Necessity knows no laws – the role of copyright pirates in the cultural ecosystem from printing to file sharing networks
This is the title of my PhD turned into a forthcoming book in Hungarian.
In this book my aim was to look beyond the legal and economic readings of contemporary western copyright piracy and understand it as a unique social practice that merits attention not only because of its dubious legality, ubiquity, or the havoc it has played with copyright-based business models, but first and foremost because it shapes the ideas and attitudes of millions of netizens about what intellectual property is and could be; what sharing and online cooperation means in a p2p setting; what privacy is and how it can be protected; how to form and negotiate online identities in an anonymous environment, just to name a few issues. Piracy is not just a drain on the cultural economy, but a powerful productive force whose legacy in social relations will stay with us long after the economic conditions that called it into being –and the power vacuum that enabled it – have passed.
The notion that piracy is more than just a legally contested shadow economy is further supported by the body of research that documents historical examples of copyright piracy either from a social/media history, literary studies perspective (Bender & Sampliner, 1996-1997; Darnton, 2003; Feather, 1987; Heylin, 1995; Judge, 1934; Kaser, 1969; Pollard, 1916, 1920; Rose, 1993; Wittmann, 2004, Johns 2010) or from a legal history standpoint (Khan, 2002; Khan & Sokoloff, 2001; May & Sell, 2006; Redmond, 1990; Scott, 1998). These historical accounts of copyright piracy describe the internal norms of information markets both before and after the establishment of national and international layers of regulation. The faces, motivations, and fates of the copyright pirates are many, but there is one thing that is common to all of them: they all exist in the extra-legal domain at the edges of state authority. In this semi-autonomous space, “Honor Amongst Thieves,” “synthetic copyright”, entries in the Registry of the Stationer’s Company, server-enforced share ratios, and other non-legal structures organize pirate activity. In each and every case we find norms that — while competing with the legal – act to encourage the production of a common pool resource, offer methods to settle disputes and limit free-riding. In other words these bottom up norms sometimes substitute, sometimes replicate state sanctioned layers of regulation that are missing or being denied.
Why is the study of piracy especially interesting today? For several reasons. First, even though on paper we have seen a steady strengthening of the protection of Intellectual Property, the inability to enforce them resulted in a significantly weaker copyright protection than any time during the last hundred years. That vacuum is partly caused, partly filled by the competing, bottom up norms of file-sharing communities. The weakened property rights, along with the emergence of filesharing networks created a de facto common pool of resources from the musical, audiovisual, textual works circulating in the digital underground. This commons has proved to be quite resilient to attacks from the outside as well as to those internal issues that can lead to a tragedy of commons. Many file-sharing communities seem to have successfully solved the problems of managing a common pool resource as well as protecting it from – in this case (re) – enclosure. There is, however, little to no research on the actual mechanisms of how these commons are maintained, protected and replenished. Only a few unconfirmed accounts describe the internal workings of online cultural black markets (b-bstf, Summer 2004; Howe, January 2005).
Second, even from these shallow accounts it is evident that non-monetary incentives and complex social motivations play a crucial role in the existence and successful survival of file-sharing communities and of those resource pools around which these communities gather. To illustrate this point it is worth examining the ways community norms manifest themselves in the technological restraints and defaults (Strahilevitz, 2003). Employed at the level of both software clients (like the design principle of bittorrent) and servers (minimum shared library size or upload/download ratio) technology is fine-tuned to reflect the characteristics of content flows, the relative popularity of different titles, the aesthetic judgments, and the thematic preferences of file-sharers. Global, open, mainstream bittorrent trackers for example set no minimum level of contribution – they rely on the sheer number of users and the loyalty of some to provide the necessary level of resources for all. On the other hand, while many national level trackers prohibit the exchange of current local goods, they highly reward the making available of local back catalogs and out of print works. Some allow only a trusted circle of releasers to provide them with digital copies of new titles. Others allow, even encourage each and every user to upload and seed whatever they see fit. From this latter group some set and enforce highly detailed technical specifications regarding video encoding, sound quality, etc. Others provide the community collaborative filtering tools to assess the quality of contributions. Beyond the technologically enforced compulsory rules, informal community norms encourage voluntary cooperation. The exclusivity, notoriety of some communities guarantees a loyal and enthusiastic user base. Their fame inspires others into competition, trying to replicate their success. Many fail, a few prefer to stay small and secluded, but some develop into big, extraordinarily powerful underground marketplaces.
Third, none of these subtle differences between different pirate communities is described with the current economic and legal language used to discuss copyright piracy, despite the fact that they have profound economic and legal consequences on legal markets and on general copynorms (Schultz, 2006) alike. Current discourse on copyright piracy tends to homogenize a wide variety of fundamentally different practices with reductionist legal /economic arguments.
Following the footsteps of Lessig (2004) I hope that the time is now ripe to step beyond the monolithic understanding of p2p file-sharing by enriching the currently fragmented research landscape with a social-sciences based piracy research that
- describes the role copyright pirates played throughout the history of printing,
- describes the international flow of intellectual property to explain piratical states such as China,
- based on these findings situates current file-sharing and assesses its impact on legal markets.
I am reading Adrian Johns’ The Nature of the Book. For the first few hundred years the biggest problems pirates were causing was that they mutilated, transformed, abridged, etc. the texts, causing great concern for the authors. Exact copying was in this sense a rare achievement and a secondary problem. Now we seek to protect transformative uses of copyrighted materials by CC licenses and such, but condemn non-transformative copying. Ironic, but i can hardly believe, that the concerns of Martin Luther were (can be) dissipated by post-modernist intertextuality, or by technological development.
