There is a big debate about how we can control digital piracy on the internet where films and music, games and software are being made available to the detriment of industry and jobs. A recent study indicated that such piracy within the European Union has already cost €10 billion and 185,000 jobs in 2008. That will rise to €240 and 1.2 million jobs by 2015. This has very serious implications for EU member states in terms of tax revenue and their ability to pay for public services.
So what is to be done? The easy part of the solution, at least in theory, is stamp down hard on the criminal gangs engaged in this piracy. If they have the advantage of hiding in the interstices of the worldwide web and are thus difficult to catch, they have the disadvantage of few friends to argue their case. While it might not be easy to catch them, as we have seen with the global tracking down of paedophiles on the internet, they can be caught.
If this were the root of the problem, it would be the case for intellectual property rights legislation catching up technological change and globalisation, with the backing of legislators at national and European level. Unfortunately, this is not where the problem starts and ends.
We have to contend with peer-to-peer file sharing, where internet friends exchange music, films games and software – invariably on a non-commercial basis. Each individual act is insignificant, but the collective impact is not. More importantly, many of those doing all this are children. The pressure is thus to exclude this innocent criminality from the rigours of the law, even though it threatens to destroy the very culture it celebrates as the film and music industries are hollowed out from within. The consequence of a laissez-faire approach to protecting vital industries and infrastructures has proved to be devastating in the past.
A striking example of this is Easter Island, where members of a thriving and successful community managed to drive it to bare subsistence and the edge of extinction by uncontrolled deforestation in the interest of culture, leaving themselves surrounded by ocean for thousands of miles without enough wood to build fishing boats.
The numbers of the Easter Islanders peaked at close to 10,000 people before the crash that saw the population slump to between 1,000 and 2,000 when explorers arrived in the 18th century. The causes of the collapse are complex, but one major facture was the competitive carving, constructing and transportation of the “moai” monuments for which the island is so famous.
These monuments, of which there are nearly 1,000, meant food producers had to support more and more non-food producers, leading to the cutting down of forests to provide more arable land. Added to this was the requirement for vast quantities of wood to construct the sleds the statues were moved on and the rollers to underlie these sleds.
The result was deforestation, leaching, soil erosion, wind damage, increased evaporation and the reduction of crop yields. With the loss of large timber reserves, deep-sea fishing was abandoned. This whole process involved uncontrolled individuals and groups cutting down trees that individually were of no consequence.
However, the loss of trees in their thousands over long periods of time led the Easter Islanders to the situation in the 18th century where the downward spiral of regression meant living was so precarious that when a child was born someone over the age of 60 was put to death.
On a much less serious level, the Victorian and Edwardian fern craze in Britain had initially unforeseen but ultimately significant consequences. An individual taking a fern has little consequence, but many thousands of people coming back time and again threatened to turn leafy glades into deserts and drive rare ferns to extinction– which is what happened. The result was by-laws were passed, legislation against damaging public property was used and rewards were offered if offenders were caught. In 1896, two fern pirates were sentenced to four and six weeks’ hard labour respectively.
The fern craze died out, but Easter Islanders today live among the ruins of their ancestors’ accomplishments. It shows us what can happen when we fail to act against apparently innocent criminality. Individual actions that seemed benign at the time inevitably can have the most collective consequences later.
No one knows what the Easter Islander said in his defence when he chopped down the last tree. But If we don’t take action against “innocent” peer-to-peer file sharing, we may yet hear the excuse of whoever illegally downloads illegally the last commercial film.
Glyn Ford is a former Labour MEP
