On January 5th, the Sydney Morning Herald published a story titled, “Dial X for Optus.” The feature recounted the story, by now well known in Vanuatu, of how Optus collaborated with certain Pacific Islands nations to make tens of millions of dollars in profit from the pornography industry.

“The scheme,” wrote Vanda Carson, “allowed the telcos to bill customers premium rates for sexually explicit calls or X-rated downloads when they dialled the country codes” of many Pacific nations, Vanuatu included. “Optus was part of the partnership of telcos which acted as gatekeepers in the porn trade between the US and Europe and small Pacific islands.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Optus illegally appropriated 100 Vanuatu telephone numbers and kept all revenues generated by them.

None of that could happen today. With the creation of a functioning and effective Telecommunications Regulator, we now have proper oversight on how Vanuatu’s communications resources are used. The government of Vanuatu has made great strides in ensuring that all telephone operators manage their systems responsibly and efficiently.

Now we need to do the same for our Internet resources.

We don’t often stop to think about it, but telephone numbers, Internet addresses and domains names are all sovereign resources. The Australian body that handles the .au domain states things quite succinctly:

“Taking the view that the Internet Domain Name System is a public asset, and that the .au [domain] is under the sovereign control of the Commonwealth of Australia, auDA will administer the .au [domain] for the benefit of the Australian community.”

Here in Vanuatu, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Utilities is conducting a public consultation on these issues right now. At issue is how we in Vanuatu can ensure that the .vu domain is administered for the public good.

On one side of the issue, we need to make sure that businesses, organisations and individuals are all free to access and benefit from domain names that identify them with Vanuatu. On the other, we need to ensure that these resources maintain a healthy, positive reputation, one that’s consistent with Vanuatu’s image as a safe and friendly place.

The management of Internet domains has been something of an afterthought for many nations. In most cases, the technical challenge of making sure they worked properly and efficiently fell into the hands of a few well-intentioned, civic minded techies. In most cases, that worked well.

But there have been a few notable exceptions.

Jo Lim, policy director for the organisation that currently manages Australia’s domains, recounts the following history: Until the late 1990s, Australia’s domains were managed by Robert Elz, a Melbourne University computer scientist who managed it in a personal capacity and on a voluntary basis. Around 1996-7, people finally lost patience with this situation. They objected to Elz’s unilateral decision to delegate the management of the lucrative .com.au domain space to a company that was owned entirely by his employer. On top of that, non-profit organisations were not at all satisfied with the way he managed the .org.vu domain.

A decision was made, finally, for stakeholders to organise themselves and take over management of the entire package. But getting geeks to work together is sometimes like herding cats. In the end they needed some encouragement from government. Lim writes:

“Minister for Communications and IT, Senator Richard Alston, gave the go ahead for the then National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) to lend support to the industry in its efforts to establish a new organisation to manage .au. Note that industry self-regulation was the government’s stated preference, in line with concurrent reforms in the telecommunications industry. At first NOIE’s assistance was fairly low key, but after a couple of false starts it was considered necessary to become more hands-on. The government laid down a number of criteria that had to be met in order to ensure continued government support for industry self-regulation. NOIE also provided some funding and staff support to help the new organisation get established.”

Other countries weren’t so fortunate. In particular, the Chinese and Russian domain spaces have become hopelessly polluted by spammers, fraudsters and purveyors of viruses and other malicious software. Spam abuse from Chinese domains has become so terrible that some administrators of large-scale systems simply block all email originating from .cn (China’s domain name).

That’s an effective, but not very elegant solution. Ultimately, a billion people are being punished for the inaction of the people whose responsibility it is to look after the .cn domain.

We certainly do not want the same thing to happen here in Vanuatu.

It needs to be said that in recent years the .vu domain has been well managed by TVL. Indeed, as someone who works with the responsible staff on a frequent basis, I feel compelled to observe that the people responsible for the technical management of Vanuatu’s domain space are among the most efficient and professional of all of Telecom’s staff.

