Scottandrsn, I think you’re missing an important point. You look at all the illegal free downloading, and predict that bands won’t be able to continue to make a living if this continues. But it’s going to continue. There’s no stopping it. You can put all the digital rights managment software and security devices and any other such things you can imagine onto future recordings.
Those copy-protected versions are going to remain copy protected for a few days, long enough for someone to run the file through a descrambler and share the unprotected file. The only alternative is to make it illegal to own general purpose computers, people will only be allowed to own computers monitored 24 hours a day by the record companies.
You’re worried about what will happen to music, you say that these damn meddling kids today aren’t spending money on music since they can get everything for free. So you slam people who argue for a different model. But what you don’t understand is that to keep our current model isn’t an answer either, it will lead to the exact same result you complain about…no one can make money from recorded music. You can’t throw every 14 year old downloader in jail. You can’t rely on a technological lockdown except to protect files temporarily…for a few days. You can’t rely on altruism. You can’t rely on a social contract.
So right now, right here, our current model is broken and is going down in flames. What are we going to do about it? Insist that our current model is the only possible legal and ethical framework? That won’t work, that’s just signing a suicide pact.
Our current copyright framework came from a particular technology. Before the printing press there was no such thing as copyright, and rightly so. Every book had to be made by hand. Books were produced for sale, but very few, since they were hugely expensive luxury items. No one authored books with the intent to make money…you might make money producing physical books, but you couldn’t make money AUTHORING books. Yeah, an author “owned” his work…but he couldn’t sell it, since no one could buy it. But of course, most authors were dead, and had been dead for centuries. There was almost no market for new works. People authored works for reasons of their own, not because they wanted to make money.
But of course, this meant very little new work. Then along comes our friend the printing press. Suddenly the physical work of making a copy of a book drops to a fraction. You could author a story, print up thousands of copies and sell them, and make a small amount of money. Suddenly we have a new job…the professional writer, someone who could make a modest living writing books. But we notice a new problem. Anyone who likes could print copies of the author’s book and sell them. How can the author make money now? We enjoy the expansion of the useful arts and sciences that professional authors give us, how do we foster this new innovation?
And so we invent the idea of copyright…we’ll give the author of a book a limited exclusive right to print copies of his book. This is pretty easy to monitor, since printing books is an industrial process and requires fixed capital. There are only a certain number of printing presses around, if someone prints illegal copies it will be pretty easy to track down who broke the copyright. And since the whole point of breaking the copyright is to make money, the simple remedy is for the author to sue the copyright breaker and the copyright breaker would have to turn over the money, plus whatever punitive damages are deemed appropriate.
And when the technology for recording music came along, it was pretty easy to adapt the existing copyright scheme to cover music. It took a lot of money to press a vinyl record. The only reason someone would spend that kind of money would be if they hoped to make money themselves. But this was fairly difficult, since it would be easy to trace the bootleg records back to the printer. This printer would presumably be making some money and have a capital investment in his plant. The money could be seized, the equipment forfeited.
So it wasn’t altruism that prevented copyright violation in the past. Potential violaters had a justified fear that they would be discovered, they had a lot to lose, and copying cost a lot of money. Remove the monetary incentive to violate copyright and violations dwindle to a trickle. Libraries were a potential threat to authors…people could read books for free…but libraries still had to purchase the works, and only one person at a time could access the works.
Controlling copying was a pretty good rough proxy for demand for the work. Yes, more than one person could read a copy of a book, a person could listen to a particular record multiple times. But no one would purchase a copy of a book they didn’t want, or produce a copy of a book they couldn’t sell. It was controllable, the law and the ethical framework behind the law matched the technology. The law was enforceable. Yes, there were copyright violations, just like there are murder violations, and sometimes people got away with copyright violations. But effort involved in copying was high, the risk of being caught were high, the rewards were low.
And then along comes the internet. Yes, we had home taping before, you could tape your records and tapes and give them to your friends and lots of people did. But it wasn’t an overwhelmingly widespread practice, since the tapes themselves cost money and it took some effort to set up…maybe only a few minutes of work per copy, but still. But now, files could be shared for no cost. The person sharing the file incurs no costs, the person downloading the file incurs only the cost of finding the track they want in a sea of garbage.
People can copy works with essentially no effort. In the old days, producing thousands of physical copies of a work and giving them away for free was insane, because it would cost so much. Yes, people did it…giving away Bibles, or vanity press, or suchlike. But only the very dedicated would do such a thing.
Nowadays, the effort involved in copying is zero, it costs me nothing if a million people make a copy of a file on my computer. From a short-term perspective I have no incentive NOT to let people copy my files. What do I care? It doesn’t cost me anything. I let you copy my files, you let me copy your files, they let us copy their files, and pretty soon everyone’s doing it.
In the old days costs were high, risks were high, and rewards were low. Nowadays the cost is zero, the risk is extremely low, and the rewards are high. Aaaaaaand, what changes in behavior might we expect to see, now that the incentives have been changed so radically by a change in the technology? Yep, we see good old human nature at work, people respond to the incentives in front of them. There sure is a lot of illegal copyright violation going on nowadays, right?
So what are we going to do about it? Nothing? Enforce our existing laws more widely? Enforce our existing laws more harshly? That’s not going to work. You could shut down copyright violators before, since they were violating copyright in the hope of making money. With no money no one bothers. But a 14 year old in his mom’s basement isn’t sharing files to make money. To enforce the laws widely would require an unprecedented amount of police work. How many FBI investigators will you pay for to build cases against 10 million 14 year old kids? And exactly what would be their punishment? Say you fine them double the amount they would have been charged if they bought the file from a music store. Say $28 per album, or say $3 per track. How much money do you think that 14 year old kid has?
