The bullying, consensus-enforcing power of the Internet was on full display last week, as the digital jet-set went about paving over anyone who questioned the narrative. SOPA and PIPA were bad laws, terribly bad, and I'm glad they were opposed, but geez. Still, the anti-SOPA movement still lacks an effective spokesperson. Perhaps we need someone who truly represents the revolutionary struggle, speaking truth to power and giving voice to the powerless and afflicted.
Finally, a hero emerges.
Yes, modern day Robin Hood Kim Dotcom stands apart. He is the brave hero millionaire who will oppose the evil villain millionaires. From the vantage of his fabulous mansion, festooned with luxury and opulence during a global financial slowdown that has impoverished millions, Kim DotCom provides the kind of proletarian credibility the movement has been lacking. True, he's previously been arrested for insider trading and stealing phone card numbers, but hey, victimless crimes, right? (I mean, insider trading-- when have the machinations of stock traders and bankers ever been shown to have negative impacts on ordinary people?) Plus, I'm sure he looks cool when standing next to his fleet of luxury cars. That's got to count for something.
I truly cannot understand the broad swaths of people who look at the MegaUpload situation and continue to speak in the same self-congratulatory terms that have attended the entire anti-SOPA/PIPA fight. Does the fact that the IP reform movement wants broad change mean we can make no distinctions between actors? And don't fool yourself if you think that there is some sort of anti-capitalist bent here. "Freeing" information does not make it free. It only means that you change who gets paid. I know: you hate the music and movie industry. I'm not a fan either. But a site like MegaUpload doesn't make that value magically disappear. It just shifts it to people like Kim DotCom, to the ISPs, to the people who control the server space, to the aggregators and the search engines. And it takes it away from the session guitarists and struggling actors and others who want only to make a decent living producing art. And, yes, to giant soulless aggravating entertainment companies.
Yes, of course: every defendant deserves due process. Of course the fact that the government can do so much without proper due process is atrocious. That ship has sailed, hasn't it? When I bring this argument up to progressives about Obama, I'm told that civil liberties are a niche issue nobody cares about. When it comes to MegaUpload or torrenting, suddenly, due process is imperative. It doesn't say much about our current character that due process becomes important when it comes to downloading IP, and not when it comes to Guantanamo. And if we're asking for procedural justice here, doesn't consistency require that we ask what procedural justice exists in what MegaUpload does? I keep reading posts that demonstrate the limited economic impact of piracy. Is there no consideration of whether IP violations are right or wrong?
Those who spend lots of time on the Internet have a bad habit of believing that they represent the public. Ask the makers of the NBC show Community; they'll disabuse you of this notion. The fact of the matter is that there is a broad majority of Americans who have little or nothing in common with the blogging set, and ultimately the appeal for a saner set of IP laws has to be made to them. Now imagine: you are a typical recession-hit American. You've heard about the SOPA fight. You're sympathetic, to the degree you understand the issues in play. How are you going to feel, when you see the same people who opposed SOPA rallying around a German millionaire, living in absurd opulence in New Zealand, by providing digital content without compensating the people who made that content?
I have asked and asked and asked for those who keep arguing against IP law, in totally black and white terms, to consider those at the bottom in the content-generation world. No one has ever even attempted to answer my questions, instead preferring to complain about me (as is typical). I love the writing program Scrivener, a labor of love by a particular person with a tiny company, the kind of company where small differences in profit and sales can mean everything. Can you easily download a cracked version of Scrivener? Do you even need to ask? Look: I believe that in this capitalist system, those who work hard to create valuable digital content have the reasonable right and expectation to be fairly compensated for that content. I have previously mentioned the unauthorized downloading of the Humble Indy Bundle, a package of games by independent developers, offered on a "pay what you can" basis for charity. Yet these conversations constantly devolve into the flatly untrue notion that people only download IP from large corporations or rich people. There appears to be no coordinated movement online to discourage or stigmatize such a practice. And it's precisely those at the bottom end of the power and profit spectrum who are the most vulnerable. Ultimately, the point isn't the companies and products I can name, it's those who were strangled in the cradle in the first place. Sure, Jay-Z can make a living selling Vitamin Water and champagne. The artist who you'll never hear because of the collapse of the music industry has no such luxury.
