Pirates of the Digital Millennium
How the Intellectual Property Wars Damage Our Personal
Freedoms, Our Jobs, and the World Economy

By John Gantz and Jack B. Rochester
Financial Times Prentice Hall

Chapter Descriptions

Chapter One, Are You a Digital Pirate? – an overview of the ideas and social situation regarding the licit and illicit use of copyrighted intellectual property. One key point: Technology has raced past current laws and practices regarding intellectual property. We need to come up with some solution that fits ALL sides.

Chapter Two, Is it Copyright or the Right to Copy? – an entertaining history of copyright beginning with monks in the European Dark Ages and extending to the present. The issues are not new. Book pirating in England in the 1700s, the 100 years the US sanction book piracy, sheet music piracy in 1900 all played the current conflict out in advance.

Chapter Three, Us Against Them?, explores the war over intellectual property use, providing a fair and balanced perspective of all the competing camps. It's the scorecard—the playbook—of the conflict. See how it was that Apple enraged the content industry with its rip.mix.burn ads, and how the music industry has angered ISPs.

Chapter Four, Inside the Corporate Intellect: A Day at Microsoft, explains just what goes into software development, in terms of human intellectual capital and corporate resources. Next time you think how cheap it is to make a CD, remember this chapter and that the aluminum and plastic disc is a very small part of the cost of a CD.

Chapter Five, Inside the Sausage: The Making of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, sets out what led to the creation and passage of this piece of legislation, which has caused one of the most pitched battles between copyists and capitalists in the history of copyright. Does this law, passed in haste during Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, create more problems than it solves?

Chapter Six, Global Fallout, explores the worldwide effects and aftereffects of digital piracy – which may, in fact impact the pirating economy even more than the exporting economy in the same way that pirated novels from England impacted the fledgling US literature market in the 1800s.

Chapter Seven, Dude, Where’s My MP3?, focuses on youth, for whom access to the Internet is seen as an ordained right and anything on it as fair and free game. Yet much of today's downloading activity is actually innocent; Napster didn't start out to change the world and topple industries.

Chapter Eight, Eliot Ness or Keystone Kops?, looks at the attempts to stem the tide of international piracy and download thievery. Real counterfeiters can make more money moving CDs than drugs, but the enforcement agencies are hampered by technology and lack of institutional will. But when the trade associations get into the act sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

Chapter Nine, Angel on my Shoulder: What’s in It for You, asks you to examine your own beliefs and ethics – but the ethics are not black and white. Our survey tells you where respondents place music and movie downloading on the scale of right and wrong. Media companies need to understand WHY they have such a poor reputation with downloaders before they can come up with a solution.

Chapter Ten, Through the Fog: The Future of Intellectual Property, sums up what we’ve learned in the previous nine chapters, and extrapolates from that some real solutions to the problem.