Digital piracy and plagiarism of intellectual property continues to grow around the world, yet copyright investigations and industry enforcers are losing ground.

Of Digi-shamateurs and 21st Century Pirates
The lounge, bedrooms and garage were stacked to the ceiling with many thousands of jewel cases containing music and software CDs when federal police investigators recently raided the house in a leafy suburb of Perth. The bathroom contained a shrink-wrap machine and an array of CD and DVD burners. Just another news story of yet another massive cache of pirated digital wares. The 'proprietor' had long fled long and has probably set up shop elsewhere since. Demand for digital content continues to rise. Supply is short and prices for legitimate products high due to overpricing by protectionist industries. It's a shamateur's market.

Yet pirated media products on stored disk and sold under the table are merely the tip of the iceberg. Much more numinous and virtually uncontrollable is the dissemination of digital content on the Internet. An estimated 46000 pages on the Web are devoted to Warez and Crakz (terms for illegal software, serial numbers, codes and patches for disabling copy protection). People who access these sites are not members of a small, semi-criminal subculture; they are largely ordinary folk, teenagers, students, music and game buffs.

Industry and copyright owners of images, movies and music seem to be powerless in the face of the Web as the recent case of Napster illustrates. After a highly-publicised court case between the famous music file sharing service and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) its service has been severely curtailed. "That'll fix them", they said. Its users however simply dispersed to alternative services such as Gnutella and Morpheus where a similar free-for-all is on offer and whose infrastructures are more-or-less impervious to legal attack and shutdown.

Much energy and capital has gone into finding anti-piracy technology that works. Tricks such as deliberately encoding data errors into music CD's, digital watermarking systems, content scrambling schemes for DVDs as well as enforced online registration mechanisms have all but failed to control the markets. The fact is that whatever the technology, it won't be long before the Internet community finds a way to thwart these efforts. If something can be displayed or played back there will always be a way of capturing and re-packaging the content. Meanwhile traditional policy-making bodies such as the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) seem just as helpless in the face of the digital age. While well-intentioned guidelines exist there are few practical solutions offered in this camp, the distribution of copied content on the Web simply continues unabated.

Trumpets of Doom and Consumer Advancement
Looking at all this with a beady eye and projecting into the future, it seems as though entire industries are under threat, at the very least the entertainment, software, print publishing and educational sectors. All their distribution channels/professions are likely to be deeply affected as well. So what's going to happen to our material world order, our 'free' markets, our incomes and way of life? Does this market-killing network monster represent the 'New Economy' of "easy money" as it was so optimistically hyped only a few months ago, or could the New Economy hype inadvertently have foretold a new economic and cultural paradigm with much more serious consequences? At this stage we can only speculate what effects eliminating middlemen, distribution and marketing sectors may or may not effect. Imagine the demise of Hollywood, the abandoned tower blocks of EMI, MTV and Warner Brothers, the empty halls of Cambridge University (perhaps converted into a museum?). Replaced by broadband-delivered art house movies produced by yet unknown directors on frugal budgets, an infinite choice of new musical genres supplied directly by musicians AND of course armies of cyber teachers who work directly with their students from home. The benefits for the consumer aren't hard to project. Convenience, increased choice and significant cost savings.

Change, it's scary - it's natural
Historically we're looking at natural patterns. It's all happened before. Take the invention of the printing press for example. 'Artificial writing', as printing was derisively called in 1400, led unstoppably toward the demise of the all-powerful clergy and ended feudalism. The advent of the steam engine rang in the industrial age and replaced many professions previously thought to have been unshakably reserved for manual labour. Economic structures and alliances have shown to have finite lives too. Where is the Dutch East India Company today, how important are the hanseatic cities in contemporary Europe and how many people think of Loyd's Shipping Company when they wish to cross the oceans? Professions such as chimney sweeps, stonemasons, sugar cane cutters, slaves, punch card operators and typists are all but GONE in 2001! The percentage of monasteries that function as places of learning today is negligible, when only 400 years ago they were your only option of getting an education. Need I go on?

If history has shown one thing then it is that society, culture and markets are self-compensatory in response to change over time. Humanity prevails. It's up to us to keep our nerve and adapt. As Marshall McLuhan once wrote: "Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is consciously aware only of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superceded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world."

Educational Shifts
Until recently education was based on geographical location. So were its content and reference works. Learning was localised, based in culture and constricted by provincialism. Take 1960's Australia for example. If you lived on a cattle station in the outback you had to travel to Alice Springs to get access to a full set of encyclopaedia, by visiting the town's library. For deeper learning you had to travel the coastal big smoke and attend university. Content was stored in a print library and to get to the REALLY good stuff you had to make it past that stern-looking librarian that controlled the library's 'closed reserve'. If you were truly serious about a your chosen field even that wasn't good enough: to attain a wider perspective you'd have travel to another country by taking a three-week boat trip to perhaps visit the British Library or the Berlin Staatsarchiv. The Internet is changing all that. Access to information is inherently global. This permits education to be cross-cultural, independent of location and offers the scholar access to the full diversity of an expanding global knowledge base. The analysis of information by more people than ever before encourages higher quality information, which in turn fuels social and scientific progress.

The 'plague' of plagiarism
Many educators try to apply old hegemonic and educational concepts to these new reference principles. Unlike print, the nature of the web content is dynamic. The location of information can change overnight. In such a world the value of hyperlinked citations diminishes, in fact the value of linking a person to an idea diminishes. Actually the notion that it is important to know the author of an idea is a recent phenomenon. During the Middle Ages, for example, the scribe was more likely to be recorded than the author. On the Web anyone can be an author and today millions do just that. It is thus likely that we are returning to an era where the idea and not the person is of paramount importance.

In light of this we may also ask ourselves if there are good educational reasons for students to know who invented electricity or the idea of freedom? Is it not really more important to acquire, analyse and display these concepts? What value is there in writing essays paraphrasing and citing someone else's idea? If we think about it, the merit and origin of an idea is mostly separate, unless there is an overriding historical or political reason. If a student can locate, analyse and present an elegant solution to the task this may be enough to prosper. Employers are not interested in footnotes and breaking new ground is not dependent on a scientist's ability to cite.

Perhaps it will become a desirable skill that will eventually be taught, to be able to plagiarise elegant solutions rather than to create one's own inelegant solutions? And perhaps the ability to create elegant, unique solutions of one's own quickly will be the rarest and most highly-paid skill in the future. In some way this educational model is reminiscent of ancient Greece where the curriculum was based on skills-based Trivium (Grammar, rhetoric, logic) rather than the discipline-based curriculum that is currently in vogue?

To be sure, Luddites will be morally outraged by such ideas, since they change the very meaning of what it currently means to be educated. Yet seen from a historical perspective, in the end airplanes replaced steam ships and the effects of the printing press on education could not be stopped.

There is nothing to prevent you from copying this very article; of refining and developing its ideas. Copyright or not.