By Yvette Wohn

Joel Tenenbaum was one of thousands, perhaps millions of teenagers. When he was 17, he allegedly downloaded seven songs from the Internet using a peer-to-peer file sharing program called Kazaa [Both parties appear to agree this is a downloading case, not (solely) an uploading case like many of the others]. Now, 10 years later, he is being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), along with Capital Records and Sony BMG. What does the RIAA want from Mr. Tenenbaum? $1 million.

But before we begin to think about the legal details and who is right or wrong, let’s think about why this is a problem. For starters, the current architecture of the Internet does not technically support copyright. It is different from controlled virtual environments such as Second Life, in which any object made by someone will forever contain the “watermark” of the maker. Items or programs in Second Life can be designated at birth whether or not they will be copyable or transferable.

That does not mean copyright has no meaning on the Web– only that the architecture of the Web makes it easy to exchange copyrighted material to a scale that cannot compare to what could happen in the physical world.

Is the Architecture of the Net Creating Problems?

These copyright issues are taking place because the creators of the Internet did not think like proprietary networks. As explained in Chapter 2, the people who designed the Internet were primarily academic researchers and corporate engineers who “had little concern for controlling the network or its users’ behavior.” When they first made the Internet, they probably had no idea that someone (actually two someones) would come along and invent a peer-to-peer file sharing program.

If the Internet were designed by the RIAA, they probably would have made it so that music would not be able to be shared by multiple people. We can make this assumption because one of the attempts made by the music industry has been to impose digital rights management, or DRM, on their products. DRM gives the media maker the authority to control what can and cannot be done with a song. For instance, a music file can be programmed so that it can only be played a certain number of times, or only on certain devices. While DRMs are increasingly fading, they still have a strong presence in much of the content available on online music stores like iTunes.

So what does that mean for an organization like the RIAA? It could continue its current mission of hunting down music downloaders/uploaders and suing them, hoping in the long run that this will discourage people from doing so. Or, it could look for an entirely different business model that still brings in revenues regardless of Internet file sharing. Or… it could try to change the Internet to one that is more controlled by requiring Internet service providers to impose filters.

That last scenario is something that concerns people like Charles Nesson, Harvard Law School professor and Mr. Tenenbaum’s legal representative. According to Prof. Nesson, the RIAA’s lawsuit against Mr. Tenenbaum is more about working to change the infrastructure to make control of content easier.

In the defense of the counterclaim he argues:

They do this, not for the purpose of recovering compensation for actual damage caused by Joel’s individual action, nor for the primary purpose of deterring him from further copyright infringement, but for the ulterior purpose of creating an urban legend so frightening to children using computers, and so frightening to parents and teachers of students using computers, that they will somehow reverse the tide of the digital future.

That is something we should think about. Will the Internet continue to run on the open infrastructure that it currently is? Do we, as users, have any say in what happens to it?