Paying the Piper Jaron Lanier's commentary on copying music files from the Internet ["A Love Song for Napster," February] is fundamentally wrongheaded. He holds up the big media companies as villains, but nothing could be further from the truth. Companies and artists have a right to demand payment for their work; denying them that right is stealing. Lanier seems to believe that just because technology makes something possible, it should be legal. That's a slippery slope. The idea that we should throw out several hundred years of copyright protection law because hackers can crack security codes is identical to the notion that we should throw out the concept of private property simply because burglars can break into houses and steal things. The appropriate remedy for illegally copying copyrighted material is to have music and video content covered as software under the 1997 No Electronic Theft Act. A few highly publicized convictions of particularly egregious offenders would squelch 90 percent of the behaviors Lanier presents as faits accomplis and preserve the right of creative people to be paid for their work.
Geoffrey James Hollis, New Hampshire
Jaron Lanier responds: I certainly do not propose that we abandon intellectual property law. The entertainment industry hopes for absolute control of information now that it's technically possible, while I argue for a nuanced balance of the kind we see in patent law: Artists would own the material and control its commercial use in exchange for sharing their output with the general public. This means you could listen to someone's music for free, but you couldn't include it in any commercial activity. Anyone who benefits financially from reusing someone else's materials would not fall into this category. Will there be any commercial music if files can be freely shared? Of course. Most of the time people will pay manageable fees or in some way engage in commerce in exchange for music without a lot of hassle. It's up to the market to find the right formula. I will say that many of my musician friends are doing better financially now because they are being forced to become more entrepreneurial, and it turns out they're good at it.
