For the past decade, ever since Napster changed the world of digital distribution, we’ve been telling ourselves a story about big businesses trying to fight little people, old companies trying to block new ideas, the past trying to stop the future. Like all simple tales, it has obvious villains and heroes, in this case music and movie lobbyists on one side and “free culture” advocates like Lawrence Lessig on the other. The moral is that no one can fight the future: All information will inevitably become digital and anything that is digital will inevitably be free. This supposed to be the happy ending.
The problem is that this story – however compelling it may be – is almost entirely wrong. The real tale has less black and white, but plenty of dark gray.
Napster made it clear that the future of the entertainment business lies online, but it did not define what that future would look like. In the decade since, we have seen a conflict between creators and the companies that represent them on the one hand and technology businesses that distribute their products without paying on the other. The accusations that musicians and other creators are greedy come from technology entrepreneurs, an unlikely form of class warfare indeed. The lawsuits against consumers – ill-advised though they were – were only filed when technology companies insisted that consumers, rather then themselves, should be held responsible for copyright infringement. And a world where all information is free would decimate the entertainment business, an important contributor to the U.S. balance of trade, as well as the economy as a whole.
In my book Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back, I present a counter-narrative – what I see as the real history of the last decade in the media business. The fact that so many businesses are having so much trouble -and the fact that the market for original online content is so anemic -suggests that making money online isn’t as easy as those “Earn Money From Home” ads make it look.
Despite much yelling on both sides, this isn’t one of the great moral issues of our time – it’s just a particularly intense business dispute between companies who invest in culture and those that distribute it without compensating creators. At stake is who gets paid for the value of a creator’s work – him and his representatives, or Internet companies that have nothing to do with it. It’s an important question, since media companies that cannot make back their investments in music and movies will stop putting money into them. Ironically, that will also hurt the Internet, which has always depended on professional content. Even remixes depend on mixes – that hilarious YouTube show about Chad Vader wouldn’t work if George Lucas hadn’t created Star Wars.
The other side’s logic is confusing but familiar. Since my book came out in the UK, bloggers have told me that music sales didn’t fall, that sales did fall but not because of piracy, that sales did fall but consumers are still willing to buy music, and that sales did fall but labels should give away music from now on. Bloggers decry the polished pop put out of major labels, even though it’s among the most popular content on file-sharing services. It’s like the old Catskills joke: The food here is terrible – and such small portions!
It’s worth remembering that the media business isn’t trying to rewrite copyright law – just enforce it. We could, and should, debate the best ways to do that. But that discussion can’t happen as long as technology companies keep pushing the idea that copyright is unnecessary – a standard they rarely apply to the patent laws that help their own businesses. Any talk of enforcement brings an inevitable response that it will somehow “break the Internet,” which is ridiculous. First, the Internet is hardly as fragile as these lobbyists make it seem – and it faces far more significant challenges from hackers. Second, if you consider what’s really happening online, it’s hard not to conclude that the Internet is broken already. We need to start thinking about ways to fix it.
These days, ironically, it’s technology companies that seem to be stuck in the past. The Internet is developing to encompass a series of smaller networks, including Xbox Live and the iPhone “apposphere” – so much so that even Wired declared “The Web Is Dead.” Google champions “the open Internet” partly because these parts of the online world are closed to its business model. And both its lobbyists and the “public interest” organizations it supports protest any effort to change the Internet’s regulatory structure – even ones that would make it easier to enforce existing laws. The kind of innovation it favors is the kind of innovation it makes money on – a natural enough attitude but not a good guide for public policy.
It’s easy to find fault with any prescription for protecting copyright online – it’s a complex issue. But it seems odd indeed that the same lobbyists and “activists” find fault with every bill aimed at this. And it’s time to ask whether they really object to certain specific measures or the entire idea of copyright in general. If they don’t like the PROTECT IP Act [or the Stop Online Piracy Act], what would they suggest? If now isn’t the time to do it, when would be? The answers never seem to appear. And the silence is deafening.
Robert Levine is a journalist based in New York and Berlin. He was formerly the executive editor of Billboard, an editor for Wired, New York, Details, RollingStone.com and HotWired. His writing has also appeared the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Fortune. His first book, Free Ride, How the Internet is Destroying the Culture Business, was published by Doubleday this week.
This post first appeared in the MusicTechPolicy Monthly newsletter.
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