And this still makes no sense. I can go to the record store and buy a new CD for $14. I can write a script that will fill up my hard drive with copies of the album, and when my disk is full delete them and start over. Suppose I run the script until I’ve created a million copies of the CD and deleted all of them. I’ve violated the author’s copyright 1 million times. Should I be fined $28 million dollars? For what? What exact harm did I do to that particular artist? Yes, I violated their copyright, I broke the law. What should happen to me? Did I really cause $28 million dollars in damage? Or did I cause $0.00 in damage?
Harsher punishments, more punishments won’t work. Technology has radically transformed the incentives to violate copyright, our existing laws and ethics only worked under a different system of incentives.
So is the solution to change the technology? That’s one idea. But will it really work? Sure, you can require everyone to imbed digital rights management into every device capable of playing music. Is that going to work? Every computer, every tape player, every CD player? And how exactly do you prevent people from stripping out the DRM and producing clean copies? Sure, very few people are going to be able to do this, in theory you’d go back to the days when you could trace copyright violations back to the source and shut down the source. But once a clean copy is produced it becomes available to everyone, it doesn’t cost anyone anything to copy or download or upload. It takes over. And DRM schemes are going to be cumbersome and have to be changed and upgraded often. How many people are going to pay for content that might or might not work on their player, that they can only listen to on one device, their device locks up unexectedly or crashes like Windows 3.1. Whose going to pay for a copy that’s a pain in the ass when they can get a clean copy for free?
The incentives are all wrong, you can’t stuff digital computing back into the bottle without destroying the usefulness of digital computing. If you try this path people will just work around it. Incentives. Human nature. A copyright scheme will only work if it’s easier for the majority of people to comply with it than break it.
So the system is broken. It is going to change. Industries are going to be destroyed. And there’s nothing we can do to stop it. All we can do is decide on a rational new scheme that also works to promote the useful arts and sciences. It may not be as effective as the one we used to have. Maybe there will be less music, less good music, more crap, who knows? But complaining that we’re going to have less music in the future doesn’t give us more music. Maybe there will be no more professional musicians in the future, and our only recorded music will be music recorded in the 20th century.
Or maybe not. We need a scheme that rewards people in some way for producing recorded music that people enjoy. We can only prevent ubiquitous file sharing with difficulty. How about a scheme that doesn’t rely on prevention of copying and sharing?
Nowadays people pay money for entertainment and communications services. People pay a monthly bill for cable TV, for a phone connection, for internet access, for satelile radio. Why not move to a service model for music? For (say) $40 dollars a month you can listen to any version of any song ever recorded any time you want as many times as you want. You can copy the files if you want, but why would you? You aren’t going to cancel your subscription when you decide you’ve got enough music, people don’t tape thousands of hours of cable TV and cancel their cable and watch the tapes. Of that $40, part would go to support the physical hardware…the servers, the networking, paying the DBAs, etc. Another part would go to the artists. It wouldn’t be too hard to keep track of what everyone’s listening to and divide up the fees that way. If 1 million subscribers listen to Brittney Spear’s new single this month, she could get 5 cents a listen…that would be $50,000 dollars. Maybe today’s pop stars make more money per month, but most musicians make much much much less.
If Brittney wants to promote herself, she can hire promoters, or sign with an established promotion firm. It doesn’t matter, since the relationship between Brittney and her promoters, managers and agents has nothing to do with the customers or the service provider.
Even if a scheme like this doesn’t work very well, it’s sure to work better than our current model. I agree that a system that relies on the altruism of artists to produce new material isn’t going to see much new material produced. But a system that relies on the altruism of consumers isn’t going to work either. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons…everybody wants lots of new music, and they’re mostly willing to pay for it. But if the benefits for pirating are realized by individual consumers and the costs of pirating are born by the whole market then no one has an incentive not to pirate, even if it means destroying the market. Demanding that consumers be more altruistic isn’t going to help. Punishing individual consumers harshly for individually trivial offenses isn’t going to help either.
The only answer is to decouple compensation for the artists from the act of copying the file. There has to be some other way to compensate the artists, since file copying is impossible to control any more. And by “has to be”, I just mean “has to be or we won’t have musicians who make their living by recording music”. Maybe professional recording artists are going to go extinct no matter what we do, but our current copyright scheme is a GUARANTEE that they’ll go extinct. Abandoning copyright entirely sounds crazy, but it would be an improvement on our current broken system. Unenforceable and widely ignored laws are bad laws. There’s bound to be multiple schemes that are an improvement on both de jure anarchy and our present system of de facto anarchy.
We need to settle on something that works and compensates artists in some way, even if it’s only a trickle compared to what they’re getting now. But artists are really only getting a trickle today, the record companies get the vast majority of the money from recorded music and the artists get a pittance. A scheme where artists get 75% of the money from recorded music instead of the 5% they’re getting today would support 15 times the amount of music production if everyone spent the same amount of money on music. Even if in 10 years consumers only spend 1/10 of what they now do for recorded music we’ll still have more new music than we have today. Maybe it isn’t possible to give artists 75% of the revenues, maybe it isn’t possible to get people to pay even 1/10th of what they now spend. But it doesn’t seem far fetched for artists to get a much much larger share of smaller pie. How small the pie will be is speculative, who knows, it may be a larger pie for all we know. But a smaller industry doesn’t mean fewer artists, it just means fewer music stores, fewer CD pressing plants, fewer advertising executives, fewer lawyers, fewer entourage members.
