DFC Report on Defending Public IP Rights
As I promised earlier, here's a copy of the report prepared for the
Digitial Future Coalition by Belden, Russonello, & Stewart: "
Defending Your Right to Read, Listen and Experience in the Digital Age" [104k MS Word .doc].
The report covers a series of focus groups on how the public understands IP issues and suggests a message strategy. Briefly put, the researchers found that whoever defines the core values in the debate tends to sway general public opinion. So, for example, the articulation of P2P as "piracy" defines the issue in terms of both ethical and legal wrongdoing. (Johnny Depp's performance aside, pirates don't tend to get a lot of public empathy.) So, in general, if the P2P issue is defined as "piracy," the core values involved in that definition make it difficult to argue against crackdowns on music "pirates." So when the issue was framed as piracy or property theft of music, people tended to view the activity negatively. As one focus group participant from Southfield, Michigan said,
I don’t think you have a right to be stealing other people’s property. Its like going in and taking something off a rack, it doesn’t belong to you.
At the same time, the report suggests that it's possible to rearticulate the argument in ways that support a different set of social forces. As a man from Grain Prairie, Texas put it when the issue of Constitutional rights was raised (in the context of eBooks, I believe),
The laws are already in place and America is the land of the free. This infringes upon my Constitutional rights.
Here's a summary of the key recommendations. But the report itself is worth reading (particularly if you're interested in rhetorical research):
- Appeal to values of freedom and fairness.
- Expose the motivations of media giants.
- Inform these participants of real departure from traditional copyright laws represented by the new laws and proposals relating to digital material.
DFC, btw, is (as you might have guessed), a coalition representing a very large and often unrelated organizations interesting in protecting the public's right to key IP issues. A full list of member organizations is
here, but among others it includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Library Association, the National Writers Union, the American Association of Law Libraries, Conference on College Composition and Communication, National Council of Teachers of English, and more (I attended as a rep from the last two groups).
Posted by johndan at April 28, 2004 02:14 PM
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