Grace and peace! What is all this, dear sirs, that one should openly rob and steal what belongs to the other, thus ruining one another? Have you now become street robbers and thieves? Or do you really imagine that God will bless and cause you to prosper through such knavery? I have gone on with the postils up till Easter, when they were secretly abstracted from the printing-press by the compositor, who maintains himself by the sweat of our brow, and who himself conveyed my writings to your most estimable town, where they were hurriedly printed and sold before the whole was finished, to the great detriment of all concerned. But I would even have put up with all this injury, had they not treated my books as they did — printing them so hurriedly and falsely — that when they reach my hands I scarcely know them to be mine. Some bits are left out, here they are displaced, there falsified, and other parts not corrected. And they have learned the art of writing Wittenberg on the top of some which have never seen Wittenberg. This is downright knavery. So let every one beware of the postils for the six Sabbaths, and let them sink into oblivion, for I do not acknowledge them as mine. Therefore take warning, my dear printers, who thus steal and rob. Other towns on the Rhine — Strassburg, etc., do not do this; and even if they did, it would not harm us so; for their publications do not reach us in the same way as yours do, being so much nearer. For you know what St. Paul says to the Thessalonians: “That no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter, because that the Lord is the avenger of all such.” One day you will experience this. Should not a Christian out of brotherly love wait for a month or two before he copies his work? We have put up with this till it has become unbearable, and has prevented us going on with the printing of the prophets, as we do not wish to see them spoiled, so greed and envy are delaying the spread of the Divine Word, and the fault lies at your door. Indulge your greed as much as you will, till we Germans are called brutes, but pray do not do so in the name of God. The judgment will most surely descend. May better times soon come. Amen.
2008 folyamán szisztematikus méréseket végeztünk néhány, Magyarországon meghatározó jelentőségű bittorrent trackeren a célból, hogy részletes, jó minőségű képet alkothassunk a peer-to-peer feketepiacok működéséről, súlyukról, jelentőségükről a kulturális piacok egészének szempontjából.
Az így nyert adatokat végül a magyarországi mozipiac elemzéséhez használtuk fel, mivel a mozis disztribúció esetében állnak rendelkezésre nyilvánosan az általunk gyűjtöttekhez mérhetően jó minőségű és részletességű adatok. A most elkészült elemzés tehát a p2p film-feketepiac és a mozifilm-forgalmazás egyes legális csatornáinak egymáshoz való viszonyát térképezi fel, mégpedig a következő három szempont szerint:
a feketepiaci kínálat alakulása: mitől függ, hogy melyik film és mikor válik a feketepiacon is elérhetővé?
a feketepiaci kereslet alakulása: mitől függ, hogy egy-egy filmnek hány letöltője lesz?
a p2p fájlcsere, mint autonóm fogyasztási logika leírása: mi a fájlcserélők, mint önálló tartalom-szerkesztő, tartalom-csomagoló, tartalom-terjesztő közösségek működési logikája?
Az elemzésben a feketepiac 2008 májusában és júniusában mért forgalmát, a Magyarországon 2004 után bemutatott premierfilmek forgalmazási adatait, valamint a magyarországi mozik 2000 utáni játszási adatait használtuk fel. Az elemzés nem egészen 5000 különböző film mozis és/vagy feketepiaci forgalmára terjed ki.
A feketepiaci kínálat
A legális forgalmazók szempontjából a legfontosabb kérdés az, hogy meg lehet-e akadályozni a mozis terjesztésbe kerülő filmek kiszivárgását a fájlcserélő hálózatokra, azaz befolyásolni lehet-e a feketepiaci kínálatot. A kutatás eredményei szerint a vizsgálat ideje alatt a feketepiacra kikerült 3600 film háromnegyede olyan alkotás volt, ami csak 2000 előtt, vagy egyáltalán nem volt mozikban, és csak alig 4%, azaz 152 film volt olyan, ami a kikerülése időpontjában a mozikban is látható volt. A vizsgált időszakban a mozikban játszott filmek közül minden ötödik került ki valamilyen formában a fájlcserélő hálózatokra. Azt a – forgalmazók szempontjából megnyugtatónak tűnő – tényt, hogy a feketepiacon elérhető filmek túlnyomó része mozis forgalmazásból már kikerült, archív tartalom, némileg árnyalja, hogy azok a filmek, amik viszont a mozis forgalmazással egy időben a feketepiacon is elérhetők, éppen a komoly PR-ral támogatott, a kiadók nagy várakozásaitól kísért, ezért sok kópiával forgalmazott (többségében nyilván hollywoodi) közönségfilmek közül kerülnek ki. A p2p kiszivárgás esélyét tovább növeli, ha a filmet sokan látják és/vagy nemzetközileg is sikeres. Minél erősebb promóciót kap egy film, annál valószínűbb, hogy kikerül a kalózhálózatokra. A p2p feketepiac kínálatának egy része erősen marketing-vezérelt.
Egészen más a helyzet a mozik műsorából hiányzó filmeknél. Ez utóbbiak kalózmegjelenését a moziforgalmazás jellemzői alig magyarázzák. Annyit mondhatunk csupán, hogy a kevesebb helyen vetített filmek a mozik programjából kikerülve kissé érdekesebbek lesznek a fájlcserélők számára, és hogy a múltban játszott filmek p2p jelenlétének esélye független a korábbi közönségsikertől, azaz korábban a filmre eladott mozijegyek számától.
Ez utóbbi jelenséggel függ össze, hogy egyes rétegműfajokba (pl, zenei, dráma, vagy romantikus filmek közé) sorolható filmek p2p elérhetősége akkor ugrik meg, amikor mozikban már nem játsszák őket. Míg a rétegműfajok esetében a fájlcserélő hálózatok archívum-funkciót töltenek be, addig más, esetleg gyorsabban avuló filmeket felsoroltató műfajok (fantasy/sci-fi, kalandfilm) esetében az aktuálisukat vesztett filmek hamar kikopnak a feketepiacról is.
A feketepiaci kereslet
A feketepiaci kereslettel foglalkozó szakaszban mindenekelőtt arra voltunk kíváncsiak, milyen tényezőkkel magyarázható az, hogy melyik filmet mennyiszer töltenek le. Azt találtunk, hogy a letöltések számára legnagyobb hatással ismét csak a kópiaszám, azaz a forgalmazói marketing-erő volt.: minél több pénzt költ a forgalmazó a mozis kereslet növelésére, annál többen nézik meg a filmet a fájlcserélők közül is. Nem találtuk azonban nyomát jelentős mértékű helyettesítésnek a mozi és a torrent között: a vizsgált két hónapban vetített filmek esetében 1 millió 650 ezer eladott jegy mellett 158 ezer letöltést regisztráltunk, azaz csak minden tízedik mozinézőre jut egy, a filmet ingyen megnéző fájlcserélő. Az alacsony helyettesítési aránynak az lehet a legfőbb oka, hogy a moziélmény alig, és csak bizonyos műfajok esetén váltható ki egy rossz minőségű p2p kópia kis-képernyős megtekintésével.