At some point, you have to ask: do people who produce the cultural and media objects we love deserve to be compensated for their work? And will those cultural and media objects continue to be created if the answer is no?
The IP debate is the purest expression of a contemporary American conceit: that we can have whatever we want at no cost, that digital technologies have meant the end of the class antagonism that animates human history, that you can identify goodies and baddies and proceed accordingly. Every political question is a battle between winners and losers, every last one. And in this battle, you want me to rush to the aid of someone like Kim Dotcom? No thanks. The information is never free. Somebody gets paid. The question is, which soulless millionaires and corporations do you want to pay? The ones who made the content, or the ones who didn't?
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19 comments:
"I believe that in this capitalist system, those who work hard to create valuable digital content have the reasonable right and expectation to be fairly compensated for that content."
Ay. There's the rub. What is "fair" compensation? How do you get around the fact that copyright is simply a state enforced monopoly that essentially impoverishes consumers? Who gets the loot? Big players or those starving writers, actors, etc., who, gadzooks! seem to be poverty stricken under ANY system.
I have no sympathy for the clown criminal in the piece, but there are more than one set of villains here....thank you.
bobbyp
Right. I just want to shift the discussion to what replaces our current absurd system, and point out that information is never free.
minor quibbles here and there but you basically nailed it, dude. Megaupload were digital landlords.
Saying 'who do you want to pay' overlooks the fact that pirating costs far, far less for the consumer of pirated content than purchasing the game/film/music in question. Paying a few cents to your ISP to download a computer program that costs $2000? . . . so it's not the most useful rhetorical question. People are lazy and don't really care that they're making Google / Kim Dotcom some microscopically tiny amount of money (even though this, in aggregate, becomes a lot of money).
I think you should be a little careful of accusing others of sticking to black and white unless you also want to include discussion about what the loss really is.
Bill Maher (yeah, I know) on last Friday's Real Time complained on behalf of content generators too. He talked about how annoying it was that people were downloading his movie instead of paying for it.
But he, as you have here, ignored the very real possibility that nothing close to all of the people who wanted his movie for free would have paid for it in the alternative. Maybe some would, but many would not.
So it's not black and white on either side. On the one hand, it's not all morally good for people to get free stuff. On the other hand, not every free download of a movie, song or book is actual loss to the content creator and distribution system.
But no one on either side seems to interested in talking about reality.
So, I guess that's basically the same as every other issue.
This argument would be a lot stronger if you linked to people celebrating and praising Megaupload, which basically every voice has conceded is a deeply unsympathetic criminal enterprise.
For that matter, who exactly is arguing against IP law in black and white terms? I'm sure there's somebody out there who favors abolition of copyrights--it's a big internet--but most serious voices have merely called for a little sanity. Even Cory Doctorow isn't in favor of piracy--but the question is what price we're willing to pay to ensure that. You have a lot of compassion for the music we won't have after the (hypothetical) collapse of all copyright-supported industries. But you have no similar feelings for the small startups and nonprofits that we won't have after copyright maximalists in the **AA ensure that future Youtubes and Wikipedias can't get started without preemptively retaining a law firm.
1) '"Freeing" information does not make it free. It only means that you change who gets paid.'
Unfortunately for your argument, it also changes, by a large factor, how much someone gets paid. The Megaupload clowns were making a miniscule fraction of what that content was nominally worth. I'd argue that this is a change in kind, rather than a change in degree.
