Gunning for a Take Down

Ed Felten has a clever post on the strange intersection of Second Life and copyright law:

Alice designs a spiffy new hot air balloon that everyone covets. Bob uses CopyBot to make his own replica of the balloon, which he starts riding around the skies. Alice discovers this and sends a takedown notice to Second Life. Bob’s balloon is then “taken down”–it disappears from the world, as in the classic cartoon Duck Amuck, where the animator’s eraser plays havoc with Daffy Duck’s world.

But surely Bob isn’t the only one riding in a copied balloon. Others may have CopyBotted their own balloons or bought a balloon copy from Bob. It’s tedious for Alice to write and send a takedown notice every time she sees a copied balloon.

What Alice needs is a takedown gun. When she sees an infringing balloon, she just points the takedown gun at it and pulls the trigger. The takedown gun does the rest, gathering the necessary information and sending a takedown notice, dooming the targeted balloon to eventual destruction. It’s perfectly feasible to create a takedown gun, thanks to Second Life’s rich tools for object creation. It’s a gun that shoots law rather than bullets.

Felten goes on to explore the ramifications of the development of such a gun. He concludes that “when copying is easy, laws against copying are very hard to enforce.”

Our copyright system depends crucially on the existence of certain frictions that are characteristic of the physical world. Lending a book to a friend is easy, but making him a copy is hard. In the 20th century, copyright law worked in concert with these frictions to discourage certain disfavored behaviors. The system could afford to turn a blind eye to certain kinds of casual copying and sharing (such as making photocopies of book pages or mix tapes from CDs) because they were sufficiently inconvenient that people tended not to do them on a large scale even if it were legal. We couldn’t stop most of that copying if we tried. Copyright law really only restricted the small minority of people with the resources and determination to make copies on a commercial scale. This worked well: the law stopped large-scale, commercial pirates, while technological constraints and social pressure kept casual copying to an acceptable minimum.

As technological progress removes the frictions of 20th century technologies, this neat distinction between the commercial and the personal is collapsing. Everyone now has the technical ability to distribute a million copies of a book, song, or movie to people all over the world. And people now have the ability to easily copy new categories of creative works, such as Second Life objects, that didn’t even exist when the laws were written. Rules that used to only apply to a tiny minority now apply to everyone. Not surprisingly, it hasn’t proven to be a very good fit.

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