A fenti ökölszabály ez egyes műfajok esetében némileg módosulhat. Az akció/thriller és a bűnügyi filmek az átlagnál kisebb mozis közönséget vonzottak, fájlcsere-forgalmuk mégis jóval átlag feletti volt. E műfajok közönségében valószínűleg felülreprezentáltak a férfiak, sőt a fiatal férfiak ― vagyis az a demográfiai csoport, amelyik a fájlcserélő-populációban is teljes lakosságon belüli arányát jelentősen meghaladó súlyt képvisel. E műfajok közönségének fájlcseréléssel foglalkozó szegmense szinte reflexszerűen lecsap a trackereken megjelenő legújabb „erőszakfilmekre”. Az erőszakfilmek kiugró kalózkeresletével szemben a romantikus filmek az átlagnál nagyobb mozis közönséget, viszont az átlagnál kevesebb fájlcserélőt vonzottak, amire viszont épp a „kettesben mozizás” jelenségére adhat magyarázatot.
Ami a moziban már nem látható filmeket illeti: a letöltött teljes filmvolumen több mint fele magyarországi mozikban 2000 óta nem játszott produkció. A felhasználók kevesebb, mint 10%-a töltött le kizárólag a letöltés idejében mozikban játszott filmeket, kétharmaduk éppen moziműsoron lévő és mozikban már nem játszott filmeket egyaránt letölt. Meglepően magas, közel 30% azoknak az aránya, akik csak moziban nem vagy régen vetített filmeket töltöttek le.
A fájlcserélők, mint autonóm fogyasztási közösségek
A folyamatos jogi fenyegetettség a korábban nyíltan fájlcserélő felhasználókat rejtőzködésre kényszeríti. A zárt ajtók mögé visszavonuló felhasználók kegyeiért számtalan tematikusan, nyelvileg, a felhasználói kör érdeklődésében, a közösség minőségében különböző fájlcserélő oldal verseng egymással. E közösségek mindegyike a maga logikája szerint válogat a világban elérhető számtalan tartalom közül.
Kutatásunkban három, magyar nyelvű, mainstream, tematikusan nem specializálódott közösség tartalomfogyasztási mintáit vizsgáltuk és azt találtuk, hogy e közösségek tartalomfogyasztása műfaji értelemben strukturálatlan, azaz a fájlcserélők kihasználják az ismeretlen kipróbálásának kockázat- és költségmentes lehetőségét, és tetszés szerint kalandoznak különböző műfajok között.
A nem specializálódott, mainstream p2p kereslet műfaji strukturálatlansága arra utal, hogy a fájlcserélésnek köszönhetően a tetszőleges ízlésű filmfogyasztó számára az „elkalandozás” saját preferenciájától, új műfajok, stílusok kockázat nélküli kipróbálása nem csupán elvi, hanem a gyakorlatban is kiaknázott lehetőség. A p2p kalózpiac egyik oldalán a tematikus struktúrák sokkal pontosabban jelennek meg, mint korábban ― köszönhetően annak, hogy a speciális tartalomtípusok köré szerveződő közönség kiszolgálása elől eltűnnek azok a méretgazdaságossági korlátok, melyekbe a piaci viszonyok között működő csatornák szükségszerűképpen beleütköznek. Másrészt az általános érdeklődési kört kiszolgáló hálózatok által a fogyasztóiknak felkínált tartalmi kalandozás, exploratív nomadizmus radikálisan különbözik az ezt a lehetőséget legális piacokon a televízió által biztosító channel-surfing, „zapping” élményétől. A p2p felhasználó a „véletlenül odakapcsolok-belenézek-nem tetszik-elkapcsolok” tévés logika helyett a „nem tudom mi ez-de letöltöm-kipróbálom-legfeljebb letörlöm-de az is lehet, hogy archiválom” aktív érdeklődést feltételező logikájával választ a tartalmak között.
További fontos tényező, hogy ezeken a csatornákon a programot maguk a felhasználók állítják össze: ők kérik, készítik el, szerkesztik be a műsorfolyamba, teszik elérhetővé be a friss kópiákat. A torrent-alapú filmdisztribúció egy viszonylag rövid életciklusú, az aktuális legális kínálatot koncentráltan, a felhasználók ad-hoc érdeklődését pedig fragmentáltan megjelenítő jukeboxhoz hasonlítható, ahol a kereslet az éppen aktuálisan felkerült néhány tucat, esetleg párszáz film között oszlik el. A filmes fájlcsere valahol félúton van a legális piacról mára szinte teljesen kikopott videokölcsönző és a tematikus tévécsatorna között, ahol a kínálatot és a programot a hálózatok közösségét alkotó felhasználók folyamatosan és interaktív módon alakítják. A globális feketepiacon elérhető tartalomkínálat körül helyileg releváns kontextusok alakulnak ki, amelyek a végső soron mindenki számára egyformán elérhető digitális kínálatot a helyi közösség igényei, értékei, érdeklődése alapján szűrik.
A fájlcsere mint sajátos szabályokkal, modus operandival bíró tartalomdisztribúciós infrastruktúra és a köré szerveződő fogyasztói közösségek térnyerése arra figyelmeztet, hogy a filmes disztribúciót nemcsak az alkotások elsődleges piaci jellemzői (ár, kínálat) felől, hanem a tartalmak fogyasztásának kontextusa, a tartalmak összefűzéséből létrejövő programming oldaláról is kihívás éri. A feketepiacok működése részben megelőlegezi, részben visszaigazolja a kulturális piacok átalakulásának azt a hipotézisét, mely szerint a disztribúciós szűkösség korában a termelők és a disztribútorok által generált és dominált kontextusok helyét fogyasztók által generált és tartalombőséggel jellemezhető kontextus veszi át. Ebben a tekintetben az online feketepiac (Magyarországon legalábbis) egyértelműen hiánypótló szerepet tölt be.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
Songs have always been shareable and shared. People, young and old, share songs with each other – by singing or playing them – in a variety of ways and settings, through a variety of technologies and media or other manner of accompaniment (as well as a capella). Songs as recordings are not fundamentally different in this respect. Since the advent of recorded media, people have shared songs in this form as well: played for each other in private and public settings, on personally distributed mixes (mixed tapes / CDs), and, in the age of mp3s, as files sent via email, IM (instant message), torrent, third-party hosting site, or any manner of online sites and services.
