Intellectual property in the face of an increasingly digital world is a hot topic--and a complex one. Intellectual property is not the same as real property, but we've often tried to treat it as if it is. This was not an issue when there were limited ways of distributing the product of intellectual property (books, recordings, etc.), which were real, physical property and were either difficult to copy or cheap enough that they weren't worth copying. Now, we're entering an age where not only is it easy to copy intellectual products, but the ease of copying and sharing is a critical part of intellectual discussion and cultural sharing (this aspect, I think, is one that corporations involved in intellectual property discussions overlook--unlike the 'piracy' rhetoric, much 'stealing' of intellectual property isn't about money).

Currently, several organizations, including but not limited to the RIAA for record producers, are attempting to maintain their current, more or less analog, business model through litigation and legislation. How's it working? Fred von Lohmann of the EFF has a very interesting article at law.com on the effect that RIAAs litigation against file downloaders has had on file sharing:

...The campaign, coordinated by the RIAA, was a last-resort maneuver by the industry to stem the tide of P2P file-sharing, which had reached mammoth proportions. In fact, some estimates put the number of American music swappers at 60 million -- that's 9 million more than voted for President Bush.

Unfortunately, the evidence thus far suggests that the RIAA litigation campaign has had little, if any, effect on P2P file-sharing. Companies like Big Champagne and BayTSP that track the online P2P population have found that the number of U.S. file-sharers continues to grow. The global file-sharing population, moreover, is skyrocketing. A survey of Internet users undertaken by the Pew Internet and American Life Project did show a marked decline in file-sharing in the months following the highly-publicized first rounds of RIAA lawsuits, but Pew's follow-up reports have documented a rebound in the months since.

....

So what about the "carrot" of authorized music services like Apple's iTunes Music Store? In the words of the RIAA, the lawsuits are also intended to "encourage music fans to turn to these legitimate services." Well, the news there is not terribly encouraging, either. While the authorized music services are attracting a modest number of customers, it is also clear that they together account for a trivial percentage of the total number of digital music files being downloaded today. In fact, it is fair to say that all of the authorized music services together do not yet amount to a drop in the digital music-downloading bucket. Apple, the most successful of all the authorized music services, sold a total of 100 million downloads in its first 15 months of operation. This sounds impressive until it is held up against the 5 billion files that move across the Kazaa network every month.

I don't want to quote the whole thing, but there's also some interesting information about alternatives to the make-them-all-criminals approach to providing fair compensation for intellectual property (and, by the way, I think this is critical--it doesn't have to be about absolute protection of intellectual property. In an ideal world ideas and discussion of ideas would be freely shared and authors and other creative artists would be fairly compensated in ways that encouraged more ideas and discussions of ideas were freely shared).

...via BoingBoing