Intellectual property: it’s about the market, dummy!

This week saw two Spanish political parties try garner support to form a coalition government to break the stalemate that the December 20 general elections produced. Among the 200 or so points they agreed on was “the arts as the backbone of the country.”

So far so good, I thought, until I read their proposals.

Both parties, the Socialists and Ciudadanos, seem stuck in the mindset of the early 2000s. They equate physical property with intellectual property, along the lines of “You wouldn’t steal a car…” and, depressingly, are still focused on punishing people who download material from the internet, as well as “educating” school children of the evils of “piracy”. It’s as though they haven’t bothered to take the time to look at the world around them.

So I’ll take it on myself to explain a few things to the men and women who would seek to impose their outdated views on us should they take office. “Piracy” is only a problem for businesses that have failed to adapt to the digital age.

The reality of the world today is that hardly anybody downloads music from the internet. Why? Because if you want to listen to music you go to YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Apple Music, or any of the other myriad streaming services.

Here in Spain there is still a fair amount of downloading of movies, but that’s because Netflix has only just started operating here. In the United States and other countries where Netflix has been around for some time, downloading of television series and films is falling off steadily, and only applies to stuff that the networks don’t broadcast, or haven’t made available. At the same time, Spanish TV stations are now increasingly catching up, and it is possible to watch most of the big series or movies within a few days of their premiere in other markets.

Books? It has to be said that many in the Spanish publishing industry have yet to wake up and smell the coffee, and still charge too much for digital versions of novels, many of which were published half a century ago. The sector’s problem isn’t one of piracy, but failure to adapt to the times we live in.

Giving school children lectures about the evils of piracy is a laughable idea and only shows how outdated the thinking of some politicians is. Any school kid will tell you that if a movie has been released in, say, the United States, then it is insane to expect people to wait three months for it to be shown in Spain, and exclusively in movie theaters. It will have been made available online almost immediately, and so people will find it and watch it.

I find it astonishing that politicians still see the world in terms of hordes of people sitting at their computers downloading everything they can find on the internet, and that the answer is more laws, more repression. This country passed so-called anti-piracy legislation that was quickly dubbed the Sinde Law, after the hapless arts minister tasked with overseeing its implementation. What the next government of this country needs to do is to dismantle that legislation before its starts being used for more sinister purposes. It won’t be torrent sites that will do away with the need for the Sinde Law, it will be market forces and the availability of other ways of accessing entertainment online that will persuade the public that downloading isn’t worth the hassle.

So can our next government, if we ever get one here in Spain, please stop this antiquated idea of pursuing the wrongdoers who are stealing intellectual property? We had a problem with downloads a decade ago, but since then solutions have emerged, and they have nothing to do with locking people up, fining them, or moral/ethical appeals; they have come from people like Daniel Ek, Reed Hastings, and companies like Apple, YouTube and many others. The entertainment industry’s problems are not going to be solved with yet more laws; it’s about the market, dummy!

(En espa?ol, aquí)