Ironically, today songs are most often shared via a video site, YouTube, which has become a de facto public audio repository. This development and the explosion of music-centered blogs and forums offer evidence, in the form of pervasive and popular practice, of how musical recordings are treated as public culture, things which people send to friends, family, and colleagues, point to and comment on, and remix in the course of their everyday lives.
To click on a YouTube link in order to access a song (or to send such a link to a friend) would hardly be considered an illegal action on the part of the millions of people who do so each day, and yet the action is hardly different from the Defendant’s use of a filesharing network to access the seven songs in question just a few years ago. Those songs are [links & YouTube stats added 6/30]:
* Bad Religion – American Jesus [448 results] * Green Day – Minority [1,870 results] * Incubus – New Skin [266 results] * Incubus – Pardon Me [991 results] * Nirvana – Come As You Are [4,190 results] * Outkast – Wheelz of Steel [21 results] * Sublime – Miami [65 results]
If one searches for any of these songs on YouTube today, one finds numerous instances of each, sometimes numbering in the dozens or even hundreds. Notably, beyond merely presenting the songs, the users who upload the videos frequently add their own elements, personalizing the songs in order to share them with peers and other potential viewers: they add new images, both still and video (including found footage and self-produced material); transcribe and caption the lyrics; sometimes, they edit or remix the audio itself, especially in the case of hip-hop songs (e.g., Outkast) – an interactivity consistent with cultural practice in hip-hop more generally.
Only in the relatively recent past – within the last century – have songs, in the “fixed” media form of audio recordings, been so strongly regulated as pieces of property whose use by others might be strictly limited. An examination at the level of cultural practice – that is, how songs as audio recordings have been used by people – demonstrates that even in such “fixed” form, songs have continued to serve as a commonplace site of sharing and creative interaction (also known as remixing). This becomes particularly evident in the use of playback technologies such as turntables as creative instruments in their own right (aiding the emergence of hip-hop and disco in the 1970s), an approach powerfully extended by the tools of the digital age.
Historicizing the Musical Commodity
The notion of the song as commodity is a relatively recent one, enabled by a certain technological confluence (the advent of recordable media and mass production), and it seems to be fading relatively quickly in the face of a new technological confluence (the digital). As musicologist Timothy Taylor writes in an award-winning article on “The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of ‘Mechanical Music’”: “the music-commodity has to be understood as always in flux, always caught up in historical, cultural, and social forces” (Taylor 2007: 283).
The album as a commodity form is a particularly illustrative example of this socially and culturally situated flux. The age of the album – roughly, the late 60s to the late 90s – was a fleeting moment, again enabled by a particular set of technologies (the advent of the long-player record, or LP, followed by the cassette and CD). While early album-oriented artists approached the LP form as an artistic opportunity, leading to the emergence of the “concept album,” by the late 90s album offerings were far more typically collections of “filler” material, propelled by a hit or two, sold at exorbitant prices (e.g., $18.99) to customers with no alternatives. At this point, the album is, in most cases, an anachronism, either an indulgent and/or exploitative exercise. Notably, internet vendors such as iTunes or eMusic and other distribution methods (including blogs and filesharing networks) have reinstated the primacy of the single track as the prevailing unit of popular music.
Reasonable paid alternatives to free downloading have only become available recently, and even then rather unevenly with regard to what is available and in what form. The defunct torrent tracker, Oink – and its ilk – offer(ed) higher quality files, better documented, uncrippled by DRM software, and of a far greater variety than one can find via any of the legally-permitted online music vendors.
Listening as a Transformative Use
Listening is an active process, a rich domain of interpretation and imagination, manifesting differently – according to personal idiosyncrasies and cultural mores alike – for each person and in each moment. As anthropologist Steven Feld explains in the oft cited “Communication, Music, and Speech about Music” (Feld 1984), the listening process is, when one considers all that is potentially involved, an enormously complex phenomenon very much centered on the particular listener in question. According to Feld, listening as an act of “musical consumption” involves, among other things: the dialectics of the musical object itself (text-performance, mental-material, formal-expressive, etc.), the various interpretive moves applied by the listener (locational, categorical, associational, reflective, evaluative), and the contextual frames available at any moment (expressive ideology, identity, coherence).
All of this activity is inextricably social in character, regardless of the musical object in question. As Feld notes, “We attend to changes, developments, repetitions–form in general–but we always attend to form in terms of familiarity or strangeness, features which are socially constituted through experiences of sounds as structures rooted in our listening histories” (85).
While grounded in communication studies and musical semiotics in Feld’s study, such an interpretation – centering the socially-situated hearing subject rather than the musical object (whether live performance or mp3) – is also consistent with a great deal of literary and media theory from the past thirty years, from Roland Barthes’s infamous 1977 “Death of the Author” to Henry Jenkins’s contemporary theories about spreadability and value.
Hans Pandeya, CEO of Global Gaming Factor, said he intends to cooperate with studios and record labels to turn Pirate Bay into a copyright-friendly business.
“We’re a publicly listed company, so whatever we take over has to be legal,” he explained. “To be legal, you have to have content providers who are paid. That’s what we want.”
Convincing Pirate Bay’s reported 20 million users accustomed to getting content for free into paying customers will an extremely difficult task, but Pandeya said he plans to make an enticing offer.
“To compete with free file sharing, you have to beat it,” he said. “What’s better than zero? Well, that’s paying somebody $1.”
Global Gaming Factor plans to pay Pirate Bay users to let their computers be part of a worldwide peer-to-peer system that can transmit data for Internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast. Theoretically, it could vastly reduce the bandwidth costs of ISPs, which are struggling to keep up with the rapidly growing amount of traffic moving through the ‘Net, much of it because of illegal piracy.
