Al Franken on net neutrality
The awesome senator from Minnesota and former Saturday Night Live star Al Franken has taken up the fight for net neutrality. In the short amount of time that he has so far been in office he has proven himself to be one of the more courageous and principled politicians in the senate, despite (or perhaps even because of) his background as a comedian.
Senator Al Franken (D)
He started this petition in favor of net neutrality, saying:
Net Neutrality is THE First Amendment issue of our time. If you want to protect the free flow of information in the country and all that depends on it, you have to help me fight this.
He also spoke at a recent public hearing with the FCC on the topic of net neutrality:
Someone is sharing your work, and it’s not the end of the world
I heard a story once, of a friend of a friend. I don’t really know if it’s true or not, but I think it’s representative of how quite a few people think.
The friend in question was apparently an accomplished musician, but he had hung up his guitar for good, never to release an album again. Why? It’s those darn kids and their piracy. “The second you release an album,” he lamented, “it’s up there for everyone to steal. You just can’t make money in the music business anymore.”
Obviously this isn’t true — while the industry itself may be in the beginnings of a death spiral, it’s hardly true that no one can make money-making music — but there’s something more interesting about the observation than just the fact that it’s wrong. The Internet and peer-to-peer technology has made pirating music easier, certainly, but people copied CDs and tapes long before Napster existed. For decades there have been easily accessible ways to copy music. So, even 30 years ago, when you put up an album it was “there for everyone to steal.”
On top of that, most artists actually benefit from music piracy.
Several studies have shown that most artists actually profit from unauthorized sharing of files. They sell more albums because people have the opportunity to download songs and entire albums for free. A study by Blackburn (2004), a PhD student from Harvard, found that the 75% of the artist actually profit from piracy. Blackburn reports that the most popular artist (top 25%) sell less records. However, the remaining 75% of all artists actually profit from filesharing. The same pattern was found by Pedersen (2006, see graph), who analyzed the change in royalties paid by the Nordisk Copyright Bureau between 2001 and 2005.
Linked on the above page is an overview of the studies on this topic:
The basic result is that online illegal file-sharing probably has some negative impact on traditional sales but the effect is appears to be quite small. The size of this effect is debated, and ranges from 0 to 100% of the sales decline in recent years, but a figure of between 0 and 30% would be a reasonable consensus value (i.e. that file-sharing accounted for 0-30% of the decline in sales not a 0-30% decline in sales). At the same time there is still substantial disagreement in the literature with the most impressive paper to date (Oberholzer and Strumpf 2005) estimating no impact from file-sharing.
So, basically, having your music shared online isn’t the end of the world. It’s actually probably good for you. (more…)
Thom Yorke calls music industry a “sinking ship” that will collapse within “months”
In a recent interview, Radiohead singer/songwriter Thom Yorke said:
It will be only a matter of time – months rather than years – before the music business establishment completely folds… [It will be] no great loss to the world.
He also urges upstart artists to avoid climbing on the “sinking ship” by signing traditional record deals.
As I’m sure you all remember, Radiohead made quite a splash in 2007 when they split with their label, EMI, and released the fantastic In Rainbows album on their own. Consumers were asked only to pay what they thought the album was worth, anywhere from zero dollars to the reported $5000 Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor paid.
As much as I’d like to agree with Thom Yorke here, I think “months” is far too ambitious. As I’ve explained before, there’s no doubt that the music industry’s business model is fundamentally broken, but in today’s economy that hardly means they’re in any real danger. Rather than getting with the times, they’ve lobbied governments and gotten rules changed in their favor — and, unfortunately, their strategy seems to be half-working. Big labels are still around, despite being at best unneeded and at worst harmful to artists and listeners alike.
So, alas, while I wish this were true, I very much doubt it is.
Rahm Emanuel’s brother pushes Obama to adopt France’s “three strikes” stance on piracy.
President Obama is considering adopting a three strikes rule for piracy. This is a bad idea.
Deadline London reports that Ari Emanuel (brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel) has been lobbying Obama to adopt France’s three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule in relation to illegal file sharing.
[Ari] Emanuel said he’s been speaking to President Obama about the U.S. adopting France’s 3-strikes-and-you’re-out stance. (Last year, France introduced a rule allowing legal action once Internet users had been caught illegally downloading 3 times.)
The three strikes rule, if you haven’t heard of it, gives file sharers “two chances” before taking legal action to deny them access to the Internet. It was passed in France in late 2008:
[The] French senate voted 297 to 15 in favour of a law that penalises illegal filesharers by cutting off their internet access. Under the legislation, internet providers would be forced to act as watchdogs, monitoring their customers’ internet traffic for signs of copyright infringement. Anyone caught illegally sharing music, movies or games would receive two warnings before having their account terminated.
This is a ridiculous law, of course. There’s no reason anyone should be barred from Internet access. It’s like denying someone access to the post office — it’s basically a free speech issue. Besides, it’s a bad solution as far as fighting piracy goes. Trying to stop piracy by laying down hugely disproportionate punishments on a very small minority to “make an example of them” simply doesn’t work. It ends up being more of a ritual sacrifice. From the perspective of the teenage/young adult pirate, it appears as if every few months a random person is dragged off and punished for something that everyone is guilty of (“everyone” is a slight exaggeration, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone under 24 who hasn’t committed copyright infringement, unless they’ve been living in a cave).
Of course there are better solutions that will actually work to end piracy, improve profits of record/movie companies, and avoid ruining the lives of young pirates — in fact, some such solutions have been discussed here on this blog and will be discussed in much more detail in the future — but such solutions mean these media companies must take risks and expand their business model. It’s much easier for them to just lobby the government to get the rules changed in their favor, and that’s what they’re doing.
