Are just some of the stupid claims made by the Federation against Copyright Theft in the past. And when you [are a powerful group of people with the resources to employ very clever people and] trot out arguments that are downright stupid I feel that you damage democracy, which I value more than a pop star’s bank balance.

Piracy funds terrorists in the same way lots of businesses do. If that were really an objection we’d stop buying oil. Mind you, the basis for the claim made by the FACT relied on a couple of Sikh’s who sent money home to seperatist groups in India and a handful of people in Northern Ireland. Terrorists? Yes. People who will destroy our way of life. Hardly. This is a misleading attempt to associate pirate videos with al Qeada.

And, of course, all these ‘piracy funds this or that’ smears falls down when we talk about downloading.

Downloading asks us to question the very ideas of intellectual property. This is not to say that I disagree with the idea, but I do think that it is patently clear (and if it is not check out my blog as I intend to post on this sson – as in over the next month or so) that IP is not property in the same way as a car or any other material object is. First, there is the point of IP being infinitely duplicable in an electronic world. Then, there is the point that IP does not work in a free market just like cars – they have a cultural value that is not attached to objects. There is the idea that a free market works to push down prices by comparing like objects. Objects of IP are by definition unique. One film is quite unlike another in a way that two batches of coffee are not. Thus, films, if they are to be considered anything other than commodities (and if they are simply considered commodities, then their defence as IP loses much of its moral weight), it does matter whether I see Star Wars or The Last Starfighter. The first is an important cultural product that cannot be replaced by watching The Last Starfighter, Krull or Battlestar Galactica. Just as, when I went into HMV to buy a CD, no matter how many CDs I buy from their bargain bin, it does not equal not buying Gang of Four’s Entertainment! because it was £15.99. And this the rub, if I want to experience the cultural product – and I do need to read, listen to, or watch that particular one – I need to pay the price requested. The market does put pressure on the pricing, but obliquely. Considering this, and the value of cultural products to society (it doesn’t matter if I own an Ikea table or a designer table – at least, not in the same way it matters if I have read, say, Slaughterhouse 5 or a fifth rate imitator which came at half the price), I don’t think that IP can be considered in anyway identical to property and the analogies should be dropped.

That IP is quite unlike physical property was made by industry itself when they proposed a levy on second hand books. They are quite right, if I buy a second hand book that benefits the author or IP holder no more than if I downloaded it or bought a pirate photocopy. The same is true of music or films.

There is also an element of commonality in IP that is part of our popular culture – culture does shape society and people should have access to these objects. That most peopele do have access is not really the point here, but what is at issue is the idea that IP holders can control its use, potentially, in a future of the self-erasing download market (don’t think that this isn’t a dream of the music and film business), allowing cultural products that have shaped society to be retrospectively withdrawn.

That they are not is a sign of their misleading attempts at argument. Copyright ‘theft’, incidentally, would imply that I have taken the copyright from its owner. That is not what I have done when I copy a CD. I have infringed copyright, but stolen? Evidently not.