2) Also I don't think that you win many points by conflating the progressives who ignore Obama's civil liberties violations with the people who're getting all het up about the violations here. From the people I follow, these folks are generally bothered about both. The mainstream progressives you're thinking of belatedly hopped on the anti-SOPA bandwagon and hardly define the movement.
3) "At some point, you have to ask: do people who produce the cultural and media objects we love deserve to be compensated for their work? And will those cultural and media objects continue to be created if the answer is no?"
It's also important to ask if people can be compensated for their work in ways that don't trample other, more important rights.
Another question is if there's enough money to go around when the supply explodes because of the death of gatekeepers and the vast reduction in the cost of production and distribution, and the increase in free time made available to people to work on this stuff (although that's subject to further progress in economic justice, but that's another subject).
It could be that there's no room for the midlist in a world where every fourth person is a recording artist, or a writer, or a videographer.
4) "Right. I just want to shift the discussion to what replaces our current absurd system, and point out that information is never free."
I suppose that you're trying to be inflammatory to get more eyes on the argument, but I'd suggest that shifting the discussion might be easier if you were to come forward with some suggestions, or simply a call to dialog, rather than mocking people because a person who they happen to be supporting because of a possible miscarriage of justice happens to be a clown.
"At some point, you have to ask: do people who produce the cultural and media objects we love deserve to be compensated for their work? And will those cultural and media objects continue to be created if the answer is no?"
The way those two questions are linked, it seems like we're saying: the average creator should be compensated to a degree that will encourage them to continue creating cultural content.
That's a far cry from the status quo understanding of copyright and IP.
I suppose that you're trying to be inflammatory to get more eyes on the argument, but I'd suggest that shifting the discussion might be easier if you were to come forward with some suggestions, or simply a call to dialog, rather than mocking people because a person who they happen to be supporting because of a possible miscarriage of justice happens to be a clown.
You think they only happen to be supporting him because he's a millionaire, and not some dirt poor teenager in Yemen? You really think the support for the civil rights of the former, in contrast to the lack of support for the civil rights of the latter, is not connected to their economic and social power? I think that's profoundly naive.
"But he, as you have here, ignored the very real possibility that nothing close to all of the people who wanted his movie for free would have paid for it in the alternative. Maybe some would, but many would not."
I've never quite understood why this is meant to be a compelling argument, at least when it comes to arguments against punishing pirates. "I wouldn't have paid for this product, so no one is losing any money if I just steal it." This presumes some sort of right to enjoy the property of others without compensation or consequence. It goes in hand with bobbyp's question: "What is 'fair' compensation?"
That question reminds me of an argument I had with someone who defended piracy by arguing "You don't have a right to be compensated whatever you want for your work." And this is true! If I charged people $1,000 a month to subscribe to my blog, I'd have zero readers. If I wrote a Kindle Single about the life and times of my dog and charged readers $5,000 a download, no one would buy it.
But, equally, you don't have a right to judge what my work is worth and pay whatever you want for it. "Fair compensation" (or, perhaps more properly described, "market value") doesn't instantaneously drop to $0 just because I have radically misjudged my value in the marketplace and the means exist to distribute my work free of charge over the Internet. Your judging something to be "too expensive" doesn't give you the right to decide that the "fair price" is nothing.
Sonny - I wasn't offering that as a defense against punishing pirates. I was suggesting that people like Maher, or apparently people like Freddie, who look at piracy and see $$ lost to the artist often are seeing the wrong number.
What's happening is an inability to accurately price discriminate. In that past, you had strict control on the number of copies, so the rights holders could easily restrict output to keep prices where they wanted them and enjoy the government-granted market power attached to their intellectual property.
These days, copying is nearly effortless, so the mechanism to protect that market power is functionally gone and hasn't been replaced with an effective means of price discriminating.
But the analogy to theft doesn't work either. We are talking about cost-less copying. If you are a content creator, the perfect world for you should be in selling as many costless copies of your work at whatever price you can get from each purchaser - i.e., perfect price discrimination. That's what's best for you (i.e., you make the most possible money) and what's best for consumers.
