The RIAA Does Not Like You
Have you noticed how hostile the recording industry has become over the past 18 months? I sure have. I'm not simply referring to its war with Napster (which Napster lost, I believe) but their unapologetic assault on consumers. Why? They're afraid
Have you noticed how hostile the recording industry has become over the past 18 months? I sure have. I'm not simply referring to its war with Napster (which Napster lost, I believe) but their unapologetic assault on consumers. Why? They're afraid of you.
At the center of this is a wasp's nest of litigation against Napster, MP3.com, Jon Johansen (the 16-year-old Norwegian kid who hacked the DeCSS code), and an imaginative blacklist of other "enemies" of the recording and entertainment industry. If the exploits of those I just mentioned are unfamiliar to you, then I suggest you have a lot of homework to catch up on. Essentially, the titans of entertainment are worried about these new fangled technologies and what groups like those above have used them for. There is a panic among these distributors that they are losing control over their content and its dissemination. The fear is a familiar one; every new leap in technology has sent a scurrying of Chicken Littles into legislative corridors pleading for more restrictions. Prior to the plebiscitary slag-heap that is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, there was the VHS and betamax battle of the mid-80s. Networks and the MPAA were aghast at the prospect of every couch potato in the world having the ability to copy anything he saw on TV and play it, trade it, or (most frightening) sell it to whomever he saw fit. It represented catastrophic loss of control. With file-trading programs now and the sheer proliferation of unrestrained content over the Web, these copyright lords fear they will lose the last vestige of influence over what they produce and disperse. The question I pose is not whether this is right or wrong. I believe that those who proclaim the recording industry and virtually all media conglomerates a cartel are correct. They are bloated middlemen who have surrendered their usefulness through decades of greed and insolence. At its core, there should be only one path between consumer and artist. Control over this link should rest solely in the hands of those two parties. I suggest somewhere along the way, the huge conglomerates that distribute most of the world's media forgot their role in it. So I remind them: they are stewards, not masters. The artist is the creator; when he releases a work to the public, it is the people who become part-owners. Still, what is clear today is that this has become a war of attrition. On one side you have litigation and jingoistic threats from groups like the RIAA against millions of song-trading netizens; on the other, a cadre of developers, hackers, and web renegades eager to crack whatever technological rampart is thrown their way. They generally have the backing of those song-swapping millions. This will not last, though. A solution will be found eventually. What is essential, of course, is which side determines that fate.
The argument goes something like this: Let's say I buy a book from Amazon. I read the book, like it, and decide (because I'm a good person) to give the book to my friend so he can read it. Is it my right to do so? Damn straight it is. I bought the book, and with it, the freedom to determine the rest of that book’s fate and all of the content it contains. This particular specter of copyright infringement never occurred to publishers or authors because no single consumer had the ability to mass-produce copies of that book once he got it home. If he traded it or sold it, it made no difference. The publishing house got paid for the initial transaction, and that's all it was concerned with. Generally, this was how record companies felt about albums produced under their multitudinous labels before the advent of recordable cassettes. Things became thornier with the advent of devices like VCRs, but in the end, "fair use" won out, and everyone settled down. Digital media is different. Let me say it again, because this is the hole in nearly every argument of Internet Freedom Fighters across the globe. If I like a song, I can obtain it now from a total stranger across the Web, without paying a cent for it, and I can then share that song with as many people as I choose. I, and millions of others, hold in our hands the ability to determine what people can hear, and however many people hear it, and we can decide this on a truly grand scale. I can totally circumvent all the big labels and the RIAA and ensure that they (along with the artist in all likelihood) receive nothing for that piece of work. Not a damn thing. Of course, the recording industry is screaming bloody murder. They've convinced most of their clients (the artists) to back them. They have a double-pronged strategy to ensure victory over the chaotic forces of the Internet. Litigation, the proceedings of which we’re all familiar, and technological, which is where corporate coders fight a binary battle to invent the perfect, bullet-proof app that will protect all digital media from the meddling fingers of even the public who purchase it. So here’s the next question: In the fight to reverse this trend,
Is technology the best solution?
