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Re: SECOND THOUGHTS ON NAPSTER, GREED, & GG
At 12:57 PM 9/22/2000 +0100, Birgitte Jorgensen wrote:
One objection I have to using Napster is purely technical. Call me
paranoid, but unless you are hooked up to an immense government,
university or institutional mainframe, the thought of having the whole
world, or even a single propellorhead in a college dorm somewhere,
scanning my personal computer's hard drive is frankly creepy, and leaves
me feeling far too vulnerable for comfort. Reason enough to buy my CDs
for now.
Yep. On the other hand, Napster scans only one designated folder...not the
whole hard drive. It's certainly possible to download a file through
Napster and then move it elsewhere so nobody else can see it via Napster.
Both conceptually and in a practical sense this is no different from the
World Wide Web itself. There are millions of computers around the world,
each sharing out a publically visible folder. While that computer is
turned on and connected to the network, anybody can come in to copy
whatever they find inside that folder, and then study it at their
leisure. If you have something you want to share with other people, you
put it into that folder; if you don't, you don't. If you want something to
be available to the public 24x7, you copy it up to a computer that will be
on and connected all the time.
From a business standpoint, if you have something to sell (whether
intellectual property or physical objects), it's wise to put only a teaser
or otherwise restricted sample out there...you want to whet people's
appetite to pay for the real thing which is superior in quality. (A
musical demo, a book excerpt, a program demo, a resume...all are the same
thing, a tantalizing glimpse of goods or services which can be obtained
through a contract, registered license, or purchase.) If the demo itself
"gives away the store," what incentive is there for people to complete
their side of the contract, or even to inform you that they're using your
work? It's a courtesy, of course, to thank people for their goods and
services and to respect the credits. There will always be many who do, and
many who don't.
The place where it clearly crosses the line (in my mind anyway, though I'm
not a copyright lawyer) is taking somebody else's work without holding the
rights to it, and putting it onto a server where anyone may make a copy for
free. I don't object to making a single copy of something and sharing it
with a friend, since the friend and I both know that this private copy does
not go beyond us. But if that copy gets into a public place where *anyone*
can make infinite copies of it, just by being in the right place at the
right time, that's definitely wrong. It's "giving away somebody else's
store" and the original creator is no longer in the loop, getting to say
what should be in that demo copy.
Sure, the original creator of something can choose to give it away entirely
for free. But the point is, it's that person's decision, not somebody else's.
The more one thinks about it the closer one gets to the realization
that, in a sense, there is really nothing new or even unprecedented
about the Napster problem, it's just that technology has now advanced to
an endgame stage where the underlying issues of copyright, royalties,
consumer rights, corporate license, and artistic proprietorship have
been thrust into the foreground where they can no longer be ignored
because there's far too much money and power at stake. While the
technology has arrived with which to disseminate music in ways only
dreamed of a few years ago, our legal apparatus, business models,
cultural-industry mechanisms, and even our perceptions of artists, and
especially of art versus commerce, lag behind these changes.
Mould-shattering times indeed!
Exactly. All Napster and the WWW have done are to make it easier for
*anyone* to be a pirate, not only the highly skilled or devious. Anyone
who can move a file into a public folder can be a pirate, and can even do
so without understanding how it works, or realizing what they're
doing. Whether that file was obtained from someone else or from a CD in
their own collection is not the issue. The point is, the pirate didn't
create the file's content and so doesn't have the right to distribute it
freely to the public, either intentionally or unintentionally. It's not
Napster's fault; it's only a middleman.
For years now people who do not think of themselves as criminals (people
like us, I presume) have been blithely transferring tracks from their
records and CDs onto audio tape cassettes for their own use (car stereo,
Walkman, boombox) and duplicated them for private use by their friends
and others. Did the record companies actually expect anyone to buy both
the disc and the cassette? (For the sake of this discussion, I leave out
the issue of industrial-scale commercial piracy since it's largely
irrelevant to the Napster argument.) To be sure, the sound quality is
less than optimal, but people do it because they can and because they
have found it advantageous to make their own audio tapes (and now to
burn their own CDs), the benefits being too obvious and too numerous to
list here. And they do it even though they know it is illegal. Does this
mean we are all a bunch of slimy, unethical louts pointing our fingers
in grandiose self-righteousness at the insatiable profit-motives of the
record companies and money-grabbing recording artists? In a strictly
legal sense, yes it does. In ethical terms, we're in a classic
battleship-grey area.
What about this ethical issue: You go to your local retail shop and find a
CD on the Magic Talent label. The performance is from the 1930's, and has
been issued (remastered) on CD by other labels which have the rights to the
performance. Magic Talent (a pirate label) have simply taken an existing
CD, copied it, passed the recording through a noise reduction filter, and
pressed a new batch of CD's for sale...doing this in a country where it's
not illegal, and then shipping them to your country. The Magic Talent disc
and the legitimate disc are side by side in the bin, and the Magic Talent
disc costs 1/3 as much as the other one. Both are legitimate products for
sale in a legitimate shop, although one of them was produced by piracy
somewhere along the line. Which do you buy?