There just isn't any way to make that happen, no matter how many college student we trying to throw the book at.
Freddy,
Economist Dean Baker has an interesting scheme to address this issue wrt entertainment/performers, etc.
I urge you to check it out. Thx.
bobbyp
I don't really get why you're vilifying Kim Dotcom so much for profiting off the success of his website and being rich. There's still a hell of a lot of copyrighted content posted unlicensed daily on Youtube, despite Google's efforts to take it down.
By your logic, the FBI should be barging in Google's doors and we should be being sarcastic about Sergey Brin's and Larry Page's wealth.
It seems to me that the only reason that hasn't happened is that it's a lot more established, and everyone has heard of Google, Youtube etc. No-one outside the tech/enthusiast world has heard of file locker sites like Megaupload because they don't use them.
The problem here is that basically old media is trying to hang on to last century's model of business. They ignored the internet when it was developing, because they thought it a stupid fad that would never catch on. Now that it's ubiquitous, they are trying to sue and shut down outfits and people that are circumventing their outdated model, rather than change their business model or practices.
It's pretty much like coal gas companies trying to sue electricity companies a century ago rather than adapt their model of business. Or horse breeders suing car makers.
And yeah yeah, "who will make the media products if not for the big companies". Well seriously, how many hollywood movies, tv shows or major label albums were actually worth paying money for last year?
I'm curious Freddie, outside of pirating, which I agree should not be as contentious an issue as it is (i.e. the whole "revolutionary" sentiment surrounding it), what are your thoughts on the shift from physical media to digital licensing?
As things are going, it seems like all media will be distributed digitally at some point. This will clearly change out relationship to content, transforming us from owners to renters when it comes to our books/movies/music/video games.
In an earlier post you mentioned Steam and Amazon as two viable models for the Internet.
But Steam in particular is based around users "renting" content from the site, except often without the discount that leasing usually entails. Do you think that will be a problem for consumer rights going forward? Or are content consumers being entitled in this respect, and should get ready to rightfully pony up for the right to use (vs. the right to own and thus re-sell, share, etc.)?
"You think they only happen to be supporting him because he's a millionaire, and not some dirt poor teenager in Yemen? You really think the support for the civil rights of the former, in contrast to the lack of support for the civil rights of the latter, is not connected to their economic and social power? "
No, I think they're supporting him because he provides a service they like, unlike said Yemenese teenager. That said, like other commenters, I'm not sure who you see as "supporting" him---most discussion I've read seems to be built around "what are this asshole's rights, and how do they affect me?" You're quite right that the important question is how we move to a world where content creators can be fairly compensated and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter, rather than your swipes at nonexistent people who lurve German billionares 'cause they're baddies. The "everything free always" crowd seems to be a pretty impotent rump in big-think circles, so I'm not sure who you're targeting here, especially when, as you say, the important discussion is figuring out what the new path should be.
It seems like that movement is actually happening already, thanks to the various digital distro services. Yes, some people pirated the Humble Indie Bundle, but there will always be shoplifters in the world; what's more striking is how many people didn't shoplift, given that it would be easy enough to do so. Essentially what we want is a system where creators can be paid for their labor, preferably without the middlemen who normally collect too much profit, and it seems like the answer is emerging via self-publishing to digital channels.
Your judging something to be "too expensive" doesn't give you the right to decide that the "fair price" is nothing.
Yes, it does. Whether or not the market agrees with you is another matter. In theory, the consumer is a price taker, but so is the supplier. If the marginal cost of production=$0.00000001/each that, in theory is the profit maximizing price. Given a downward sloping demand curve, one should think there would be many more buyers at this price.
That's the (free market microeconomic) theory, I think (could be wrong...willing to listen).
