Is that an iPod in your pocket, or are you just trying to rob me?

I hate to say it, but the age of copyright is over. As a journalist, I'm supposed to exhibit frothing-at-the-mouth enthusiasm for copyright protection, printed media, and other things that will soon only exist within the Library of Congress. But as Dave Barry once pointed out, there's no point in pursuing the demographic of "people who are dead or older."

I'm biased, maybe because I have a rap sheet. I recently faced a serious complaint under the DMCA, which, for those of you who aren't in the criminal know, stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA is what happens when Congress monkeys with the Internet. It's also the infamous law being used to prosecute college students across the country for distributing illegal copies of copyrighted material. When my case came up, I uninstalled all the offending software (some of which had been running without my consent) and swore, ala Frances Willard, that I would "never touch the stuff again." Which I'm willing to do, to stay out of the clink.

However, let me just get one point across. When I first entered the world of downloading, there was no iTunes. The only way to get music was to convince my parents to drive me round to Best Buy and drop $15 on a CD. And $15 was the cheap end of the scale - new CD's cost as much as $24. Record companies, confident in their monopoly power, had been fixing prices with the enthusiasm of the Wal-Mart Price-Slashing Smiley. In economic terms, this is a market failure, and perhaps illegal downloading began when one brave student took on the mantle of Adam Smith and decided it was time to do something with his invisible hand. The truth is, I was drawn to it because it was cheap and easy - the values our generation lives by. But when I was 14, I never bought CD's. By downloading music, I got to sample artists, periods and styles I had never previously known. My world expanded because I wasn't tied to the all-expensive CD. Online downloading decreased the risks associated with musical diversification, and increased the odds of it ocurring. I bought more music, rather than less, because of downloading. And this is what the IRAA still fails to understand.

I did an interview today with the director of a Rwandan nonprofit. This consortium of moviemakers puts all their product online, for free, with no copyright protection. And after a moment of shock, I realized that their strategy was genius. In the world of viral marketing, media is information, and its power (and selling ability) lies in how easily it can be distributed. This strategy brings more, rather than less, attention and money to the cause. The same is true for music downloading. It has created a fan base for artists who might never have attracted a second glance in the era of big-budget CD's. It has brought music to the masses, who couldn't afford it before.

But then again, maybe that's just what the record companies fear. The diversification of the music-making and distributing process. They know their profits depend on a narrowly-defined intellectual monopoly. The truth is, I never stole anyone's intellectual property. I deprived them of their rightful profits. But I never claimed to have written or performed "Genie in a Bottle," or any other ballad that went through my machine. In fact, the value of the product came from the fact that Christina wrote it. Illegal downloading might make the real theft of ideas more recognizable, rather than less, since it ensures a wider spread of information.

The Internet has turned the little guy (the downtrodden consumer, etc) into the commercial decision-maker. It's a shift in power that most large corporations can't handle, and I don't blame them. But in my opinion, they will have to learn to leverage profits differently. I have seen the future, and it is open source.