Ed Felten has come up with his own variant of Godwin’s Law — this one having to do with the ways that rhetoric about pornography tends to infect discussions about copyright. You wouldn’t think the two topics had much to do with each other, except tangentially (pornography makers can claim copyright protection in the works they create, for example). But the reality is a bit more complicated — basically, content companies increasingly argue that peer-to-peer technology is the work of the devil because it leads to increasing distribution of pornography. This is an ironically puritanical stance, since movie and music companies have themselves been on the other side of censorship fights in the past.

Ed’s point is that the arguments by P2P critics and by P2P companies tend to switch when the pornography card is played in the copyright debate:

For example, Hollywood argues that filesharing will lead to a shortage of movies, because nobody will make movies they can’t sell. But when the topic switches to pornographic movies, suddenly they start arguing that filesharing increases the creation and availability of content.

Similarly, some P2P vendors who say they can’t possibly filter or block copyrighted content, suddenly decide, when the topic switches to porn, that they can provide effective blocking.

Of course, the problem of blocking porn is somewhat different from blocking copyrighted works, because, analytically, what makes something porn is a different question from that of what makes something copyrighted. As I note above, pornography can be copyrighted, and of course it follows that it may also pass into the public domain. Hard to get a computer to make these sorts of distinct judgments, absent some improbably universal (and improbably precise) mandatory labelling scheme. That’s the sort of thing that it takes a government to impose, but we’ve been spared the imposition of such a scheme thus far.

Ed may have titled his blog entry “Godwin’s Law, Updated,” but I think “Felten’s Law” has a better ring to it.

UPDATE: After posting this entry I came across a reference (thanks to Google) to Felton’s Law, which is an artifact of the role-playing game (RPG) culture. I don’t think my suggested use of “Felten’s Law,” supra, would create a trademark problem, but you never know. (Felton’s Law states that “No party is so powerful that a clever trap can’t defeat them.” I can’t pretend to know enough of the Knights of the Dinner Table backstory to explain anything about “B.A. Felton.”)

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