Participating computer owners could use the money deposited into their account to buy and download songs, TV shows or movies.
Google is under anti-trust scrutiny for its book publisher dealings. In A Book Grab by Google, Brewster Kahle rightly pleas:
We need to focus on legislation to address works that are caught in copyright limbo, and we need to stop monopolies from forming so that we can create vibrant publishing environments, and that we are very close to having universal access to all knowledge.
But we must generalize this access argument beyond books. The issue is beyond just music too – which is a central focus of the debate since the advent of Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa, Grokster, Limewire, BitTorrent, and the litany of file sharing library tools. It includes movies, photography, journalism, textbooks, remixing too.
In short, it concerns all forms of creative works under copyright. All content has irrevocably collided with the disruptive innovations of the digital Internet and Web.
Why? Because it involves the natural advent of a global digital public library network on the Web and it is fundamentally at odds with legacy copyright policy enforcement.
The global digital public library network
The physical public library system and the emerging digital public library should be understood to be part of a global digital public library network, or GDPLN (”good plan”) — an open network that allows interoperability of all global DPLs.
Consider the Library of Congress (LOC). It is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, started with Thomas Jefferson’s personal donation of his own private library. The Library’s mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. It’s the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections. We support it with our taxes.
Libraries and copyright have a long and uneasy relationship. In 1870, Congress centralized the copyright system inside the LOC. The Copyright Office is in charge of administering compulsory and statutory licenses. It required all authors to deposit in the Library two copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States. The place to restructure and rebalance copyright in the digital era is in the LOC & Copyright Office – but it will take administrative leadership, likely Presidential as it did at the advent of radio when President Hoover was involved.
Today a de facto digital public library exists but copyright has not been rebalanced to embrace it. Our physical public libraries may legally have all content under copyright law but our digital public library may not. This is the root of the fundamental policy gap that is leading to the disruption of the content industries.
Rebalancing copyright can establish a thoughtful digital public library network policy, end the failed war on digital piracy, adequately compensate creative artists – from journalists and authors to musicians and movie makers – for their works, and legitimize today’s de facto behavior of freely sharing content – under copyright or not – across the Web.
In the absence of a coherent digital library policy, personal home libraries are shared on peer-to peer networks to fill in holes in the GDPLN collection not provided by Google or digital library initiatives. This is not piracy: it is the natural sharing of home libraries which has occurred since Roman times.
The copyright war has failed
Legacy copyright is dysfunctional in the Web era because it struggles to create artificial scarcity alongside a digital public library. Despite the efforts at control, all content flows freely. It should — because the digital library is good for humanity. However, there is no compulsory, subscription or equivalent framework to recognize the existence of the GDPLN that provides a mechanism to collect a pool from its service providers and distribute it to creators of useful arts on the basis of their respective contributions. A similar compulsory solution was somewhat analogously created with the advent of radio.
Enforcement has failed, will continue to fail, and moreover should fail because it literally attacking the digital public library.
Consider the absurdity of music enforcement efforts. Look at China, which now gets free ad-supported music downloads in a label-approved deal with Google, while Americans and Europeans are sued for the natural behavior of sharing their private home digital library collections. The litany of harmful and fruitless litigation of GDPLN innovators and citizens continues go grow.
The private content industry is at war with the public digital library and the innovative companies providing the tools to build it. Paradoxically, copyright’s present policy is killing much of the content industry in the digital age by failing to codify the digital public library network.
The good of the library outweighs the interests of private library owners, yet we must find balance to compensate the creators of the useful arts.
Google itself is a product of digital libraries (the Stanford Digital Library Initiative). But under the “safe harbors” of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it can spider, index, link to, and exploit innumerable copyrighted works and pay nothing to the creators of the content. Google presently stores and returns much of the world’s journalism, and it is steadily adding books, music, movies and television programming to complete its collection. It is not obligated to comply with the public library privacy guidelines as detailed at the American Library Association.
What is to be done?
Consider a “straw-man” for a win-win global digital public library network policy that balances the needs of society and artists by restructuring copyright and extending physical public library principles to the digital age:
1. Levy Google as an anchor fee producer, as if it were a radio station – but for all content. Level the playing field for all providers to participate in the GDPLN. Alter the safe harbor for search engine portals and require a royalty pool to be collected in a radio-like solution – but for ALL content.
2. Establish more uniform privacy policies.
3. Be open. Allow absolutely all libraries large and small from the LOC to the personal home shared folder to participate, so that new volumes can be added openly by the populace to the library
4. Encourage uniform metadata standards so volumes are better cataloged and retrieved from all nodes on the library network. Institute rare volume archiving standards so the library doesn’t lose rare content
5. Permit streaming and downloading, recognize they are indistinguishable. Drop the distinction between webcasting libraries of content that stream it and download libraries of content that download for listening, reading and viewing.
6. Leverage low cost technology like P2P software instead of suing these important digital library innovations.
7. Legalize digital copies and distribution of any and all content types to be shared on the library network
8. Allow remixing to occur liberally with a revenue share model for the original creator and the re-mixer, depending on percentage of content used
9. Require participants in the library network to provide a slice of their revenue (like the radio model, like Google’s free music in China, or their tax support in the case of public libraries offering digital services) so tax-supported entities provide a slice of their tax support to artists. Distribute it fairly and with regard for the cost of creating a work (movies get more than newspaper articles). Exempt home libraries because they will be taxed to support the public library system as they are today.
Time is running out. Work on the GDPLN digital library policy must begin. Engagement of the stakeholders with governmental involvement can and must lead to a truly pragmatic and balanced solution as was achieved after the somewhat analogous invention of radio.
I recognize that a process to achieve such a policy will be arduous. It must involve stakeholders. It does disrupt the status quo and rebalance copyright rather fundamentally. But the status quo is broken. Having dwelled on it for a decade I don’t see any better solution to the dilemma presented by the collision of copyright with the open global digital public library network.
