The Generation of Digital Thieves
The Deutsche Content Allianz—a coalition including Germany’s public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, the GEMA (Germany’s music licensing authority, which operates with the enthusiasm of a medieval toll collector), the book trade association, and various music industry bodies—published a letter in early 2012 calling on the German government to sign ACTA without further delay. Buried in that letter was a phrase that lodged itself in my head and stayed there: they described people like me, and everyone else who uses the internet in the ordinary way, as a generation that has been sent into the world of the internet without any sense of wrongdoing about digital theft.
Criminals. That’s what we are, apparently.
ACTA—the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement—had been negotiated in near-total secrecy for years. When details finally surfaced, protests broke out across Europe: hundreds of cities, tens of thousands of people in the streets, including coordinated demonstrations across Germany the same weekend the Content Allianz published their letter. The timing was either spectacularly oblivious or deliberately confrontational. I can’t decide which reading makes them look worse.
The industry’s line was that ACTA simply codified existing law—no change, just harmonized enforcement across borders. Jürgen Doetz of the private broadcasters’ association made this argument with apparent sincerity, seemingly unaware of how suspicious it sounds. If it changes nothing, why negotiate it in secret for years? Why the urgency to sign before anyone reads it carefully?
What ACTA actually threatened was to turn ordinary internet behavior into actionable infringement: sharing a photo you didn’t take, posting a video where a song plays in the background, quoting text at length. Things every person with an internet connection does every day without thinking, because they’re not actually harming anyone. Research from Wellesley College and the University of Minnesota had already demonstrated that film piracy had negligible impact on box office revenue—and that what impact did exist was almost entirely explained by international release delays. People downloaded movies because they couldn’t watch them legally in their country yet. Close the release window gap; you mostly close the piracy gap. But that would require adapting to how the internet actually works, which the content industries have never shown much interest in doing.
What the Content Allianz wanted—and what ACTA would have given them—was the restoration of a control they lost when the internet arrived, dressed up as consumer protection. They wanted to be able to threaten, audit, and pursue ordinary users as a deterrent. They wanted platforms to police content on their behalf. They wanted the leverage back. Cultural diversity, which they cited as their central concern, had nothing to do with it.
What I actually wanted, then as now, was a proper fair use doctrine—something equivalent to what exists in the United States, where quoting, commenting, remixing, and transforming copyrighted material is recognized as culturally valuable rather than treated as a default offense. The Netherlands were already moving in that direction. The Netherlands have always seemed to understand what the internet is for. Germany was moving the other way.
ACTA died in the European Parliament that July, voted down 478 to 39. The internet had a good afternoon. The same coalition has since reappeared under different names with different acronyms, making variations of the same argument. The fight doesn’t end. But for one vote in Strasbourg, the score was: the generation of digital thieves, 478; the people who called us that, 39.