But here’s the thing: TVL has no formal mandate from the government to manage the .vu namespace. They took it on as a public service simply because nobody else was willing or able to do so at the time.

Now, with other Internet Service Providers ready to start rolling out their respective services, it’s time to start deliberating on how we want this sovereign resource to the treated. Most of the ground rules are pretty straightforward: We want everyone to be able to share equally; we want the process of sharing to be as simple and straightforward as possible. And we want to make sure that nobody abuses the resource.

Internet domain spaces like .vu are generally considered to be a Commons. The term comes from shared lands in England where villagers could graze their cattle. As long as everyone cooperates, all of their cattle thrive. But as soon as someone tries to get more benefit out of the resource than the others, the community at large suffers. Eventually, we arrive at a situation characterised by influential ecologist Garret Hardin in 1968 as the Tragedy of the Commons.

To date, Telecom Vanuatu has shown nothing but competence and responsibility in its management of the .vu domain. From a technical and ethical standpoint, their performance has been exemplary. But as we’ve seen from the Optus debacle, it only takes one short-sighted individual to sully the entire resource.

While we have every reason to believe that this kind of abuse will never happen again, it would be more comforting to be sure of it. There’s a difference between stating that something will not happen again and stating that it cannot happen again.

All that’s required to ensure this is a simple set of clear rules (the fewer the better) and the authority to enforce them. We already have the authority in the Office of the Regulator. Now the community at large needs to sit down with him and write the rules.

This week, the Australian government moved closer to implementing its controversial Internet Content Filter. The ICF represents the Rudd government’s latest attempt to curtail access to illegal or ‘unwanted’ online materials by requiring that all Australian Internet providers implement this filtering system. News sources report that the government has released the technical specification of its pilot implementation.

I’ve written before about the technical, ethical and legal problems surrounding this plan. I maintain that the system is ineffective and inappropriate, foisting a law enforcement role on the nation’s ISPs, and threatening free speech without providing sufficient protection from the very content it seeks to block.

With Internet deregulation on the horizon in Vanuatu, it seems timely to take a look at some of the basic issues underlying the debate.

At the core of the debate over access to Internet content is the issue of privacy. The question of privacy has a few particular wrinkles here in Vanuatu, where family-centric village life still dominates our culture.

There are two fundamental approaches to privacy in the online world. The first takes an individualistic, contractual approach. It states that all information pertaining to you is yours and yours alone, though you may choose to negotiate away some of your personal information in exchange for a given service. In this light, privacy is a desirable, valuable commodity; it’s up to the individual to ensure that they don’t give away too much of it.

I like to call this the American approach, because of its strong emphasis on personal liberty and responsibility.

The second perspective on privacy contends that the cat is already out of the bag. We live in a global community where information about us is available to any who chooses to look. If we accept that point, then the only things left to do are to make sure that nobody gets a monopoly on access to information and that everyone’s information if equally accessible. So if a nosy government wants to know everything about us, that’s fine, as long as we get to know everything the government knows. Proponents of this approach claim that this creates a culture of civility, because anyone who pokes his nose into others’ business will soon find his deepest personal secrets exposed as well. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

I call this the Japanese approach, because such a regime relies on mutual respect, restraint and conformity to function properly.

In the American approach, individuals must carefully guard their own personal information. But what happens if they don’t?

Suppose someone joins an online dating service, even though they’re already married. Let’s say they later run for political office. If it comes out that the candidate propositioned women in a discussion forum, well, too bad for him. He disclosed the information; now he has to live with the consequences.

On the other side of the issue, if our candidate contracts an STD, then goes online to order drugs to treat the condition, how should we treat his actions? Does his Internet Provider have a right to know this? How about the government? The American approach says no.

In this context, a content-filtering programme creates huge worries for individuals. In order to filter out the ‘unwanted’ material, a content filter needs to look at every URL you type in. It would be bad enough if the government were looking at this information, but in this case, the people with their eyes on the data would be private Internet Service Providers.