— Az úgy volt, hogy a huszadik század második felében csökkenni kezdett a mozilátogatók száma — mesélte X., akivel én 2018-ban találkoztam, egy jövőbe tett utazásom alkalmával. A filmesek aggódva figyelték ezt a jelenséget és elhatározták, hogy valamit tenni kell. A Filmesek Világszövetsége több alkalommal összeült és zárt ajtók mögött tárgyalt. A televíziósok megpróbáltak bejutni ezekre a megbeszélésekre, de sikertelenül. A legcsinosabb televíziós kémnők is póruljártak, néhányan pedig átálltak az ellenség oldalára, mert filmszerepet kaptak. — Egy napon a Filmesek Világszövetsége bejelentette, hogy tizenöt ország közreműködésével filmet készít. A tizenöt ország kormánya megígérte: anyagilag és erkölcsileg támogatja a koprodukciót. A filmesek minden országban statisztákat, ágyúkat, repülőket és csatahajókat kértek és természetesen sok-sok pénzt. A szuper — monstre produkciónak egy főrendezője és tíz rendezője volt; mind készítettek már nagy történelmi filmeket, grandiózus háborús filmeket, tehát óriási gyakorlatuk volt a csapatok irányításában, mozgatásában, a különféle szárazföldi és légi hadműveletekben. — Három évi előkészítő munka után a főrendező összehívta a vezérkarát, és közölte velük: hajnalban kezdődik a forgatás. A rendezők összeigazították óráikat, aztán mindenki a saját statiszta-hadseregéhez sietett, ahol lelkesítő beszédeket tartották. Hajnali három órakor a filmesek riadót fújtak és elkezdődtek a felvételek, illetve a „Felvétel” elnevezésű nagyszabású hadművelet. Tizenöt országban egyszerre, összehangoltan. — Reggel nyolc órára a filmesek mind a tizenöt országban elfoglalták a fontosabb kormányépületeket, telefonközpontokat, laktanyákat, vasúti csomópontokat. Mire a hadseregek észbe kaptak, már tehetetlenek voltak: a saját, kölcsönadott ágyúikkal, repülőikkel lőtték, bombázták őket. A statiszták lelkesen harcoltak, mert a napidíj elég magas volt. Déli tizenkét órakor a harcok lényegében befejeződtek, és a produkció főrendezője közölte a tisztes fegyverszüneti feltételekért könyörgő kormányokkal, hogy a filmesek mind a tizenöt országban átveszik a hatalmat. — Nemsokára falragaszok jelentek meg, amelyeken felszólították a lakosságot: őrizze meg a nyugalmát és szolgáltassa be a televíziókészülékeket. A készülékeket beszolgáltatták, de a tévés gerilla-csapatok még sokáig ellenálltak, majd visszavonultak a hegyekbe. Harcuk, bár hősies volt, reménytelennek bizonyult. A filmesek néhány nap alatt felmorzsolták őket. — A filmrendezők másik intézkedése az volt, hogy letartóztatták minden írót. A Filmesek Világszövetsége közzétette: ezentúl minden filmet a rendező ír meg, tehát az írók fölöslegesek. A költőket nem bántották. A kritikusokat viszont — kevés kivétellel — ismeretlen helyre hurcolták, fekete autókban, az éj leple alatt. — Néhány nappal később kötelezték a lakosságot, hogy minden este moziba menjenek. Este hét órától éjfélig. Szombat délután öttől hajnali háromig. Élelmiszert csak az kapott, aki fel tudta mutatni a kellő mennyiségű, lebélyegzett mozijegyet. A filmesek ettől kezdve szabadon kísérletezhettek és nem volt ritka a huszonnégy órás, sőt a negyvennyolc órás film sem, sőt egy alkalommal ötszázhetvenkét óra hosszat tartó filmet is vetítettek. A rendre és arra, hogy senki se hagyja el a nézőteret, felfegyverzett jegyszedők ügyeltek. A lakosság ingyen vett részt a filmfelvételeken és a csinos lányoknak sorozóbizottság előtt kellett megjelenni, s ha szükség volt rájuk, SAS-behívót kaptak. Hogy mi történt aztán, arról már nem tudok, mert az informátorom, X., nem jött el a következő randevúra. Mint később megtudtam, valami nagyon hosszú és nagyon unalmas filmet vetítettek, és ő megpróbált megszökni, de szökés közben agyonlőtték. Gyorsan visszatértem a XX. századba, hogy figyelmeztessem a világot. No, meg mozijegyem is volt este nyolcra. Egy négyórás koprodukcióhoz, amelyben — az újsághírek szerint — több ezer statiszta szerepel, és állítólag fantasztikus csatajelenetek láthatók benne. Emberek vigyázzatok!
Steal these words, copy the ideas and pilfer any profit they provide: the debate has reached a conclusion and the floor has sided in favour of the motion. Around three-quarters of the participants support Professor William Fisher, and believe that existing copyright laws do more harm than good.
Throughout the debate, the margins were largely constant, though support for Professor Justin Hughes, who argued ably against the motion, increased to almost one-third of participants between the opening statements and the rebuttals.
Professor Fisher stressed throughout the debate that the expansion of copyright curtails recombinant creativity: a system designed to encourage expression was captured by a handful of corporate interests and now holds it back. Among his recommendations are reintroducing a registration requirement for copyrighted works, a form of compulsory licensing and differential pricing. Cleverly, he raised these ideas as the debate drew to a close, thereby escaping scrutiny.
Professor Hughes maintained throughout the debate that the production of content was not the crux of copyright’s purpose, but the production of high-quality content, and that existing laws do more good than harm in sparking quality with the filament of incentive. Changes in copyright laws are certainly needed, he acknowledged, yet this hardly condemns the system entirely. Rather, it is hard to look at the explosion of free content on the web and conclude that copyright hampers it.
Meanwhile, in her expert commentary, Jessica Litman of the University of Michigan noted that copyright “intermediaries” like publishers and distributors were needed when the cost of production and distribution was high, but this is no longer so. David Lammy, a British MP who serves as the Minister of State for Higher Education and Intellectual Property (a telling title in itself), believes that “copyright needs to confront these challenges and evolve”.
Even if the debate did not compel participants to overturn their convictions, it is fair to say that we have all been forced to reexamine our positions, based on the sharp arguments of the debaters, the wise words from guest contributors and the floor’s thoughtful comments. The Economist joins the floor in thanking all the participants.