I also find it significant that not only do Napster users still buy CDs,
they use Napster in a resourceful way to compare tracks, sample before
buying, and to find new material they might not otherwise have located.
In other words, Napster has deepened the range and expanded the scope of
their musical consumerism and enhanced their appreciation of music. No
record store can offer anything remotely like that experience, just as
the online book and music sites offer cross-referencing capabilities
impossible to duplicate in the bricks-and-mortar world. I call this kind
of development progress and it seems wrongheaded and peevish to claim
that it is damaging recording artists or writers.
In that sense, Napster is indeed good. (But again, Napster itself is just
a neutral middleman...what's really happening there is millions of
individual pirates each offering to the public something they enjoy enough
to want to share...whether or not it's ethical.)
If a train is carrying contraband, should the law enforcement officials
seek to destroy the train, or should they seek to stop the people who are
loading and unloading the train? The train is simply a medium.
But if you think the music industry battle with technophiles is vicious
wait until you see the main feature. As bandwidth broadens, there is
going to be an even bloodier showdown with the power brokers of
Hollywood when the Napster equivalent of sharing digital movies becomes
as common as swapping songs. I can't wait. The way we giggle at the
videotape warnings from the FBI and Interpol (does this agency actually
exist or is it as fictitious an entity as James Bond's employer?)
...or Mrs Pollifax's colleagues...
has
always incensed the movie industry into full battle mode. The only
reason home video piracy never got completely out of control among
private users in the same way as it did with audio tapes is primarily
due to the fact that most people don't have dual VCRs and the quality of
second or third-generation VHS dubs is dismal. It's surely not because
consumers didn't want to deprive Hollywood of the greater profit margins
it so richly deserves. The point, however, is the same as with music:
people love movies and sharing copies will be part of a much broader
picture that includes the legitimate purchase of substantial numbers of
videos and DVDs, not to mention continued cinema-going (and there would
be more of that if the chains had not built so many of those abysmal
screening-room-sized cineplexes).
Here's a spin: is someone more likely to watch the same movie repeatedly,
or to listen to the same CD repeatedly? Does it matter that one is visual
and one is not? Does it matter that one has a definite story line and one
does not?
Until the Net erupted into our lives, all this "criminality" transpired
without any serious public debate and despite the legal threats of
record companies impotent to resist our subversive consumer activism
(sounds far more heroic than mere pirating), partly because there was
little they could do about it and partly because the potential profit
losses were minimal, though assuredly painful to any record executive
worth his or her Platinum Amex card, in comparison to digital file
sharing. It's the sheer scale and speed of Napster, and the rapid
proliferation of devices to take advantage of it, that has changed
everything.
The point is that when a technology becomes cheap enough and ubiquitous
enough, like audio cassette tape player-recorders, VCRs, CD burners,
computers, mobile phones, and so on, they open up new ethical frontiers,
and because these technologies become so quickly integrated in our
social and private lives, they are also rapidly deemed NECESSARY. Then,
it's a short leap from an option or privilege to a full-blown right. So
I'd like to propose that a basis for creating a new ethic be founded on
a brand new declaration of human rights that goes something like this:
Every global citizen is entitled to equal and unimpeded access to new
technology. (This would include technology as it pertains to education,
medicine, transportation, energy, etc., not just the cultural
industries.) Thus, when the introduction of a new technology poses some
challenge to the status quo or intervenes in narrow corporate interest
or eradicates insupportable privilege, governments would be compelled by
law to find ways to accommodate the advance of technology and make it
affordable to the masses. Who doubts that the tyranny of technology is
not the new religion?
Well said.
At the crux of the issue is this: just because a technology is available
does it give us the right to use it freely as we see fit, or to use it
only in limited ways? Which ways might that be? Who should decide? What
criteria would we use to establish these parameters? What about those
who can't afford access? Well, I seem to be right back where we started
by repeating Mary Jo's questions and adding a few of my own!
If only the music industry had been listening to Glenn Gould's "ravings"
as far back as 1966, we might have avoided some of this turmoil, because
this is where his radical ideas about the anonymous artist and the "new
listener" come into the picture. If we can take GG at his word, I think
what he was saying all along was that once a piece of art is created and
is, so to speak, released into the world, does it not in some way belong
to everyone? It's now both a philosophical and concrete reality. Recall
his arguments on forgery and the false value attributed to the
one-of-a-kind object. Of course, some of what he was saying was
deliberately disingenuous, but the fact remains that he (not to mention
Andy Warhol) realized long before we were able to easily duplicate
cultural artifacts digitally en masse, that the current concept of
copyright is Victorian, and that somehow we must weave the idea of
replication into our new definition of what constitutes "art." According
to Gouldian thought, forgery's good name must be restored.