There is nothing stopping a low-level employee from watching this data simply out of prurient interest. In fact, this kind of abuse happens almost every time comprehensive surveillance is conducted. In a famous example, low-level staffers in the US National Security Agency would regularly listen in on romantic conversations between soldiers serving in Iraq and their wives at home. The practice became so common that some even created ‘Greatest Hits’ compilations of their favourites and shared them with other staffers.

The American approach contends that anyone who abuses a person’s privacy is liable to civil or even criminal prosecution. But how to police something like this? The American approach basically states that you are responsible for protecting your own data, but you should have powerful legal tools available if someone betrays your trust.

In order to act though, we have to know someone is spying on us. More often than not, all we have is someone’s promise that they aren’t.

At the other end of the privacy continuum, the Japanese approach to privacy states that personal information is only valuable to the extent that others are willing to respect it. It’s more a cultural approach than a legalistic one.

Let’s take the same example we used above, where a candidate tries to set up an adulterous liaison in an online forum. Everyone can see the information, but before they talk about it, they consider whether this site is considered a public or private space.

In an essay titled ‘Privacy and Paper Walls’, I wrote:

“In the past, most Japanese houses were made of wood and featured sliding doors made mostly of paper. They were useless, of course, for blocking noise or preventing willful intrusion, but they were extremely effective at establishing a distinction between public and private space. A couple in a crowded household might have a furious argument, for example, but if the fusuma, or sliding door, is closed, then as far as anyone in the adjoining room is concerned, the quarrel hasn’t happened.

“It’s hard to imagine how one could possibly ignore something so obvious, but consider the social transaction involved: If you agree to ignore what happens on the other side of the door, I will agree to do the same. Now consider the number of potentially embarrassing noises that could emanate between these spaces, and you’ll begin to appreciate just how useful such an agreement would be.”

Put in terms closer to home for many in Vanuatu: We should consider carefully the beam in our own eye before commenting on the mote in our brother’s eye. Who else uses that dating forum? How comfortable would it be for all of us if public attention were drawn to that site? If society collectively decides that the site should be subject to scrutiny, so be it. But it’s equally possible that people might choose to leave such information alone – no matter how much they might personally disapprove of it – because the public cost would be too high.

A dating site might not be a perfect example of a site people would prefer to consider a private space, but let’s go back to content filtering services:

If people find out that staffers were regularly watching what sites they access, the vast majority would disapprove, because even innocent information can prove dangerous. A woman who’d miscarried several times would not want anyone but her closest confidants to know that she was pregnant again, not because it’s wrong, but because discussing it would be too painful. Likewise, a devout Christian experiencing a crisis of Faith would not necessarily want it widely known. It’s perfectly normal that we should face such moments in our lives, but it’s not something most of us choose to make public.

The Japanese approach, therefore, relies on a social contract in which everyone respects everyone else’s secrets in order that their own remain protected.

It’s pretty easy to see how knotted and difficult privacy becomes in an online world whose very basis is cooperative information sharing. Whether we think that people should take care to protect their individual privacy, or that privacy should be protected through mutual discretion and respect, it’s clear that attempting to regulate online behaviour inevitably creates complicated, difficult and often troubling problems for everyone.

Whether we use online systems or administer them, or both, we all benefit from a minimalist, agnostic approach that avoids prying wherever possible.

As with all public content-filtering schemes, this idea is well-intentioned, but fatally flawed.

National content filtering is an inefficient and fundamentally faulty technical approach that deputises the nation’s Internet Service Providers to the role of neighbourhood sherriff, something they’re not at all comfortable with. Second, and more importantly, it creates a dangerous legal and moral precedent that is difficult to distinguish from the infamous Great Firewall of China, which is regularly used to stifle social and political dissent.

Indeed, a spokesman for the online rights group Electronic Frontiers Australia recently said, “I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world.”

