Analogies Gone Wrong

As a columnist who writes primarily on technology policy, the last few weeks have left me feeling a little bit like a kid in a (somewhat repulsive) candy store. Harvard Business School (HBS) has categorically rejected the “vile hackers” who snuck an early peek at their admissions decisions, the blogger Nicholas Ciarelli has been asked by the California courts to reveal the names of his sources, at least one medical student is on his or her way to being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and lest the University Library feel left out of the copyright infringement loop, their celebrated digitization project being orchestrated with Google has come under fire as well.

I won’t discuss the details of each of these incidents, as I assume spring break has rendered the minds of most Crimson readers unable to remember anything the happened before it. Still, a cursory look at these stories unveils a trend in public interest in technology policy, one with potentially powerful ramifications: when people pay attention to questions of technology policy, they don’t do so by virtue of morals, or even idle curiosity. They do so because they are surprised to find that the rules that govern the world behind their computer screen simply don’t conform to their basic intuitions about governance and ethics.

Consider, for example, the recent notice of pending subpoena submitted to the associate Provost’s Office by the RIAA, mentioned in the Crimson on March 18th. It suggested that at least two cases of copyright infringement had been traced back to computers in the Longwood Medical Area, and that a request for the identity of the infringing parties would likely soon be filed with the courts.

What the RIAA would like us to believe is that the as-yet unnamed culprits are guilty of the equivalent of petty theft or shoplifting. But did we react to this story in the same way we would have if we found out that a handful of our peers had been caught walking into Tower Records and swiping a recording of a Bartok piano? Probably not.

I’d wager most Harvard undergrads have committed willful (and in most cases knowing) copyright infringement, and I can guess reasonably well by looking at the shared music libraries on iTunes that many people have done so quite recently (the collector’s edition of The Massacre by 50 Cent has only been out since the beginning of March, and I’m sure at least some of the half-dozen or so copies online weren’t actually purchased...).

No, Crimson readers weren’t afraid for Harvard’s reputation when they read that their peers were to be sued (dozens of our peer institutions have suffered similar fates). They were afraid for their own security: they wanted to know if this meant they themselves could be caught and tried.

Now, most all Harvard file-sharers could tell you right away that swapping mp3s is illegal, and some would likely go so far as to say that despite the fact that they do it, they believe it to be “wrong” at some level, perhaps because they fear it destroys the incentive model for creative works. But if Harvard undergraduates truly believe file-sharing to be wrong, and they do it anyway, this implies at some level that the only reason we don’t all walk into stores and take whatever we like is because it’s hard to do so without being caught.

I don’t think this is true. I think the reason so many people share files over the Internet with blatant disregard for the law is because they’re unable to internalize the reasons why these things are illegal. Downloading copyrighted recordings off Kazaa is too easy—too much a natural extension of the rest of our uses for the Internet and too far removed from any plausible impact on music industry sales (50 Cent probably isn’t starving). Hard as the RIAA might try, their ad campaign and their well-publicized lawsuits have simply failed to convince people that file-sharing is bad—instead, they’ve merely created a backdrop of fear over which these activities continue to take place.

It’s not just copyright, either: many have had a similarly dissonant reaction to the HBS admissions hacking incident of last month. All the now-Harvard-rejects did was guess at the address for a page that was already available on the net—it’s as if you had guessed the six-digit code number for this article and found it before it was linked to from the Crimson’s online front page (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, browse to this column or any other story on-line, and look to see what the address is).

HBS officials would like to frame this as the moral equivalent to walking into an apartment whose front door has been left open and rifling through papers left on a desk. But for people used to typing in strange web addresses all the time, it’s hard to see it that way. Instead, it seems to us that HBS had posted their admit list on a proverbial telephone pole somewhere in Cambridge, location undisclosed, and some curious applicants had gone out looking and stumbled upon it. Is such an action reprehensible? Is it worthy of automatic rejection?

The varied responses across business schools running this software are a testament to how complicated that question is. So are the conflicted feelings of undergraduate file sharers. We simply don’t have a clear picture in our heads of whether we equate these newly christened illegal or immoral actions with the older ones we’re more comfortable with. The battles over technology law and technology ethics that are becoming increasingly common as people do more and more business (and therefore have more and more conflicts of interest) over the Internet all more or less center around the ancient question of how to make new ideas fit into old frameworks. Perhaps if we all think through our presumptive analogies a little more thoroughly, we can begin to clear up the clouds.

Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.