One of the interesting aspects of the battle over digital copyright and peer-to-peer file-sharing has been the shifts in the discourse around it. The entertainment industries have worked not only to create new laws and more vigorously enforce old ones, not only to shift to DRM locks as their primary mechanism of enforcement; they’ve also worked very hard to change the tenor of the debate. And it has worked: from the early days of Napster when a magazine as mainstream as Time could headline an article “Is It Sharing or Stealing?”, the public coverage of the issue has accepted the arguments that downloading is (a) indisputably illegal, (b) very bad for business, and (c) morally wrong to some degree. These are exactly the talking points that people like Jack Valenti hammered at in every press opportunity, every speech on campus, every appearance before Congress.

So it’s refreshing to see an article like “File-Sharing 101″ — part of a “back to school” series in Wired that also includes more consumer-friendly reporting, like what tech gear you need and what the best social networking sites are. The article compares the benefits and drawbacks of using BitTorrent, Direct Connect, and various “one-click hosting” services like Megaupload to collect music and movies. Most of the discussion is about the availability of content, the technical limitations, the ease of use. The legal risks are a factor, but the article takes a distinctly agnostic stance about whether those legal risks are worth obeying for their own sake. The article ends with the following:

Legal interpretations may vary about what constitutes legitimate sharing of copyrighted content, and we’re not lawyers. Sharing a few music clips with your friends may not violate copyright law, but distributing the latest Hollywood blockbuster to 30,000 other fans almost certainly does. So give some thought to your file sharing before you start. While one-click hosting is fairly private at the moment and darknets keep content away from prying eyes, it’s all for naught if your university actively monitors traffic and is determined to shut down peer-to-peer activity.

We recommend you check your college’s “acceptable use policy” and similar documents to determine their position on file sharing before engaging in potentially illegal activity, or at least make sure you save three grand, the going rate, in case you get caught.

This is a relatively unique statement in the mainstream press, both for its defiantly casual attitude about the legal issues — suggesting that you have $3000 around to cover the potential legal penalty is hardly a moral admonition from on high — and for daring to suggest that some limited sharing may in fact not be a copyright violation at all. This has still not been directly tested in a major court, as far as I know; the Napster judgment simply assumed it, as a step in the logic of finding them liable for contributing. The RIAA has been relatively careful about settling most of its lawsuits against individuals, in part so that the question does not get asked.

It’s nice to see Wired, a magazine that has generally seemed to have discarded its defiant digital politics for a more business-friendly stance (compare their recent covers [Stephen Colbert, Transformers, Heroes, Jenna Fischer of The Office, even Martha Stewart] to those of their first few years [Marc Andressen, John Malone of TCI, Laurie Anderson, Richard Dawkins, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT] for just one clear sign of this shift), jostling this discursive frame a bit.