Many commentators from the floor wanted copyright scrapped altogether. Often, the argument hinged on the idea that, in practice, it is the distributors of content, not its creators, who profit most from the current set-up. Yet the majority of the floor, regardless of which side one voted for, simply want copyright laws reformed, by striking a new balance between the interests of content owners and the public.
Specifically, the duration of copyright is considered too long; the scope of protections too broad; the legal penalties too dear. How to make these changes in practice has not been fully aired. It is left to be debated, but in another forum.
I’m here to praise the music fanatic who holds down a reasonable if unexciting job, turning in a decent day’s work after spending the night in a recording studio or driving back from a gig in Stoke.It is this kind of musician – dedicated, self-sacrificing, self-disciplined – whose efforts are the lifeblood of a host of vibrant music scenes and who will be least affected by the current turmoil in the music industry. Any money they made was only ever ploughed back into music. Lower revenues will certainly make them dig deeper and sacrifice more for their art, but it will not stop the music.
What the free music revolution threatens is not music per se, but the idea that you have to be a musician full time to be truly creative. You don’t. Too often the commercially viable musician sinks into an effete preciousness that is the death knell of creativity. Being a “full time” musician didn’t seem to spur Axl Rose into making Chinese Democracy any quicker.
It is time that the importance of day job-supported musicians was more widely recognised – for it is they who will ensure that music will survive the death of the music industry.
Less than 24 hours after the season premiere of Prison Break aired on Fox on Monday, it was downloaded close to one million times, according to TorrentFreak.
Prison Break fans didn’t have to download the show illegally. The show is readily available to stream legitimately on both Hulu and Fox.com, where viewers have to sit through a few commercial breaks, but they can still watch the entire episode legally.
[Hulu won't disclose how many people viewed Prison Break on the site on Monday, but the show is one of the top 5 most-popular shows on Hulu today, and it was the most-popular show yesterday. There's no way of knowing, though, whether the program was watched more on Hulu than it was downloaded illegally.]
The fact that one million people downloaded the show within 24 hours — a little less than one-sixth of the 6.5 million people who watched Prison Break on TV on Monday night — proves, though, that P2P isn’t going away just because there are legal alternatives now.
“This is a group of people who define themselves in part by the technology they use and the application of that technology,” says Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research. “Chances are that this is only happening in a defined age group. You’d be hard-pressed to find 60 year-old guys passing this stuff off to their buddies.”
Even if file sharers make up a small slice of the population, the impact is not insignificant. Could networks win these viewers back? The most common complaint about big media companies over the last decade is that they’ve been slow to provide legal alternatives. In this case, however, Fox has gone to great lengths to give viewers an option to watch programs legally online, but die-hard file sharers still aren’t biting.
“I think a lot of the problem is that the content providers have typically been using business models that extend backwards in time. They have not been able to adapt their intellectual property and business processes to the new reality — essentially that all types of information and media are going to find their way on to a network and will be widely distributed,” says Rosenberg. “Look at the music industry. They simply didn’t have a formula for preventing file sharing until Apple taught them how to do it.”
Many legal alternatives could be improved, too, says Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, an online media measurement company. Content providers have been slow to offer legal streaming options in many international markets, and there still aren’t many networks that let users actually download files, which is a bummer for collectors, says Garland.
Also, the networks haven’t necessarily improved upon the experience on pirated sites, so users don’t have much incentive to leave those sites.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” says Garland. “Sites like Mininova or Pirate Bay have been around long before there was Hulu, and why should they stop using a familiar option that works well?”
But in most of the viral and bacterial world, copying genes and having your own copied is a way of life, one that proceeds smoothly without hindering either party. It’s a fundamental property of microbe- and virus-hood.
“Anything might happen. The virus doesn’t know. It simply does it because it can,” said Koonin. “The ability to do so is simply a byproduct of the ability to replicate DNA.”
A few days ago I posted a simple question on my blog. “Why do people pirate my games?”. It was an honest attempt to get real answers to an important question. I submitted the bog entry to slashdot and the penny arcade forums, and from there it made it to arstechnica, then digg, then bnet and probably a few other places. The response was massive. This is what I found:
How relevant is it to declare oneself to be “for” or “against” copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted. The most recent is the proposed “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA) [1], to be tabled at next month’s G8 meeting in Tokyo, including a clause known as the “Pirate Bay killer” that would force countries to criminalize services that may facilitate copyright infringement, even if not for profit. This is just one example of how copyright law is mutating into something qualitatively different than what it has been in previous centuries.
Radiohead’s “pay what you want” distribution gamble paid-off despite — or perhaps because of — rampant file sharing, according to new analysis from Will Page, chief economist at the MCPS-PRS Alliance, a British rights organization, and Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne.
Radiohead’s notorious release strategy for In Rainbows, which allowed fans to download it for an optional price with a valid e-mail address, was considered to have been a failure by some because the album became wildly popular on file sharing networks almost immediately upon its release.
But Garland and Page’s, “In Rainbows, On Torrents” report, slated to be released on the MCPS-PRS website on Friday, indicates that Radiohead’s strategy was a success nonetheless, contributing to the album topping the charts in both the UK and United States and a wildly successful worldwide tour. When it comes to judging whether an album is a success these days, the old metrics just don’t cut it.
The report found that torrent users traded 400,000 copies of In Rainbows on its October 10 release date, and that it was shared a staggering 2.3 million times by November 3 (chart courtesy of BigChampagne). By comparison, albums by Gnarls Barkley, Panic at the Disco and Portishead released around the same time using conventional means were shared less, the most-frequently shared being Panic at the Disco’s album, which was downloaded 157,000 in a week — nearly three times lower than In Rainbows’ peak day of trading).
Many within the music industry (including U2 manager Paul McGuinness) will no doubt view these 2.3 million downloads as sales Radiohead lost by giving the album away in a readily-sharable format. And either way, they represent email addresses that Radiohead failed to add into its fan database.
Will_page_2 Garland and Page admit that server problems on Radiohead’s site almost certainly drove some users to torrent trackers, as did the fact that Radiohead had “signaled” to fans that the album was free. But their most interesting finding about why fans chose to download the album via torrent rather than from InRainbows.com is their hypothesis that users adhere to music acquisition venues regardless of other factors.