The issue of content filtering is, on the face of it, appealing. The idea is that one should be able to block objectionable material in order to make the Web ‘safe’ for children.

In principle, that’s a commendable thing. Indeed, it’s the responsible thing to do in certain circumstances. The Vanuatu IT Users Society strongly supports the Ministry of Education’s decision to use content filtering software in its schools. Adults have a duty to take reasonable steps to ensure that their children aren’t endangered in any way, and content filtering is a useful tool in this regard.

But technology alone is not sufficient to protect our children. The number of websites producing content unsuitable for children is immense, and content filters simply can’t block all of them, even if they’re updated every day.

And content filtering comes at a price. One important shortcoming of this technology is that it often blocks perfectly legitimate material as well. Over-sensitive filters applied over-zealously often have absurd results. In one famous case, an online service replaced the letters ‘a-s-s’ with ‘butt’ and ‘t-i-t’ with ‘breast’ every time they appeared on their site. The result looked something like this:

“We have buttiduously canvbutted the industry, buttessed what is available and buttembled the finest selection of contractors for this buttignment. The filters will buttociatively clbuttify all communications and filter then, I can butture you, rebuttemble them with surpbutting exacbreastude in any quanbreasty.”

Jokes aside, content filters have their place, but it is not on public networks. In every pluralistic society, there will be a huge variance about what people consider acceptable and what they do not. To be sure, there are some things that all of us decry, but there are many more that we could never agree on.

Attempting to find a single set of rules to apply to an entire nation is a fool’s errand. It’s certain to create acrimony and accusations of censorship.

Whether intentional or not, there would be censorship, too. Content filtering systems typically mis-identify between 2 and 10% of all content. In strictly numerical terms, this means that millions of websites would be falsely blocked.

Studies conducted while assessing Australia’s national content-filtering scheme found that various candidate services slowed traffic down 18 to 78%. An individual school or household might be able to justify this kind of slowdown, but to enforce it on an entire population would unfairly jeopardise online business activity and make everyone’s surfing experience feel like walking waist-deep in treacle.

Australian Senator Steven Conroy angrily denounced concerns raised by opponents of the plan, saying “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.”

That’s a disingenuous argument at best. And it’s more than a little worrying that the very minister with the power to limit what citizens are allowed to see is so contemptuous of reasoned criticism. With a national content-filtering scheme in place, he would have the ability – and, he might say, the mandate – to block such dissenting views entirely.

The mere principle of the thing is troubling. In order to block illegal content, you have to see what every bit of traffic is doing. In effect, it’s like stopping every driver on every road, every day, just in case one of them is drunk.

Happily, such a thing can’t happen here.

Vanuatu’s constitution explicitly constrains the government from conducting illegal search and seizure. It cannot interfere in the lives of its citizens without cause. Creating a national content-filtering system here would be likely be found illegal, because it amounts to government inspection of all its citizens’ private communications. The Supreme Court would never allow the government to listen to every telephone call, to open every letter or even to read every postcard sent. Content-filtering on a national basis would be effectively the same thing.

In this age of technological innovation, it’s often difficult to fight the temptation to treat every challenge as a technical one. Information and communications technology has done much to simplify our lives, and has made some things possible that we only dreamed of before. It also creates any number of liabilities. It presents new threats to us on a regular basis.

Ultimately, we combat these threats as we always have. We look to ourselves and our community to protect our values, we try with every step to stay on the straightest road. We use our own good judgement.

And the one thing that computers will never possess is judgement. They can never take the place of a strong moral compass, that sense of right and wrong that we learned in the arms of our family, our church, our community. Any attempt to replace this fundamental good sense with a tool loaded up with any number of arbitrary rules is bound to fail.

Freedom comes at a price. We know that some people here look at pornography. We know that criminals conspire over the phone. We know that people write objectionable things to one another. But that doesn’t give us the right to treat the entire nation like potential crooks.