The debate is further clouded by the fact that people seem to be not too familiar with the concept of "sunk costs" as these costs may relate to the current market price, i.e., Freddy stressing that movies "cost a lot of money to make." Once that money is spent (or a resource expended), it's gone baby gone. And if people stop making big budget movies...how do we assess the social loss, if any? If you're so desirous to see a movie, you should be willing to pay the big for it (thus the Pope pays Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel....are all those visitors to Rome "stealing" his art?).
It is also disheartening to see lefty types insisting that artists "get into the creation thing" based solely on their judgment wrt future rewards, or "deserve" economic rewards (I think people who clean toilets should also be rewarded for their contribution to society--how much do they deserve?).
That's not the human nature this socialist admires...but hey, you got to go along to get along. It's a rough world out there.
We owe it to ourselves to find a better production/consumption model.
bobbyp
"You think they only happen to be supporting him because he's a millionaire, and not some dirt poor teenager in Yemen? You really think the support for the civil rights of the former, in contrast to the lack of support for the civil rights of the latter, is not connected to their economic and social power? I think that's profoundly naive."
I think they probably are barely aware of the teenager in Yemen, whereas Megaupload dood was on the front page of a lot of newspapers.
I think it's pretty obvious that downloading something for free that you'd normally have to pay for is morally wrong. I don't really care at all about the Megaupload guy - it's a fair demonstration of why SOPA/PIPA weren't needed (though, yes, due process is required just as much here as with the teenager in Yemen, etc...) Piracy isn't a good thing.
However, piracy has always existed and will continue to exist. I'm sure it's frustrating for content producers and studio execs, etc... but it exists. It's their response to this frustration that, in turn, frustrates consumers.
Piracy itself represents meaningful economic data. And I don't mean that each pirated copy of a movie represents a lost sale, though I'm sure some do (not nearly as much as content producers claim, but that's a different discussion). When I look at piracy, what I see is a desire for convenience that content producers simply don't provide. Indeed, content producers go out of their way to lock down their content, to the point where paying customers are so limited in how they can consume said content that it's not surprising that piracy is so prevalent.
Compare Hulu to iTunes or Amazon and you can see what I'm getting at. With Hulu, even if you’re a paid subscriber, some shows won’t air episodes until the week after, old episodes are not always available, some episodes can only be watched on the computer and are restricted from mobile devices. These are utterly arbitrary limitations on watching content that just drive people into the pirates' arms.
Piracy doesn't just lower the price of content to $0, it provides a comprehensive selection of digital distribution channels, the ability to time-shift content, the ability to transfer something you've bought to a different device, and a ton of other intuitive conveniences that people would be willing to pay for, if only they could do so.
Unfortunately, that's a slippery slope, and it gets abused. Thus piracy spirals out of control. I'm not trying to excuse piracy here, I'm just saying that purchasing content is usually made to be inconvenient. When distributors make it convenient, everyone reaps the rewards. Witness iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, and a slew of other companies that are imperfect, but providing value to paying customers and content producers alike.
The dumb thing here is that piracy isn't that convenient. It's not that difficult to beat the pirates at that game. Will that solve all the piracy problems in the world? Of course not, but content creators will be compensated for their work - enough so that there will be ample motivation to create new works.
Thanks for the binary choice. I'll choose one from the myriad that spread out across the landscape of reality, thank you... :)
I know you are trying to shift the conversation away from those two choices, but I missed the sardonic tone.... I think people don't really like absurdly enriching Big Kim any more than they would like do the same for Big Hollywood.... I'm sure people were really not all that aware that there was opulence pouring down around anyone like Mr Dot... naive? Yeah... and so what? People tend to idealize the world that lies outside their direct experience.
Moving on, I game for any form of stable outcome that looks like a charity... not because it is (a charity situation) but because it is the least commercialized form of compensation for-cause that I can think, and people who are careful with their money try to make choices that get get the most money where it counts. Also, I am convinced the current trajectory of the consumer opinion about its consideration in the business partnership is approaching a similar model.
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