July 01, 2003

The Boggling of the American Mind

Liberty Punk's Geoff points to this massive comment thread at over at Right Thinking. If you want to see some of the goofier music piracy apologists in action, you can find them there.

(Ben Weasel and our Matt from Vegas even joined in a bit-- which is something of a lost cause, by my lights...)

Anyway, the funniest bits are the sententious lectures (each typed with a straight face, I'm pretty sure) on the economics of music, delivered by people who clearly have no idea how clueless they are about how anything works. (Ben tried to plug in some actual data, but to little avail.)

Examples:

if the band gets $1.00, and it takes $2.00 to make the CD, the industry is pocketing $10.00-12.00 per CD.
or
I'll happily shuck out a dollar a song for my favorite bands, but they can wash my crotch if they think I'm turning out $20 for a CD that's half filler, $18 of which goes to the studio...
Ladies and gentlemen, meet our enemy: The Industry and The Studio. Rapacious fiends!

Then there's the guy who advanced the novel theory that purchasing a CD actually deprives the artist of income:

Many artists actually *owe* money on the royalty statemnts for CD sales due to some pretty clever accounting practices. This furthers the debt the artist has to pay via other revunue like shwag and concerts before they can get an income. So it's really, "Buy a CD, starve an artist" instead of the other way around.
And there are several posts to the effect that buying and selling things runs counter to the spirit of capitalism.

There are of course lots of platitudinous, barely cogent analogies about whether lending your car to your brother counts as stealing, etc. My favorite: "this is as warped as if people who accidentally caught dolphins in fishing nets were convicted of murder." And so is our understanding of the complex balance of rights, privileges and duties deepened.

Many of these folks see failing to pay for records as some kind of grand defense of Liberty, a noble act of civil disobedience akin to the Boston Tea Party or marching from Selma to Montgomery. But some of these latter-day Martin Luther Kings and Ethan Allens seem to take things a bit too far, in my opinion:

As far as I'm concerned, targeting individual, fairly random users to strike fear in the heart of the public is tantamount to terrorism. I'm perfectly happy to terrorize right back, and if they want to act like some kind of fascist secret police, I'll stand up and cheer for the first suicide bomber.
A couple of posts later, this dude says that his suicide bomber comment wasn't "entirely" facetious and adds:
This whole issue is wrong on so many levels, it boggles the mind.
Evidently.

Posted by Dr. Frank at July 1, 2003 03:20 PM | TrackBack
Comments

I readily admit to downloading music of of P2P sites. I think there are very few people who haven't engaged in that kind of piracy.

However, I think I spend more on music per year than anyone on this earth. There are things you can get on a CD that you just can't get on Kazaa, like album art, lyrics, extra media, liner notes and the all important aspect of ownership. I prefer my CD walls be lined with the real cds, not copies with hastily scrawled playlist stuck inside.

Even if someone believes they are doing their favorite artists a favor by "sticking it to the man," they're just taking dollars out of the pockets of those artists that they profess to adore. It's sanctimonious to think that you are some kind of rebel pirate making a point when you download music, meanwhile not caring that you favorite bands will go on being poor.

Yes, I download a lot of music. But I always put my money where my mouth is. (Ok, so I may download an Andy Gibb song for kicks but not buy the cd...but you get my point. Don't you?)

Posted by: michele at July 1, 2003 03:55 PM

*I* get your point Michele. I think I'm in the same boat as you, in a way.

I have a bunch of mp3s on my computer here at work, but none on my computer at home. Why? Because home is where my CDs are. The vast (vast!) majority of mp3s on my work computer are songs that I already own copies of on CD or vinyl, and I just don't want to be bothered toting cd cases to and from work.

The exceptions are mp3s of songs that have never been released on CD (or anywhere-- I'm talking about little, little, little indie bands whose recordings only exist on their own master tapes and on their mp3.com members' page, the purpose of which is to get people to download them).

Basically, I can pick any mp3 on my computer here at work and then go home and pull out the CD or record that that song appears on.