I'm reminded of an episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" -- in which future money
really plays no part, except when they are dealing with "less advanced"
cultures...but we digress. They visit a planet where there is no art or
music, only science and technology. The holographic doctor heals a couple
of people whom they rescued from somewhere, and happens to hum a tune as he
works (as his avocation is music). They are enthralled. Their culture
suddenly cannot get enough of the doctor's performances, and recordings of
him are replicated. The doctor seriously considers leaving his job to be a
full-time musician on this planet. Meanwhile, the culture's scientists
have developed a way to replicate the doctor himself (at least his singing
side), but "improve" him by making him able to sing higher, lower, and with
more agility. The music becomes more technical, less artistically
"inspired," but it turns out this culture is only interested in the novelty
and the technological marvel of it anyway, not the actual music or the
artistry of the interpretation. The real doctor is suddenly no longer
wanted, or valued at all. That culture prefers the forgery. They have
gained the idea of music. The doctor actually gains nothing except the
knowledge that there is now a planet where an "improved" copy of himself is
popular. This is, of course, a blow to his sensitive artistic
temperament. (I don't remember the Prime Directive being brought up in
that episode, but it should have been. Even though the doctor and captain
meant well in offering free music to this culture, it profoundly altered
the culture's evolution.)
Interestingly, the doctor himself is artificial, but the crew is always
valuing the ways in which he acts increasingly human. It is the
irrationalities and "imperfections" that they love (just as Kirk and Bones
used to rag on Spock when he acted human, and just as Data in his turn
strove to become human). But the techno-culture would rather have the
technical perfection rather than the irrational artistry, because that is
their ideal.
It seems time again to discuss GG's views about recordings and the way they
can be supposedly more desirable than live performance, because the editing
process allows flawlessness to be attained. That's even more to the
forefront now in the age of digital editing than it was in GG's day of tape
editing. A typical recording is now "product" rather than
"performance." As GG pointed out, a recording can make a performer seem
inadequate in live performance, because the audience now expects the
repeatable flawlessness rather than the whimsy, the sense of occasion.
Are we becoming that culture that would rather have the "improved" musician
than the actual musician? Is the standard of good performance now
determined only by an absence of "mistakes" or unintentional
elements? Must everything be rationally intentional to be good, or is
there still an artistic place for intuition and accident?
I agree with Bradley's notion that a copyright holder's tolerance of
infringement is directly correlated to how well-established and
financially secure they are. I am by no means independently wealthy but
I could live with the idea of selling an article to a magazine,
accepting what I consider a reasonable one-time fee for my effort, time,
expenses, and the "worth" of the ideas embedded therein, and then, if
someone wants to hurl it into cyberspace and freely distribute it by
non-profiting means, that's fine with me provided there isn't a third
party charging a hefty fee for it without paying me a royalty. Bottom
Line: why should I demand royalties above and beyond what I considered a
reasonable compensation for a product that is no longer generating any
income but is nevertheless being consumed?
Have you seen the Hollywood film "Wag the Dog" from several years
ago? Dustin Hoffman plays a film producer who has attained all the wealth
he could ever need, and there are plenty of connoisseurs who appreciate the
value of his work. But the public doesn't know of him, even after a highly
successful career, because producers don't get noticed in the credit or the
Academy awards. All he wants anymore is the credit, to have the importance
of his work recognized by the public. But he's currently engaged in a
project where he will never be allowed to take the credit.........I won't
spoil it from there on. This film also gets into some other issues about
how appearance can be far more important than reality.
My conclusion: in the digital age, we must accept the fact the very
concept of intellectual "property" as we know it is outmoded,
unsustainable, possibly immoral, certainly an affront to the new
emerging order of things, and, in any case, a cruel illusion. That's my
humble call to arms.
What happens to the humanity of art? What happens to the value of things
that were significant *because* they were quirky and unpredictable?
Whether we like to admit it or not, technology is leading the discussion
and not the other way around, and all our ideas about artists and
culture are in an exhilarating (or terrifying, depending on where you
stand) state of flux. It would be gratifying if we took this historic
opportunity to re-examine and re-construct our cultural institutions and
philosophies, and used that process to create a new paradigm for art in
the digital age. We could use a few more visionaries like Glenn Gould
and Marshall McLuhan at this point to help us develop a more profound
understanding of the Web as a communications tool, but their extensive
and generous body of writings will have to suffice.
Maybe the Courtney Love article that John Hill showed us all here a couple
months ago?
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html
Bradley Lehman
Dayton VA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl