Journal mshomphe's Journal: The Digital Genie 3
(Or, How to learn to stop worrying about copyright and begin to love digital distribution)
There are few things preoccupying the entertainment business cabals more than the looming threat of digital piracy. There have been some humorous takes on the current stance of the entertainment industry with respect to sharing of files. However, there are legitimate concerns that the RIAA/MPAA have about the future of filesharing.
Let's imagine a future where bandwith and memory are virtually infinte. Digital reproduction is near perfect. So, with a few clicks of a mouse, I can download an entire album (or movie), liner notes and all, right onto my computer. And further suppose that I have a 'fabber', a device that can produce a CD/DVD of the media I have downloaded, that spits out the CD instantly. In 2 minutes, I have generated an exact duplicate of the latest pop sensation's album, without giving any money back to the artist and the group that created the album.
This is the fear of the music industry.
In order to prevent this future, they are on the frontlines now, forcing legislation and enforcement of laws in a manner that seems almost despotic and maniacal.
But this is not what will happen. The industry fails to see three key points:
1. This kind of instantaneous reproduction is not only an important advance in the dissemination of knowledge, it will reduce their distribution costs to near nothing.
2. Monetary compensation is not the intent of art.
3. Total "digital rights management" (the complete control over where/when/how a piece of digita media is used) is not possible.
The first point is something that the industry is not willing to examine because it involves a major move from existing infrastructure to a substantial investment in a new, untested infrastructure. Selling objects in stores is something that the industry not only knows how to do, it has been doing it for a very long time. Inertia, it seems, is one of the strongest forces in the universe. However, the industry needs to realize that new methods of distribution can complement, not just supplant, the existing methods.
The second point is more subtle. People want to be compensated for their art, investment, etc(1). They want to have some control over the use of their creation. If I write a song, I don't want it to be associated with or co-opted by some group that I strongly disagree with (meaning that I wouldn't want, through my art, to be associated with, say, the KKK). But an artist has to realize that to share your art is to inspire others -- by doing that, you've already lost some degree of control. A painting you create could inspire a madman to destroy indiscriminately; or it could inspire a whole new movement in painting. These are the risks associated with being a public artist.
The industry surrounding the artistic community is a business. It operates for monetary gain from assisting the artist in some way. The true center of the issue is that the industry is afraid that it will not be compensated in the future for its investment. One argument that could be made to quell this fear is that for an album to make it "into the wild" on a p2p network, someone would have to buy the inital copy. And one could futher argue that the mathematics of altruism would take over, dictating that everyone would have to buy enough albums on their own to keep the network, and by extension the industry, alive. A more immediate response is the following: Just because somethign is offered for free, doesn't mean someone won't pay to get it. There seems to be this overwhelming sense in the business community that if someone offers a product for free, people will go with that option every time. This is not the case. Brand loyalty is a strong drive (as ad people know). Also, people will compensate someone that they feel has done a good service for them, even if the service was free. As someone once pointed out "You can get coffee for free at the office, but people still go to Starbucks".
The third point is a huge issue. Digital media means absolute fidelity in reproduction, ease of distribution, and the ability to manipulate that media. The digital genie has been let out of the bottle. This is a good thing -- we can encode vast amounts of data and easily make sense of it. It's a new dawn for science and analysis. However, many want to stuff that genie back into his bottle. With the supremecy of digital media already demonstrated, the genie will no longer fit back in. Furthermore, complete control over a piece of digital media once it has passed into the hands of the consumer is impossible. Here's why:
THE USER MUST BE ABLE TO LISTEN TO/SEE THE DIGITAL MEDIA THAT S/HE HAS PURCHASED
Art is communication, and once it starts travelling throught the aether, it can be recaptured. To take a concrete example, if I buy some encrypted CD, and say it only works with my RIAA-endorsed player, I can always put a microphone up to the headphones and record it onto my computer. I now have an unencrypted form of the media I was listening to. There is no way to encrypt a piece of media meant to be sensed by a human being so that i cannot be recaptured in some other format.
This is my proposal for the entertainment industry.
(1) Embrace digital media. This is a huge advance and make the most of it.
(2) Revamp distribution. Incorporate digital transfer as a way to cheaply distribute product to customers.
