I am writing in regard to The Bottom Line in the Friday, Feb. 6,2004, edition of The Daily Helmsman. I normally find these writingsto be witty and insightful about whatever issue is being discussed.Such was not the case today.
The issue at stake was the continuing legal battles theRecording Industry Artist Association (RIAA) continues to wageagainst file-sharing companies, Internet service providers andregular users. The first question I asked myself after reading bothDoug Blankenship's and Nick Swan's columns was whether these twowere RIAA employees or whether The Daily Helmsman itself wasstumping for the cause of the industry. Though not seeing adisclaimer from The Helmsman to what extent it endorses theopinions of its columnists, I will still offer the benefit of thedoubt.
What both columns utterly failed to address was the overallsignificance file-sharing now has in society and questions ofcopyright law. In fact, the only mention of law in any sense isgiven from an absolutist standpoint, with lectures on moralitythrown in for seasoning. Blankenship seems confident that theRIAA's legal actions will ultimately stop casual file-sharing by alarge number of people. In fact, his entire column seems to boildown to just a dire warning, comparing file-sharers to riotersfleeing before police. This is simplistic and, again, ignoring allfacets of a very complicated subject.
Swan, on the other hand, merely appears to sermonize us aboutmorality, setting up a series of unrealistic questions afile-sharer might face, which he then answers with the sameabsolutist and simplistic morality of Blankenship. He uses wordslike "rightness" and phrases like "gained the knowledge of rightand wrong" to spice up his lecture with a supposed air of moralcorrectness. While he invokes the U.S. Constitution asjustification for the deference to law, he ignores the fact thatthe Constitution is a work that had to be agreed on by a largeenough number of people to be valid. The same is true for all laws,hence the absurdity of an absolute morality existing outside thewill of the people.
As a student of The University and a daily reader of TheHelmsman, it is my hope there will be an effort in the near futureto present a more balanced viewpoint on the issues covered. Theblatant lopsidedness of these editorials is offensive to studentswho like to hear perspectives from all sides of an issue,especially one as controversial and difficult to explore as moderncopyright laws and their future.
Brian Ragle
U of M student
