Our parents were taking liberties for granted in their analog world, liberties that are not passed down to our children in the transition to digital \u2014 such as the simple right to send an anonymous letter.<\/p>\n
Sometimes when speaking, I ask the audience how many would be okay with sites like The Pirate Bay, even if it means that artists are losing money from their operation. (Do note that this assertion is disputed: I\u2019m asking the question on the basis of what-if the assertion is true.) Some people raise their hands, the proportion varying with audience and venue.<\/p>\n
The copyright industry asserts that the offline laws don\u2019t apply on the Internet when they want to sue and prosecute people sharing knowledge and culture. They\u2019re right, but not in the way they think. They\u2019re right that copyright law does apply online as well. But privacy laws don\u2019t, and they should.<\/p>\n
In the offline world, an analog letter was given a certain level of protection. This was not intended to cover just the physical letter as such, but correspondence in general<\/em>; it was just that the letter was the only form of such correspondence when these liberties were drafted.<\/p>\n First, the letter was anonymous.<\/em> It was your prerogative entirely whether you identified yourself as sender of the letter on the outside of the envelope, on the inside of the letter (so not even the postal service knew who sent it, only the recipient), or not at all.<\/p>\n Further, the letter was untracked in transit.<\/em> The only governments tracking people\u2019s correspondence were those we looked down on with enormous contempt.<\/p>\n Third, the letter was secret<\/em>. The envelope would never we broken in transit.<\/p>\n Fourth, the carrier was never responsible for the contents,<\/em> of nothing else for the simple reason they were not allowed to examine the content in the first place. But even if they could, like with a envelopeless postcard, they were never liable for executing their courier duties \u2014 this principle, the courier immunity<\/em> or messenger immunity<\/em>, is a principle that dates as far back as the Roman Empire.<\/p>\n These principles, the liberties of correspondence<\/em>, should apply to offline correspondence (the letter) just as it should to online correspondence. But it doesn\u2019t. You don\u2019t have the right to send anything you like to anybody you like online, because it might be a copyright infringement \u2014 even though our parents had exactly this right in their offline world.<\/p>\n So the copyright industry is right \u2013 sending a copied drawing in a letter is a copyright infringement, and sending a copied piece of music over the net is the same kind of copyright infringement. But offline, there are checks and balances<\/em> to these laws \u2013 even though it\u2019s a copyright infringement, nobody is allowed to open the letter in transit just to see if it violates the law, because the secrecy of private correspondence is considered more important than discovering copyright infringements<\/em>. This is key. This set of checks and balances has not been carried over into the digital environment.<\/p>\n