Lessig discusses laws that inhibit creativity
I imagine most of you readers already know quite a bit about our friend Lawrence Lessig; Harvard law professor, founder of the Creative Commons movement, and outspoken expert on copyright law and its relation to technology.
If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you check out his book Free Culture, which was released under a Creative Commons license and is therefore free to download.
A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. Like Stallman’s arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don’t get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can’t get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written.
To get a brief summary of some of his ideas, watch this TED talk he gave a few years back (below the fold).
Music industry and the internet
There is a music store in my area called “Records”. Mike and I tried to find it together once but got hopelessly lost in the zombie land that is K Street Sacramento at 7PM.
Anyway, this record store was once featured in a documentary called “Scratch”. All about the history of… scratching, and hip-hop. Then-Davis-resident DJ Shadow showed the camera crew around the basement of this place (though they’ve since moved FYI) which was filled with records stacked to the ceiling. They practically had to walk on records just to get around. DJ shadow then gives a short speech to fellow aspiring artists in the industry:
You’re looking through all these records and it’s sort of like a big pile of broken dreams in a way. Almost none of these artists still have a career really — so you kind of have to respect that in a way. I mean if you’re making records and if you’re a DJ putting out mixtapes or whatever. You’re sort of adding to this pile whether you want to admit it or not. Ten years down the line you’ll be in here, so, keep that in mind when you start thinking like “oh yea, I’m invincible,” or “I’m the worlds best” or whatever, because that’s what all these cats thought.
With the help of the Internet the music industry has even more contenders than it would in physical form. Anyone can now distribute their music to thousands of people without even costing them a dime. Good or bad music, licensed or not, it’s all available at our fingers and perhaps we have all forgotten that was our main intent.
Music Industry: How did we get here, and how can we fix it?
There’s no reason to buy music CDs anymore. The actual artists get very little money from them, as the vast majority of profit goes to the studio. Assembling and shipping them is expensive and largely unnecessary when digital distribution is cheap and easy. So, we’re left with an outdated distribution model that’s expensive and inefficient, and rather than pioneering a new model of music distribution, the music labels fought any such attempt every step of the way. The only reason the big music labels signed on with Apple’s iTunes nearly a decade ago was that they assumed it would be a complete failure (thanks in part to the high price the labels insisted on charging for each song), and afterward they could turn to the world and say “see, we told you this would never work.” As we know, iTunes was hugely successful, even with the initial DRM and the still-overpriced songs, and music labels were dragged kicking and screaming into the world of online music sales.
Why is this important? Well, while the music industry was dragging its feet, technology was rapidly improving. File sharing was inevitable. It’s now so ingrained in our culture that it’s impossible to stop. Yes, it facilitates copyright infringement. But so do VCRs and tape decks. If you ever recorded a television program on your VCR and watched it more than once, you were breaking the same law. File sharing just does this on a massive scale. It didn’t require a change in our morality or cultural values — it was actually a logical result of them. Humans drive technology, not the other way around, and the Internet didn’t force your kids to copy music. They’d be doing it even without peer to peer file sharing software, by sharing CDs or copying tapes or any number of methods. This doesn’t make it right, but it’s important to accept the reality of things: music piracy is here to stay.
Pirate Bay ordered to delete torrents
The Amsterdam court today ruled that The Pirate Bay must remove a list of copyrighted torrents from their website within three months. In addition they have to block Dutch users’ access to parts of the site where copyrighted torrent can be downloaded. If not, the three ‘operators’ will have to pay penalties of 5,000 euros ($7,500) per person, per day.
Ignoring RIAA lawsuits is cheaper than showing up in court
Ars Technica reports that the default judgment (what you get for not showing up in court) is less than what those who have actually gone to court have received.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum captured the nation’s attention when they were defendants in the RIAA’s first two trials against accused online infringers. But here’s the mind-warping reality: both defendants would have been far better off monetarily if they had simply ignored the complaint altogether and failed to show up in court.
(…)
Thomas-Rasset’s retrial ended up with a $1.92 million award, while Tenenbaum faces $675,000 in damages. Those who didn’t show up owe around $7,500.
A later edit to the article states:
Update: I was interested more in what happens within the federal court system for this article, but several commenters rightly point out that “not showing up” isn’t the cheapest way out of such situations. Settling with the RIAA usually leads to payments of between $3,000 and $5,000, lower than the default judgments issued here by Judge Gertner. Convincing a jury that you’re innocent could be cheaper still (if you find a pro bono lawyer), though it comes with certain obvious risks.
I’m not quite sure what I’d do if I were in this situation. Settling seems like the easiest way out, but it’s basically paying protection money to what I feel is a criminal organization that bullies people by exploiting the legal system.
And, of course, shoplifting the CDs rather than downloading the MP3s would have ended up landing them even lesser punishment than the above scenarios.
Quality and convenience — what companies can do to discourage piracy
I am convinced that people are willing to pay for much of the media that they currently pirate. It is not that we are just constitutionally against buying it, but rather there are systems in place that actively work to discourage us from purchasing rather than pirating. Inflated prices, digital rights management, and so on.
This goes along with a general point I try to make with this blog: we can sit around calling an entire generation “pirates,” or we can try to understand why these so-called pirates do what they do.
In this article I am going to explore two different examples: one that demonstrates how a company can drive consumers to piracy, and another that demonstrates how a company can convert pirates into customers.
Mike Vollmer
npc82
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