lascivious or indecent. Three governmental inquiries have been launched into porn in cyberspace in Australia: the Senate Committee on Community Standards, Department of Communications and the Australian Broadcasting Authority. How do they imagine they can police anything but a tiny proportion of e-mail or file transfers? Customs pertinently bemoans that file transfers are transfers of information not goods. They cannot seize a series of ones and zeroes shooting down the phone lines.
True, there have been some arrests, but they have mainly been at the supply end, not the receiving end, presumably with police finding the source by disguising themselves as users. The arrests are very rare at the receiving end. A man was convicted in Western Australia of being in possession of child porn, but he was using a computer at work which made detection much easier.
And now to the central point of this essay. If it has been so difficult to do anything about obscenity in cyberspace when there is both public demand and political will (of sorts) to do something about it, how much more difficult is it going to be to deal with copyright breaches in cyberspace (stealing the intellectual property of others) when there is virtually no political will and the public foolishly does not care less.
Copyright should be a more pressing issue. Industry that depends on copyright represents between 3 and 4 per cent of the economy ($20 billion a year), almost as much as agriculture. But as computing power grows it becomes easier to replicate works … words, pictures and sound … and to make them widely available on computer networks without paying the creators of the works.
Experience over the past 25 years, particularly the past five years, indicates that waiting for solutions from the Government is a waste of time. Several major copyright issues have been hived off to committees. Changes the Copyright Act, when they come, invariably close stable doors after the technology has bolted. Protecting copyright through the courts invariably costs more than it is worth.
Historically, the best protections have been technological. CDs with their attractive superior sound and difficulty of copying were a better solution to illicit music taping than silly penalties. But the technology has marched on.
Unless a sensible combination of law and technology is found to give creators of works a decent financial return for their work, the result will be creators will stop creating, or worse, become totally dependent on government grants. That will create a far larger tear in the fabric of society than a few pervs and inquisitive kids looking at porn.