The vast majority of people are law-abiding individuals, and it’s one of the tenets of a free society that we assume every person is innocent until they demonstrate otherwise.

The people who manage our national infrastructure face the constant temptation to peer and poke into our communications, sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes not. But just because they can doesn’t mean they should. The desire to snoop is a temptation that must be resisted. I am sure that if it came out that one of our telephone companies were eavesdropping on our calls, there would be a national outcry. Listening in to a nation’s Internet communications is just as intrusive, and should be just as vehemently opposed.

On Tuesday the Daily Post published a Pacific News Service article about the Project Wickenby debacle, in which Vanuatu-based members of the Australian Federal Police raided four local financial institutions for evidence of misdeeds by Vanuatu citizen Robert Agius.

The raids raised a storm of controversy concerning the right of the AFP to conduct such operations on Vanuatu soil, and raised questions concerning their treatment of a Vanuatu citizen.

Politicians, chiefs and private citizens all expressed dismay at what they perceived as an assault on Vanuatu sovereignty by a ‘bullying’ Australia, who some claimed abused its status as a primary aid donor to leverage the complicity of the Vanuatu government.

The PNS story largely recapitulates these much-discussed events. But it’s noteworthy because it contains the first public response from the commander of the Vanuatu detachment of the AFP’s transnational crime unit in Port Vila.

These comments demonstrate a fundamental failure to understand the dynamics of the situation in Vanuatu. Worse, due to unfortunate phrasing, they appear to hold community values and approaches in low regard.

Some will take this as a reason to remain silent on contentious issues. A more appropriate response to this would be more, not less, communication.

British author Terry Pratchett has written a series of novels featuring a grizzled, cynical and remarkably effective policeman named Sam Vimes. Vimes walks his beat in cheap, thin-soled boots. After years of night-time patrol, he learns to rely solely on the feeling of the cobbles beneath his feet to tell where he is.

Nothing is more important than knowing the ground one is standing on, literally and metaphorically. It’s important everywhere, but nowhere so much as in Vanuatu.

Admittedly, learning the roads and byways of Vanuatu through the soles of one’s feet, so to speak, is a painstaking process that requires patience and perspicacity. Learning what to infer from the mild blandishments so typical in Bislama demands an attentive ear and much experience. The AFP and others need to learn that there is no shortcut to mutual understanding.

The PNS story quotes Commander Warren Gray expressing his surprise at the anger displayed by the Port Vila Council of Chiefs. He goes on to say, “I don’t want to obviously say anything contrary to the chiefs, except to say that they are sadly misinformed about the situation….”

It’s no secret that some – but not all – of the fury expressed against the AFP is being manufactured for political purposes. That does little to excuse this display of tone-deafness when it comes to public relations. Instead, it underlines the need for positive and effective engagement in Vanuatu’s dynamic society.

Walking in 300 vatu thongs will assuredly make each pebble, each washed-out runnel of the streets immediately and intimately familiar. It is, I suppose, much harder to feel the nuances of one’s journey through a pair of quality leather soles.

How much more difficult, then, for a policeman to understand his beat if he thinks the nakamal is just a place to drink kava, if news reports of chiefly anger come as a surprise. Most critically, if the chiefs – and the public in general – are so woefully misinformed, surely he shares some responsibility to discuss and to clarify exactly what role his unit can and should play here in Vanuatu.

Vanuatu society is above all ruled by relationships. Intimate awareness of individual personalities, building trust and understanding – especially in areas where consensus might be difficult to achieve – is critical.

The policeman stands behind his badge, subjugating his personal views to the law of the land. It may seem counter-intuitive, but in Vanuatu trust in the badge comes only after the man behind it is deemed trustworthy.

A good policeman must therefore descend from his perch on the plinth of the law, at least long enough to build that trust. He must trade in his leather boots and walk about ‘dry leg’ for a while. He must invest time and effort in getting to know the people on his neighbourhood beat, and he needs them to know him.

