h LaMacchia allegedly lacks? If a federal judge, experienced in copyright cases, can be moved by such contradictory ideas in the space of a single decision, what of the rest of the population? Although our government may never be perfectly democratic, the state of the laws and their effective enforcement still depends ultimately on genuine support by the broad mass of the people. How much is the general public going out of their way to actively cooperate in maintaining the old rules of the game? Does the person in the street even know what is going on with intellectual property? I have mentioned the lack of mainstream journalistic coverage of these issues; how many times have you seen a story about this on the evening news? One reason why few journalists cover intellectual property stories is because journalists, and their employers, don't want to give the public any more ideas than they already have about copying and distributing copyrighted material. Another reason, I think, is that they know the public really isn't interested. I can supply an anecdote from my own recent teaching experience. A month or so ago, I had my freshman composition students read a section from a book entitled New Media Technology: Cultural and Commercial Perspectives. The section that I assigned discusses several cyberspace issues; one portion, written for parents, runs: "Make sure that your child is not obtaining pirated material, such as digital recordings of copyrighted music or video. This is not only potentially dangerous but is illegal. If you do find pirated material, talk to your child about how he or she received it, and delete the files (Pavlik 383)." After we read that excerpt in class, I asked the students how many of them had ever talked to their parents about intellectual property in any way. No hands were raised. I knew from earlier discussions that most of my students have computers at home, and that even those who aren't home users still have ...