I like CDs, I like vinyl, and I like searching out 7" singles that contain songs that aren't on the full-length records. Even when certain bands go and do things like collect those songs and put them out on compilations called stuff like "Kill the Musicians" or "Thank You Very Little." I buy those CDs, too. (cuz they've got new artwork and commentary!) =)

Posted by: geoff at July 1, 2003 05:24 PM

You're right, Michele and Geoff, but we can't count on everyone to be as cool and artist-supportive as you are. (As we see from the yahoos I quoted in this post. Many of them clearly do use the P2P networks explicitly as a way to avoid paying for something that they really ought to pay for, whatever tortured justification they offer. And as it stands, there's no method to keep cool people honest, and the temptation to get the free stuff, spending the rest of your entertainment/art budget on other things that aren't as easy to hornswaggle is, as you say, far beyond most people to resist entirely.)

The thing is I'm not convinced that p2p sharing, as it stands now, is having such a massive effect on The Industry as a whole as some claim. Not yet. There are loads of other factors in the music business's slump. (It does have an effect, though, and this will increase as the activity increases. Obviously.) But I do believe it has an effect on individuals, in that the dollars that are spent on Music in general aren't necessarily associated directly with the specific music that is consumed. I'm far more concerned about the long-term implications of such indirect, market-distorting funding than I am about Kazaa or the p2p process or this or that method of compression. (The technology is, on the contrary, very cool and offers a lot of bright possibilities as a method of distribution and indeed communication. I'm no Luddite.)

Because there will be a solution to the problem of digital distribution. Producing recorded music entails costs, and some method of paying these costs *will* be determined. It won't remain a free-for-all, with the Micheles of the world subsidizing the activities of Martin Luther King over at Right Thinking.

As I've said, I believe the most likely method will be largely indirect, disguising much of the costs through advertising and sponsorship, and presenting the consumer with modest direct fees for services and distribution hubs that are intended to encompass all content. Quite likely, this will result, ultimately, in a *greater* amount of money being pumped into "the industry," which will have something of a trickle-down effect even to the smaller, less commercially viable artists (provided they can figure out a way to fund their recordings in the first place-- an issue which adds another clump of worms to the can. Their already paid-for back-catalog should do okay, though.)

But I think undermining the value of the individual song or recording, re-centering its profitability as an unspecified element of "programming" in a comprehensive flow of information that is collectively remunerated and for which payments are distributed according to a statistically representative formula, is something to worry about. That's essentially what happens with radio broadcast royalties. And radio programming is notorious for two things: (a) it sucks, and (b) it's really, really hard to break into if you don't have access to the kind of tremendous financial resources that are only available through institutions that tend not to take risks lightly.

Posted by: Dr. Frank at July 1, 2003 05:55 PM

Frank, I think your concerns are right on the money. I realize you are worried about large-scale, systematic effects, but it occurs to me that one fairly discrete effect of digital distribution may be to devalue significantly the concept of the LP (or the concept of the concept LP, for that matter!). Could any of those great late-60s/early 70s Kinks albums get made in a world where music distribution is dominated by downloading of individual songs? Of course, there's nothing physically impossible about downloading an entire album, but it seems likely that many folks will choose not to do so. This will be a change for the worse, IMO, as many of my favorite albums are my favorites because they are more than a collection of songs, even if I initially bought them for just a couple songs. Moreover, it sometimes takes a while to figure out what is great about an album qua album -- and in many cases I would never have figured it out, had I not been "forced" to buy the whole LP.

Posted by: Aaron at July 1, 2003 06:43 PM

"it occurs to me that one fairly discrete effect of digital distribution may be to devalue significantly the concept of the LP (or the concept of the concept LP, for that matter!)."

That's another good point, Aaron, though its importance could be argued on the aesthetic scale. (As for me personally, I agree, and it seems like the ability to download "only the good songs" off an album *is* killing, culturally, the whole idea of a collection of songs being greater than the sum of its parts.)

And Frank, you're right when you say that we (or the music industry, or anyone who deserves to be making money) can't *count* on everyone crossing-their-hearts and hoping-to-die that they'll only download songs that they've already paid for in CD form; I really only brought up the fact that I do that to make my position clear (that I was keeping myself on the safe side by only downloading what I already have on disc). Any ambiguity I might have had about the filesharing issue has been put to rest by reading what you and Ben have to say about it. The Photodude dude is right on, too. The principle (which was always rightly "theft is theft") has been backed up by enough circumstantial evidence from the inside (you guys), and circumstantial evidence is often what ends up selling a viewpoint, unfortunately, when the principle becomes blurred by grasping at rationalizations.