It’s been famously said that justice must not only be done, but it must be seen to be done. There is no doubt that the AFP, the legal advisors at the State Law Office, the Attorney General and the Prime Minister himself are all convinced that the Wickenby raids were performed with cause and in good faith. But cause and good faith need to be demonstrated to the community at large, if only to defuse such criticisms as have been raised.

It pains me to see the relief in the face of a new acquaintance when I tell them I am not Australian. It pains me more to see Australians painted with a broad and xenophobic brush. It pains me most of all to see the many instances of unreflective talk that make it easy for ni-Vanuatu to make these generalisations.

I had the privilege this week of being asked to take some photographs at the Vanuatu unveiling of the Pacific Economic Survey. The event was attended by two Australian Parliamentary Secretaries and by a number of fairly senior individuals in Vanuatu. The photos I took will be collected here.

I was proudest of the photo above. It’s of two veteran politicians whose approach and presentation could hardly be further apart.

I don’t know much about Duncan Kerr, the Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Affairs. Indeed, I’ve not so much as chatted with him. Those who did this week spoke of a warm, quite likable and very switched-on individual. It’s clear that in the photo he wants to do away with distance, to present himself with real, if practised, warmth and to make himself accessible. One imagines working with him in a spirit of comity and fraternal respect.

Chief Boulekone is one of the founding fathers of the nation. He was integral to the successful drafting of Vanuatu’s Constitution, worked as a politician for many years, and has since become one of the more prominent observers of Vanuatu politics. He is respected all the more because he made the choice to exit politics when he saw the process becoming corrupted, yet distanced himself only enough that he could comment without ever being accused of partisanship or self-interest.

There are few politicians in Vanuatu who have not been compromised in some way, shape or form. Chief Vincent is one of them.

What struck me most about the photo at the top was the stark contrast between the two individuals. Kerr does his best (authentically, I don’t doubt) to create the appearance of friendship. Boulekone’s air is exactly what a chief is supposed to have: authority and a stern impassivity.

And that, my friends, pretty much sums up the difference between Australian and Vanuatu politics. The one thrives on alliances, the other on individual respect.

This is a commendable goal. Respect for the creative works of others is at a low ebb these days. We need to alter our cavalier approach to copyright and to properly reward those who spend their time and effort in creating the music, movies, software and other creations we so enjoy.

The advent of the Internet and its increasingly important role in people’s day-to-day lives have caused a fundamental shift in the nature of creativity and sharing. In the past only a small minority of writers and musicians ever saw their works published, and fewer still managed to do so without first being recruited by a major producer.

Anyone wishing to achieve any kind of popularity was at the mercy of those who controlled the means of distribution, who had relationships up and down the supply chain, who could spend the required sums on advertising and marketing. It should come as no surprise, then, that traditional publishing and recording contracts gave the majority of the revenues from such works to the publishers and recording companies. Only a small fraction of that was ever returned to the creative artists themselves.

Copyright law has changed greatly over the years. Its original intent was to provide protection to the author of a creative work, allowing them a short-lived period of monopoly on the reproduction of their opus. It was reasoned that this would ensure that creators had every opportunity to profit from their efforts, in exchange for enriching the market of ideas for generations to come. In the intervening years, publishers and distributors have lobbied successfully for greater and greater protections, including a much longer protection period than originally envisaged.

In the age of printed books and vinyl records, this worked quite well for almost everyone concerned. Reproduction was an expensive and time-consuming process and though some complained about predatory practices in the recording and publishing industries, it was rare that truly great talents went unremarked and unrewarded.

With the advent of cheap home recording equipment, however, things began to change. Friends began to make ‘mix tapes’ for others using their dual-cassette machines. Video cassettes routinely changed hands, allowing a generation of office workers to catch up on their favourite soap operas, and fundamentally changing the power of position in the broadcast schedule.