In a very substantial way, this is our generation’s arms race. Human lives are not at stake, but arguably, that which makes us human is. The free flow of ideas, and I do mean FREE, is the next stage in the evolution of human expression. The fact that it was aided by technology does not mean that its progression must be dictated by it. The very fact that both sides to this find themselves spinning like a cat chasing its tail proves the futility of this. It is necessary to approach this from a philosophical angle. The purpose of an idea is to reach as broad an audience as possible. The means to do this, and accomplish it instantly and cheaply, is available to us for the first time. Digital watermarks, pass-codes, time locks—all act as artificial impediments to this. What is a greater injustice, is that they are imposed and presided over by agents who did not create them, but act merely as couriers and advertisers. Their motive is to profit both ways—by buying what the artisan creates and controlling that work as far down the market chain as possible for as long as possible. They wish to eat their cake and have it too. This is a philosophical motive, it must be dealt with accordingly. (Profit, I think any corporate lawyer will agree, is the governing ethos of any business.) The cultural attitude that permits this must be transformed so that it is no longer acceptable. That is why Napster is such a sting in the face of the RIAA. People are consciously choosing to cut them out of the equation. Their reasons are purely philosophical too. They don’t want to pay for it. The most direct effect of this is that it weakens the mighty recording industry. An ancillary consequence is that it weakens the artist as well. This is something people will have to work out in their conscience. And that is as it should be.
I've touched on what our role in this can be, but what about government? Don't roll your eyes like that, it *does* have a place in this. If anything, it acts as a third party. A ballast you might say. I won't for a moment believe that it will be an impartial one, but it does represent some degree of balance between citizens and corporations. Now I know most people feel that government is securely in the pockets of big business, but if that were absolutely true, then those same companies wouldn't have to keep hosing down the halls of Congress with billions of dollars every year. I realize I just finished saying that the answer to all this is a social one, but in order to really cement those changes, some laws will have to be passed and regulations set in motion. Hence, Uncle Sam needs to throw his hat in the ring too. He'll need coaxing and prodding, not all of it very gentle by the look of the next four years, but if all the kids holler loud enough and raise a big ruckus, he'll have to do something to shut them up. (Those dang fool kids are interrupting his nap, anyway.)
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For example, if I cared to do so, I could write a book, and make it free via the internet. People could read it online, or even print out their own copies to read if they wanted to. This is an interesting concept, but there are a variety of reasons most people would choose not to do so. One might be that, despite the fact that a writer is trying to promote an idea(s) to a certain audience, food and shelter supercede that desire. It sounds silly, but how can an author really be expected to devote his intellectual efforts and passion to a work of literature, if he has to spend most of his time with a job? Yes, I realise it is possible to write a book while having a job, even a good book. That would vary by person.
Personally, afforded the opportunity, I would love to devote most/all of my time to using my demonstrably ordinary mind, and devoting myself to giving birth to a work of my own imagination, a work that will in turn, tempt and tease my ordinary mind into cleverness.
After completing this, I would be inclined to find a publisher, who would be able to promote and sell my book, in a similar manner to how record companies go about manufacturing and promoting music.
I don't see the stealing of intellectual property as being any different than tangible things.
By the same token, I think intellectual property, when desired, should be justly compensated. In this country, I reserve the right to go out into the world and offer services or products for sale, to profit. If I have some intellectual property that I wish to share, that I think is profitable, and more importantly, beneficial to an audience, why shouldn't I reserve the right to market it?
I don't think the real issue here is the greed on the record companies' half, in trying to profit from the sale and control of artists' media. The "artisans" selected these companies themselves. They weren't coerced into being represented by them, nor their works being manufactured by them. If they wished to promote and distribute their artistic works freely, they have the option to do that themselves.
Wouldn't that be difficult? Yes. It would take a lot of time and resources. Record companies have this luxury - that's their purpose.
The real issue, possibly, is that record companies in an effort create more profit, have seduced the public, time and time again, with absolutely horrid, fabricated artists/musicians/etc. They no longer have to seek talent for their labels, the create it themselves.
The music market grown so entirely saturated, that all the industry has to do is detect the standards of a large audience, and fabricate an artist or group to meet those standards. The result: fetid garbage; just look at the billboard charts.
This isn't coincidental. The entertainment industry as a whole, has located a very special market: children. From the age of 9 months to 19 years, precise corporate selling is beamed directly to children separating them from their parents, an unheard of practice formerly, and teaching them how to nag their beleaguered parents as unpaid salesmen for companies. There is a bombardment of their impressionable minds.
The marketeers are keenly aware of the stages of child psychologies, age by age, and know how to turn many into Pavlovian specimens powered by spasmodically shortened attention spans as they become ever more remote from their own family. Conditioned to become gazers and spectators for an average of 30 hours a week, youngsters now register as more obese and out of shape than any previous generation since 1900 when such records began to be collected. Their teachers see the results of this addictive commercial exploitation, the rat pack product conformity, the intrusion of commerce into the schools themselves.