Posted by: geoff at July 1, 2003 07:03 PM

I'm curious what you think of people buying used cds. That's kind of like music theft in that the artist doesn't benefit from the sale. But people have garage sales all the time. Even the library sells its old books. I feel kind of guilty when I buy a used cd though.

Posted by: kristine at July 2, 2003 08:41 AM

Kristine, I know a guy (a software engineer who sees this issue through the prism of concerns over a different kind of piracy) who claims that he sends five bucks to the artist (if he can locate him/her/them/it) whenever he buys a used record. That's a nice gesture, and I wouldn't dream of discouraging it. ;-)

It's not the same thing though. The copy exists and has been paid for. Whoever purchased the copy owns the physical object and can sell it or give it away or put it in the microwave or whatever he wants to do with it. He doesn't however, have a license to do whatever he wants with the material contained on the disk. He can't make copies and sell them to other people without an arrangement with the person who holds the copyright. He can't use the material in a commercial enterprise like a film or a tv ad without an arrangement either. (Aaron, am I wrong or misleading on any of this? Let me know if I am.) I don't think it makes sense that he ought to be allowed to make a thousand copies and give them away either, though it's hard to imagine why anyone would do that.

I believe the argument of piracy advocates (the ones who don't come out and say "Yeah, I steal music-- what're you gonna do about it?") is that making the material available for others to download, even on a massive, worldwide scale, is exactly the same as lending a physical CD to your mom, or putting a song on a mix tape for your girlfriend. That was what you used to hear all the time in the Napster years: "I'm just sharing my music with my friends. Can I help it if I have several million of them? *wink*" It's not exactly the same, though, as even the dimmest of them must realize. It may not quite be "stealing" either, in the same sense that shoplifting a CD from the KMART would be. (In one way, it's not that important what you call it. In another, though, I think Spacetoast has a point about stealing being "semantically sharper" and of use in the argument, since many Free Content folks seem to believe they can evade the moral dimension of the issue simply by arbitrarily excluding themselves from the definition.)

The used CD/LP/book market is healthy and in no way undercuts the notion that the material on a record has value which should benefit the author. On the contrary, it bolsters it. Obviously, if no one ever bought any new records, the system would crash. That's kind of what this argument is about, in a way.

Posted by: Dr. Frank at July 2, 2003 04:30 PM

Your explanation is accurate, Frank. The Copyright Act specifically provides that a copyright owner cannot control resale of a particular, lawfully made copy of a work. This so-called first sale doctrine is to prevent a copyright owner from using the exclusive distribution right conferred by copyright to restrict the free alienabilty of goods. The difference with file-sharing is that the file-sharer is distributing illegally made copies (and also illegally reproduces the work in the process of sharing the file). By the way, there is a limited exception to the first sale doctrine that prohibits renting of records (which, apprently, was a big issue at one time).

Posted by: Aaron at July 2, 2003 07:17 PM

Aaron, renting records, huh? How about that. So did the issue come up when they started renting out videos? Fascinating.

Posted by: Dr. Frank at July 2, 2003 07:38 PM

Apparently in the early 80s record stores started renting records in conjunction with selling blank tapes, in order to facilitate home copying. I don't remember this being a big thing myself, but the record companies thought it was enough of a threat to lobby Congress to pass the Record Rental Amendment Act of 1984. There is nothing similar for videos, as far as I know, presumably because Blockbuster et al. do not generally encourage home copying the same way these record stores apparently did.

I do recall one amusing case involving videos. Among the exclusive rights afforded by copyright is the right to "public display" of a work. The definition of "public" is open to interpretation in some circumstances, and video producers got into a fight with peep show booth operators as to whether showing a video in a private booth was a "public display" within the meaning of the Copyright Act. Unfortunately, I can't remember who won. The peep show booth industry appears to be thriving regardless.

Posted by: Aaron at July 2, 2003 09:08 PM
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