p2pnet news view DRM | P2P:- Toward the end of a rather spirited debate between Crosbie Fitch and myself, Crosbie made an interesting comment.  I think the issues it raises are better served by a full-length article.

Crosbie said: “Rights cannot be sold. They can be suspended by the government (in creating the privilege of a monopoly), but no-one should have to pay for their restoration. Artists can sell their work, but they shouldn’t sell their privileges — they should simply neutralise them.”

But IMO, there are a few problems with that scenario:

Most people — even creative artists and software designers — don’t understand the history or stated purpose of things like copyright and patents.

They don’t understand the importance of the Public Domain, and often times — like Sonny Bono — are likely to think of so-called “Intellectual” property as analagous to PHYSICAL property, in which case they’ll view the expiration of copyright as a form of expropriation.

We can thank years of corporate-funded misinformation campaigns, and a general lack of historical consciousness, for this state of affairs, but that doesn’t stop it from being horribly annoying at best — and outright dangerous at worst.

Such ignorance becomes dangerous  when it leads “small fish” (unsigned musicians, smaller software designers, relatively-unknown authors, etc) into supporting the Status Quo, simply because they believe supporting the RIAA or its equivalent is actually a way to safeguard what they’ve been trained to believe are their ‘rights’ (as opposed to mere privileges of limited duration and scope.)

I came up against this first-hand when “Sam I Am” mentioned how he hated the RIAA as much as we did because they ‘extorted’ him every time he wanted to use some of ‘their’ music for one of his fashion-shows, but he’d support their actions anyway, because the expiration of copyright-term would ostensibly ‘take’ something from his daughter.

Sam is basically a troll who goes around spamming various p2p/copyright-reform related message boards with recycled RIAA talking points, and leaving trolls aside, how exactly does one counter years of disinformation, and also soothe the inevitable fear of change that these issues bring up?

Another difficulty is: most folks are still at least implicitly wedded to business-models involving the sale of copies.  Never mind the fact that this doesn’t (and can’t) translate to the idea of selling digital copies (with total fidelity, the distinction between ‘originals’ and ‘copies’ vanishes.)

Never mind that digital copies essentially ‘cost’ nothing to produce — a few keystrokes, maybe?  Given the fact making digital copies is just so damn easy, why would anybody bother to pay for particular copies?

It’s not that the ‘content’ embodied in the various digital copies lacks “value”, so much as it lacks any justifiable ‘price’.

The copy cost essentially $0 to make, so any price you assign — even 1 cent — inevitably ends up looking like a really drastic markup that nobody much sees a point in paying.

Digital media are just so damned easy to copy

Back in the analog era, people didn’t have these kinds of problems because third or fourth generation copies were pretty degraded and unusable. But as I said before, in the digital domain, ‘copies’ are exactly like ‘originals’, such that thousandth-generation ‘copy’ would (in principle) retain total fidelity to the original.  (Barring, of course, damage to any of the copies in between.)

Enter DRM — making digital media ‘imitate’ analog media, such that a particular digital ‘copy’ is ‘welded’ to a particular physical  location.  This is extremely clunky, and — rightly — pisses everybody off.  It limits interoperability, portability, and basically only ‘duplicates’ the cumbersome disadvantages of analog media while lacking even the portability of being able to play an analog cassette-tape on multiple machines.

Nobody likes DRM — at least, nobody in their right mind.

Now, it would be nice to believe people will just ‘neutralise’ their monopoly privileges when confronted with the real history of copyright/patents, and the nature of digital media itself, but it’s exceedingly unlikely for several reasons:

Nina Paley nails one of the least respectable reasons in an article over on http://www.questioncopyright.org:

As she says:

“This may be hard to hear, but: many artists who claim they just want to eat and pay rent are lying (perhaps to themselves). Most artists don’t want a living wage — they want to win the lottery. Suggest to most filmmakers and musicians that “success” is about $75,000 a year, and they’ll turn up their noses. You call that a jackpot? They’re only in it for the millions, baby. If that means working a day job and remaining obscure, so be it. Millions need to be poor so that one can be rich; they’re willing to do their time being poor, so that one day they can be rich at the expense of others. Their turn will come, they think.”

http://questioncopyright.org/compensation

This is especially ironic when ’small fish’ get on board the RIAA’s copyright-fascism train: too many of them still cherish fantasies of being the next Nickelback, Amy Winehouse, or Microsoft.

That’s where www.sellyourrights.com is such a good idea:

1. It reassures folks who think that, absent the monopoly privileges of copyright and patent, they won’t get paid, that, yes, people do actually value their effort.

2. The use of Creative-commons licences (as opposed to straight-out ceding to the Public Domain) allows people to still impose conditions (noderivs, noncommercial, etc.) which allows them to retain a sense of ‘creative control’ which, if their stuff just went public domain, they wouldn’t retain.

3. It ‘incentivizes’ the use of Creative Commons licenses, making them more attrractive to folks outside the percieved “utopian’ free culture/copyright reform movement.  (Like it or not, even questioning stuff like copyright — much less advocating reform/repeal, strikes many as ‘utopian.’)

Don’t get me wrong here: the emerging ‘participatory culture’ vibe will only increase over time, eventually becoming the new ‘norm’ against which people’s actions are judged.  In twenty or thirty years, copyright fetishists will — rightly — be viewed as ‘hoarders’, and their stuff won’t be propagated throught he info-sphere with anything approaching the success of those who want their stuff to spread.

By that point, the idea of selling digital copies will also be viewed as self-evidently absurd, and people will barely be able to understand  the p2p/copyright-reform debates going on today.

But we’re not there yet, folks.

http://www.sellyourrights.com and other similar ideas strike me as a great way to ease the transition.

We’re right in the middle of a Thomas Kuhn-style ‘paradigm shift’, and the more ways we can ease the transition, the better.

Henry Emrich – p2pnet
[Emrich says he's, "just some guy," sometime musician, wannabe writer, sporadic blogger, and (hopefully) good-natured person.  He and his wife live in Pennsylvania with two cats, and, "entirely too many record albums".]

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

September, 2009

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 9:27 am and is filed under DRM, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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