People don't obey laws that they don't believe in. I'm not claiming that they behave lawlessly, or that they'll steal whatever they can steal if they think that they can get away with. Most people try to comply, at least substantially, with what they believe the law to say. If they don't believe the law says what it in fact does say, though, they won't obey it - not because they are protesting its provisions, but because it doesn't stick in their heads.
In Digital Copyright, Jessica Litman explains that this is a very important fact which needs to be understood if we are to also understand why so many people download copyrighted music from the internet:
Governments stop enforcing laws that people don’t believe in. Laws that people don’t obey and that government don’t enforce get repealed even if they are good laws in some other sense of the word. The national 55 miles-an-hour speed limit, for instance, (had it been followed) would have conserved fuel and saved laws, but it wasn’t, so it didn’t, and now it’s history. Congress repealed it.
The reason people don’t believe in the copyright law, I would argue, is that people persist in believing that laws make sense, and the copyright laws don’t seem to them to make sense, because they don’t make sense, especially from the vantage point of the individual end user.
Is there any chance that the government will stop enforcing copyright laws that people don’t believe in and don’t pay any attention to? Not much — there are huge international corporations that have a lot to lose if copyright laws are loosened at all; no one really made money from the 55mph speed limit, so there weren’t enough powerful interest groups putting money behind efforts to retain it.
The nature of copyrights has changed dramatically in America over the past few decades. In the past, it was more a contract between creators and users: creators received limited rights to commercially exploit their works while users received broad rights to use and, eventually, also copy these works. Today, copyright is conceived on the model of intellectual property: a work that is created is “property” in some sense like a car is property and which the creator can retain broad rights to.
In reality, though, it is the media corporations which retain broad rights to the works — the creators are being pushed farther and farther into the background. Copyrights are about large amounts of money over many decades, and powerful people want to make sure that this doesn’t change. This is why corporations spend large amounts of money to get politicians to extend the length of copyrights every few years. So, while copyright laws may not make any sense to the average person and are difficult to understand even for copyright lawyers, it’s unlikely that the situation will change much any time soon.
Most people seem to believe that the copyright law draws a distinction between exploitation of a work for commercial purposes and consumption of a work for private purposes ... despite the fact that that’s never been the law, and despite eighty-five years of concerted educational efforts.
It’s significant, I believe, that people’s beliefs about the nature of copyright have persisted over the years despite all of the efforts to “educate” them (which should probably be described as propaganda). It’s almost like everyone believing that the speed limit is 75mph despite the fact that all the signs say 55mph and there are regular public service announcements on television and radio telling people that it’s 55mph.
As Litman says, people tend to believe that the law makes sense and will simply refuse to believe that the law says things which don’t make sense. It may be unlikely that copyright laws will change any time soon, but it’s also unlikely that people will change any time soon. The international corporations which make so much money off of copyrights will spend a lot of money to keep the laws the way they are, but they’ll lose in the end if most people persist in ignoring them.
Doesn’t it sound more rational, then, to try to craft laws which make sense and which people will actually believe?
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What they are actually hearing is the voice of that Dick Chaney, a/k/a Satan. Like when President Bush thought he was hearing the voice of God telling him it was OK to invade another country, it was really Chaney.
The above comment was for the daily poll, “Should we believe people…”
i see law as the quantification of the social contract (aka the rules most of us have agreed to live by). Alas, since lawyers make money by suing people and money influences politics, lawyers can make laws that have nothing to do with morality or reason. Not all laws, of course, are the result of that, but much of the system is designed to make lawyers richer. But that might be my own cyancism.
For a law to be worth a damn, the vast majority of the culture must support it. Virtually everyone supports the law of “don’t kill me and i won’t kill you”, so that is easily enforced. On the other hand strict drugs laws are futile because too many people think that smoking pot is ok for it to work. That’s not a judgement on the laws, just and observation.
Laws that protect greedy companies do not enjoy much support, they are strictly held up by those with power and money. Our copyright and patent system is seriously screwy and favors companies over creators.
We can see the phenomenon in other parts of law. If you owe money to a company, they can do all kinds of terrible things to you, if they owe you something… you’d be lucky to get anything out of them.
i obey the laws that i agree with or that i fear to be caught breaking. i don’t fear driving too fast or think it *wrong*, but i do fear speeding tickets. My speed is determined by the likelihood of getting caught and the traffic, not by the signs.
Law? What really it is???
Law is the leader of the right way it’s not controlling us. Every kind of laws: Natural law, Political Law, Science Law!!!>…..