The Web is full of one-armed men
Part of me wants to be outraged at this new trend to blame websites for the criminal activities of some of their users. Part of me realizes that this is not a new trend.Joining MySpace, the poster boy for scapegoat websites, are YouTube and VampireFreaks.com, the latter of which is undoubtedly giddy at the attention spike. There's also a ridiculous bill working its way through Congress that would ban the access from school computers of any site allowing users to have profiles.
The problem with all of this if very simple: these sites have done nothing wrong. If someone posts a copyrighted video on YouTube, YouTube has not committed copyright infringement; the user who uploaded the video has committed copyright infringement.
Has YouTube provided a vehicle for the user to commit copyright infringement? Yes. And so have the group of people who got together back in the '60s to make a distributed computer network. And so has DARPA. And so have the people who created the hardware and software the person used to make the bootleg duplicate. And so on.
But each of these entities acted well within accordance of the law. The only law-breaker is the idiot user.
The VampireFreaks thing is even more ridiculous, and ZDNet ought to be ashamed for even running the story. The only "news" in this is that someone who went crazy and shot up a bunch of people happened to have a profile there. Oh! But so did some other couple (he was 23, she was 12) who shot up some people.
Of course the fact that the site's 624,307* other members have not shot anyone is deemed irrelevent.
It's the same argument — and the same flaw in the argument — brought against video games (those Columbine kids played Grand Theft Auto, you see), Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, and even movies when they were the new thing. And, like YouTube and MySpace, it always comes back to the same thing: it's the idiots who committed the crimes that require punishment, not their hobbies.
What I don't get is why it's become so easy for us to shift blame from the people who commit the acts. Is it because there's money to be made in it? Are the lawyers to blame? Is it because modern psychology makes it easier to accept that we are not in control of our own actions? Or is it simply that we refuse to believe our friends and family could actually be capable of such things?
* Figure based on the site's reported member base on its homepage as of 5:29 pm, Sept. 16, 2006.
posted by Smitty @ 5:45 PM
1 Comments:
It's alwways been easier to blame a game or music or whatever rather than the person involved. In a lot of cases, it's the parents doing the blaming. It's easier to blame something else than realize that maybe you messed up raising your kid.
In cases of a society problem, it's easier & cheaper to blame music or games or whatever than providing funding for programs that would deal with the real underlying problem (usually relating to poverty)
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