The music, movie and television industries cried out at the prospect that their artists might be denied revenue. Some countries arranged for a tariff to be placed on the sale of every blank cassette, recordable CD or DVD disk, the proceeds of which would be given back to an industry body, which in turn would share the money among recording artists according to their recent sales ranking. In Canada, for example, publishers and recording companies receive between 80 and 85% of the approximately 28 millions dollars annually collected from this. Performers receive the bulk of the remainder.

Producers and distributors still complain, however, that digital reproduction is far too easy, that the Internet makes it possible for people to share unauthorised copies of their work on an unprecedented scale. But when they announced a campaign of legal attacks on illegal file-sharers in the US, they were roundly castigated for treating their own customers like criminals. More importantly, this campaign of legal intimidation has had little or no effect on the level of file sharing among the general public.

There’s a good reason for this. Digital reproduction is just way too easy, and no technical measure can ever successfully stop it. Copy-protection schemes such as the rather euphemistically named Digital Rights Management are ineffective in their very nature. There is no technical way to stop someone from making copies of anything he likes. In order for a song or a movie to play, it has to be read by the computer. And the moment it is readable, it can be written as well. Copying is inevitable. It’s just that simple.

The major distributors and publishers are being forced to find other means to maintain their historical control on the production and dissemination of creative works. Their popularisation of the word ‘piracy’ has had an unfortunate rebound effect, wherein responsible people resent file copying being equated with rape, pillaging and plunder, and many youth proudly flaunt the title, even to the point of creating International Talk Like a Pirate day, when people are encouraged to speak like characters from a Robert Louis Stephenson potboiler.

The proposed legislation in the UK and its copycat counterpart in Australia would require Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, to suspend or even terminate the account of people suspected to have repeatedly downloaded unauthorised music and video files. Apparently, their experience with the fruitless wave of lawsuits in America has taught the recording industry that they shouldn’t be seen to be policing this area themselves.

The proposed legislation won’t work, unfortunately, for technical, ethical and moral reasons.

First off, trying to put technical limits on what can and cannot be freely copied futile. If a file can be read, it can be copied, and if it can’t be read, it’s useless to anyone. Limiting distribution is also an impossible task. There is absolutely no way to tell whether you’re sharing unauthorised copies of files without watching everything you do on the Internet – and that would be an unwarranted and egregious violation of your privacy.

But even if such a legal precedent were allowed, it would still be trivially easy for someone to hide their activity using encryption technology. They could practice misdirection by transferring the files via shared computers located overseas. Or they could simply disguise the traffic to make it look like they’re downloading from a website or mail server. There’s already one Russian service in existence that is promising exactly that.

There is no technical or legislative solution to the sharing of illegal content. Every measure introduced to curb this kind of activity has acted as nothing more than a temporary inconvenience to those determined to copy files. Worse, it’s made it more difficult for people to take advantage of any number of legitimate uses of file sharing.

A digital copy costs next to nothing to create. And when I give a copy to my friend, I still get to keep the one I’ve got. This means that digital music and video is effectively free to obtain. It is not, of course, free to produce. It’s cheaper than ever it was, but it’s still a long way from free.

This represents a tremendous threat to those who have traditionally controlled the production and distribution of creative works. It also provides a revolutionary opportunity to independant artists the world over and to those in traditionally marginal markets. Artists who might only sell a copy or two in any particular record store are realising decent profits by marketing and selling their work to a global audience on the Internet. Many bands are being signed by clubs and promoters based on the support shown by the size of the following on their MySpace websites.

File copying should be encouraged, not punished. At the same time, we need to find ways to recognise the value of every artist’s contribution to society. There’s no easy way to do so, either. Respect can’t be legislated, regulated or applied coercively through threat of litigation. It arises organically, based on a sense of the common good.

People in Vanuatu know more about respect than most. Every important tabu has been preserved as much by the willing compliance of the people as by any overt threat of force. As more and more of Vanuatu’s kastom is captured and stored on computer, we’ll have to work hard to ensure that it continues to be revered and respected by all who view it, no matter how widely it’s shared.