(3) Give the people what they want. P2P networks are notoriously unreliable. If you make a network available that has high-quality recordings, excellent bandwidth, and reasonable prices, people will abandon free p2p services. (4) Do not look at filesharing as piracy. This is free advertising. As long as you are charging unreasonable rates, screwing artists, and calling your customers criminals, free p2p will continue to grow.
If the industry fails to do this, it is incumbent on the artists themselves to take the digital distribution paradigm to the masses. Loose alliances of artists can wield as much power as these multinational conglomerates in this new space. The power shifts dramatically when the artist directly markets/interacts with his/her fans.
(1) Despite Marx's insistance of speaking of homo faber, most people would probably be more like the protagonist of "Office Space" and do nothing.
Reproduction quality (Score:2)
The point? Copy-protect your CDs as much as you want, all it takes is for someone to take the analogue output from your stero and plug it into their sound card's input. The quality will not be 100% CD quality, but with a half-decent stereo and sound card it will be virtually indistinguishable from most mp3s out there. End result? Copy-protection will not work because at some stage they have to let me hear the music. If I can hear it, I can record it. If I can record it, I can potentially copy it and give it to others.
By sharing mp3s (and some of them very poor rips anyway) people are obviously willing to sacrifice sound quality for convenience. Once there is one digital copy, it can be reproduced with no further loss in quality, so the files will fly around the P2P networks once more.
BTW, I personally buy CDs and DVDs in preference to sopying them. I will only copy music/movies if I cannot find legal copies. (For example, copies of albums not available anymore - if they ever do get re-released, I will buy them.)
Re:Reproduction quality (Score:2)
I'll usually download files just so I can figure out how to play them. I'm not going to run out and buy Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" just to learn "Livin on a Prayer". Which is the other problem with distribution -- there's a lot of filler. One-hit wonders are great for business, bad for consumers.
BTW, you have the dubious distinction of being the first person to post in my journal. I owe you a Coke or something
Re:Reproduction quality (Score:2)
And the only way the record labels will make it not worth copying from the headphone jack is to distort the sound quality - if they do that, no-one will want to listen to the music in the first place! I gotta be able to hear the music at a reasonable quality or I ain't buying it. If I can hear it, a microphone can too.
I remember the (good-old) days of the 8-bit home micros when the software companies started introducing copy protection on their software. Within days of a new copy protection method being released the crackers had broken it and had distributed the cracking tools. The more advanced the software companies got, the more advanced the crackers got. Then all of a sudden a whole bunch of new tools appeared (legitimate hardware/software tools, not from crackers) which could be used to 'freeze' your computer and dump the entire contents of the RAM to disk. With that, you loaded the game into memory, hit the button and saved it - now you could share the game with your friends. Eventually the software companies realised that they were wasting time and money developing new copy protection methods and they just gave up. Games (and business software too, though naturally games were the main focus of crackers) became dead easy to copy and the companies didn't disappear! In fact, sales started to increase slightly.
You can never stop determined people from copying your software (or music, videos, etc) because they will always find a way. What you have to do is give your target audience a reason to purchase your product.
I'll usually download files just so I can figure out how to play them. I'm not going to run out and buy Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" just to learn "Livin on a Prayer". Which is the other problem with distribution -- there's a lot of filler. One-hit wonders are great for business, bad for consumers.
I tend to buy CD singles, because I don't want to spend $25-$30 on an entire album just because I liked one song that I heard on the radio. The problem is, sometimes I might not hear a new release until a couple of months after it has been on the charts. (I don't listen to the radio that much, and the pub/club I go to regularly lags about 2 months behind the latest hits. Or it takes me a couple of months to find out the name of a catchy tune I hear...) Unfortunately singles have a very short life on the catalogues and are almost impossible to find after 3 months. 8-( What's my solution? Buy an entire album that I don't want, or copy a single mp3 file off a friend or the net. If I could buy a good quality
BTW, if you want my opinion, buy "Slippery When Wet" - its got a lot of good songs on it, many of which are also great fun to play. (I play guitar (badly) though I haven't picked one up for a long time...) (Then again, I'm a Bon Jovi fan, so I might be biased there...) 8-)
BTW, you have the dubious distinction of being the first person to post in my journal. I owe you a Coke or something
No Coke for me please - I'm on a diet. (Unless there's Bourbon in it!) But thanks for the offer. 8-)