A Crisis of Content

Jim Hedgepath, president of Pegasus Originals, was vacationing in the Rockies last summer when he got a tip-off via e-mail. Internet users were flocking to a new website and furiously downloading his artists' copyrighted work for free. The site shut off the downloads when Hedgepath threatened to sue. But within days the same bootlegs were circulating on an underground, members-only site. All this easy Internet piracy made Hedgepath despair for the future of his craft. "Many artists have gone, and many more will go," he sighs. "I've talked to a lot who are looking for something else to do."

Something, that is, other than designing cross-stitch needlework patterns.

Hedgepath's company doesn't deal in music, as so many injured copyright holders do these days. It sells ornate stitching patterns, and the files that are being traded Napster-style are templates for hobbyists looking to make pillows decorated with cuddly dogs and flowery pastoral scenes.

Duplicating patterns may not seem like a terrible crime. Your mom may even have copied one or two in her time rather than pay a few dollars each to buy them from companies like Pegasus. But pattern pirates are on the loose on the Internet, and the middle-age crafts crowd has begun to demonstrate the same deeply held sense of entitlement felt by 17-year-old Limp Bizkit fans downloading free MP3 tunes. When Hedgepath challenged the piracy of one outfit, brazenly named PatternPiggies, the online postings in response were downright defiant. Shouted one user: "Ladies, this is war, and I'm out for blood."

Make no mistake: the implications of the peer-to-peer file-sharing movement that Napster pioneered go way beyond pop music. There are already Napster-like services for videos and full-length feature films. Books, blueprints, vintage comics and stock photos may be next in line. Even newspapers and magazines are worried. (Hey, you did pay for this article, didn't you?) The fact is--as the stitching-pattern makers learned the hard way--there's no corner of the so-called content industry, no bit of intellectual property, no idea, that isn't in danger of being Napsterized. "The hype is justified," insists Jupiter Communications analyst Aram Sinnreich. "Network file sharing has profound implications for the business model of the entire entertainment industry."

Epic battles loom in a war that will stretch from courtrooms to boardrooms and back. On a practical level, the conflict is being fought, as Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig has observed, between two sets of "codes." There's the legal code, or set of laws, that could end up endorsing file sharing or driving it into the criminal underworld, and there's the software writer's code, or computer instructions, that can create programs for sharing copyrighted information or encrypt files so they can never be shared.

And the gladiators themselves? They tend to adhere to one of two rival information-age ideologies: the info-anarchists' rallying cry that "information wants to be free" or the entertainment industry's insistence that content creators must get paid or there will be no new art to download.