Columnist David Pogue relates an entertaining anecdote today in the NY Times about an encounter with drug-sniffing dogs in an airport bathroom. Actually, on closer reading, it’s more about how the baby boomers have a fundamentally different outlook on file-sharing and copyright law than their kids. Apparently while describing the various shades of copyright “violation” — copying a disc you own, copying a disc from the library, downloading because you’re cheap, etc — he got a completely different response from the young ‘uns.
While the oldsters were divided on some of the situations as to whether it was morally wrong to do such a thing, the kids were nearly unanimous in thinking that there was almost no situation in which copying was wrong. Pogue was alarmed by this and seemed afraid of what the effects might be when this morally bankrupt generation makes up the entire consumer base. Well, hopefully, by then we will have done away with a copyright scheme set up to perpetuate obsolete business practices and it won’t be so shocking to want to make a copy of something.
The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality [The New York Times]