“The venue hypothesis suggests that even when the price approaches zero, all other things being equal, people are more likely to act habitually (say, using The Pirate Bay) than to break their habit (say, visiting www.InRainbows.com),” reads one section of the report. In other words, people tend to develop habits around the acquisition of music; once they find something that works, they tend to keep using it. As the paper mentions, “The Pirate Bay is a powerful brand with a sterling reputation in the minds of millions of young music fans.”
The hard lesson to the music business here is that it must license venues for music acquisition that fans prefer to file sharing networks or otherwise make the toleration of file sharing part of their business plans. If even Radiohead’s freely available album was torrented 2.3 million times in the first three and a half weeks, how can more traditional offerings successfully clamp-down on file sharing? They can’t, pure and simple.
In addition, official offerings like InRainbows.com need not be considered to be in competition with file sharing networks, as hard as that may be for longtime music insiders to comprehend.
“Frequently, music industry professionals suggest that an increase in legitimate sales must necessarily coincide with a commensurate reduction in piracy, as if this were a fact,” says the report. “Yet, the company BigChampagne has made no such consistent observation in nearly a decade of analyzing these data. Rather, it finds that piracy rates follow awareness and interest… The biggest selling albums and songs are nearly always the most widely pirated, regardless of all the ‘anti-piracy’ tactics employed by music companies. Or, to sum up by paraphrasing an earlier argument, ‘popular music is popular everywhere it’s popular.’”
Exactly. All of this torrenting of In Rainbows contributed to the album making such a big impression on a listening public that’s bombarded with an ever-increasing amount of information. Without its album being so widely traded, would Radiohead’s album have shot to the top of the charts? Would their worldwide tour be such a smashing success?
Eric_garland_2 Not necessarily, says the report, and we agree. Applying economic principles to digital music, Garland and Page found that “the challenge of achieving popularity (or attention) when the old rules of scarcity and excludability don’t apply (to information goods) the way they used to, changes the monetization game completely.” And Radiohead clearly won that game, regardless of how many times its album was traded online.
Garland and Page came to the undeniable conclusion that the music industry needs to stop thinking of shared files as lost sales, and start treating them as an aspect of reality upon which they can build part of their businesses.
As for Radiohead, they can rest easy knowing that while their strategy will now come under increased scrutiny by enemies of file sharing within the industry, that by “losing” the battle for the email addresses of those who downloaded their album via bit torrent, they actually won the overall war for the public’s attention — no easy feat, these days.
“Piracy hurts open source because open source asks people to help give back and contribute code, but they say, ‘Why should I help? I have Microsoft Office for free,’” Suarez-Potts said.
Around the world, he said, many national governments are realizing that this hurts them, too, because their citizens are then consumers of stolen technology rather than active participants in open-source communities that can help people gain technology skills that benefit workforces and nations.
By cracking down on software piracy, nations around the globe are starting to see that they can help themselves dramatically by encouraging innovation and creativity — as well as job growth and richer economies — through open-source development, he said.
“China wants to create workers who can do this and create and sustain wealth,” rather than just sell pirated software that doesn’t improve the lives of the country’s people, Suarez-Potts said. “We will all benefit if they are creating interesting things.”
Other nations, including India, are making similar discoveries, he said. “They really quite clearly see that they should have their own intellectual ecosystems. China is now embracing open source and is asking how they can work with the international communities; likewise in India and Latin America.”
The agreement between internet service providers, the government, and the music industry to send angry letters to music fans who are downloading free music is a smokescreen, intended to obscure the crisis the record industry is facing.
This agreement has come about as a result of music industry pressure on ISPs who are, after all, facilitating their customers’ free music downloads. If this were an ordinary copyright infringement case, the record companies would put their lawyers onto the ISPs. However, everyone knows that the music industry is using internet sites, particularly the big social networks such as MySpace, to promote their artists.
It is just not in the music industry’s interest to bite the hand of the ISPs, which provide them with access to potential customers. But on the other hand, the industry does have a case against the ISPs – so what is to be done? I imagine some corporate boardroom representing the ISPs shrugged their shoulders and said “well I suppose we could send them a warning letter”. The industry moguls replied “yeah a warning letter – that’ll do it”.
But of course a warning letter won’t do it. Without some kind of legal framework to back it up, it’s nothing more than a gesture. The real problem for the record companies is that the ground is changing beneath them. New technology has made it possible for people to acquire music without going through the traditional route of buying objects in a shop.
Rather than fighting this trend, the industry itself needs to find new methods of collecting royalties. The only real moral argument the industry has that will work with music fans is that the artist should be rewarded financially for providing them with music. Yet everyone knows that historically the record industry has paid artists a fraction of the price paid by the public for albums and singles.
What needs to happen is for the industry to reverse its priorities, put artists to the fore and pay them a larger share of the price in return for their support in the transition to new business models. It is doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to conceive of other ways of levying royalties where original music is used. The way we get radio in the UK offers two simple examples.
On one hand, we have the BBC service, where for the price of the licence fee you can listen to as much radio as you like. On the other hand, there is commercial radio, which is free at the point-of-use to you, the listener. However, the fact that it is free doesn’t mean the music content is not paid for. Royalties are paid to musicians from the sale of advertising that appears between the songs. Either of these two models could be applied to music.
A licence fee could be paid, allowing you to download as much music as you like, which will be simpler to police as you would need to presumably give your licence number before you download anything. Or sites such as MySpace, which make billions of dollars in advertising revenue without paying for any content whatsoever, could reverse that trend and start paying royalties to musicians and other content providers.
In an ideal world, such royalties or the blanket licence fee would not be paid to music companies themselves but to an independent collection agency that would pay the money directly to artists. The music industry treats the internet as a threat, whereas for artists it gives us an opportunity to get closer to our audience than ever before. We must be very, very careful that we don’t alienate those fans and make it impossible for the next generation of singer-songwriters to have viable careers.
The only real solution is to legitimise the peer-to-peer services. Rather than fighting against music sharing, the music industry should issue licenses that allow royalties to be collected every time a song is shared. The snag, of course, is how to generate those royalties in the first place. The slow uptake of music subscription services proves it’s unfeasible to ask people to opt in to paying 10 pounds a month for music.
