Digital Communism

Internet file-trading tools, a California court handed a major victory to communism. The Internet allows the well-wired to take copyrighted material freely. Left unchecked, rampant copyright theft may soon destroy the for-profit production of movies, music and books and may usher in an age of digital communism.

Technology will soon increase the ease of copyright theft because as broadband access proliferates, more people will be able to download pirated movies and music quickly. Currently, authors are safe from Internet piracy because most book readers still prefer printed words to electronic text. We may soon, however, see electronic paper that is as easy to read as printed pulp. How much money would Tom Clancy be able to make when readers can download all his books freely in under a second? Can you imagine college students paying $75 for a textbook they could download for free?

The best hope to stop copyright piracy lies in stopping the distribution of peer-to-peer networks that facilitate such theft. By holding that these networks have no liability for inappropriate use of their tools the California court has reduced the value of digital property rights.

Some have claimed that Internet piracy simply represents another form of competition and all copyright holders need do to compete successfully is to lower prices. But a central tenant of economics holds that if multiple firms sell identical products, consumers will patronize the lowest price provider. If pirates give away their product for free, content providers can compete only by also charging nothing.

The ability to exclude is the essence of property rights. If I "own" land but anyone can trespass I don't really have any property rights. Similarly, if I own a movie, but anyone can freely watch it, my rights have disappeared.

Is it necessarily bad if piracy destroys intellectual property rights? After all, when everything is free we can live out Karl Marx's dream and have everyone take according to his needs.

The twentieth century witnessed a brutal competition between communism and capitalism. Communists believe that people can be motivated to work for the common good, while capitalists believe that profit provides the best catalyst for economic production. Capitalism, of course, triumphed mainly because of its superior economic performance. By decimating profits for content producers, peer-to-peer piracy may give us a communist system of intellectual-property production.

I imagine that few would invest in a factory in the Congo. Because of political strife, property rights in the Congo aren't respected, so it would be nearly impossible to profit from building a factory in the Congo since once it was built, armed men would come and steal the equipment. Businesspeople only make investments they can profit from.

Copyright holders were able to sue Napster into submission, but Napster had a centralized database that was easy to locate and destroy. New forms of Internet piracy, however, rely upon peer-to-peer networks where users download material directly from each other's hard drives. Since it would be impractical for content providers to sue millions of Internet users, to protect digital-capitalism copyright holders must be able to stop the proliferation of piracy tools.

Some might argue that copyright holders should fend for themselves in the marketplace. Imagine, however, the fate of stores if there were no effective laws against shoplifting: Theft would drive them to bankruptcy. True, copyright holders can somewhat protect themselves by imbedding copy protection technology in their products. A movie, for example, could contain a code allowing it to be played only on your hardware. Imbedded copy-protection technology is foiled, however, if even one user creates and disseminates a clean and playable copy. Furthermore, imbedded copy protection can never protect e-books since you can create a copyable e-book merely by scanning the text of a physical book.

Of course, copyright holders could still find a few ways to profit in a world of rampant piracy. Movies could be financed by the sale of action figures and musicians could profit from concerts. It's difficult to see how authors could profit, however, except, perhaps, by begging for tips.

Always a good place to retreat to when you have nothing else to say.

Except, of course, that I did have more to say. You just ignored it.

I can't spell, and you can't think. I like my problem better.

Anyone who ever disagrees with you is stupid. I get it. You don't have to repeat your favorite personal theory about the universe in every post.

A Socratic dictum comes to mind, Protagoras.

Let me know when you figure out the difference between remuneration and profit. Learning the distinction could make a practical difference in your quality of life.

I never insulted you. I never called your ideas or opinions absurd or moronic. I never said you couldn't think. Nor did I call you a coward - something you erroneously accused me of.

You have, to the contrary, continually insulted me rather than addressed the question at hand - and yet you began the conversation!

You began by calling my statement absurd. In order for you to turn your accusation from bare assertion to accomplished fact, all you had to do was cite one specific example of a great work of art or literature made for material profit.

Instead of doing so, you cited works that were done for extremely inadequate pay - not for a profitable return.

I will point out now, parenthetically, that Protagoras was a thinker who is famously attributed with the saying that "man is the measure of all things" and who was associated with the school of thought that holds all opinions to be of equal value.

If you feel so strongly that it is appropriate to automatically label all opinions contrary to yours as absurd and moronic, fine. But let's have some truth in advertising.

If you are a performer yourself, you have some idea of what musicians, etc. go through before their efforts begin to return any money. ( The old adage : " Don't quit your day job ! " is painfully true to MOST . )

Read #24 by Greg West, who IS a musician. The current system mainly enriches the corporate honchos at the music companies, plus a handful of superstar musicians. A system where 2nd-tier artists could make a moderate living by either selling their music online for a modest download fee, or for free (in order to promote their live tours and promo items) would lead to MORE music being written and available. The internet is a very big world. At ten-to-twenty-five cents per song-download, it would be easier to just go to the home site of your favorite artist to download his latest stuff than to hunt on the web, yet an artist with a few thousand fans could make a decent living thru downloads and live performances

Interesting take in post #5. I never thought of it from that angle.

That reminds me of when I did my taxes a couple of months ago. I used to pay an accountant to do my taxes for me. Over the last five years, I have done them myself with tax preparation software. Each year, the process gets even easier as the software improves. This year's program upon installation imported data from last year's return and from my finance software so that before I even started, I was already more than halfway done. I was amazed at how quickly I moved through the program. Within an hour, I was finished even though I used the long form and itemized. Another few mouseclicks and both federal and state were electronically filed.

I wonder if all the accountants and tax lawyers of the world are going to get together and force the government to stop the sale of software like TurboTax and TaxCut so that their profits can be protected too.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out for the recording industry when all is said and done. I still think they can make money off digital music if they play it smart. But in the worst case scenario, at least the recording artists should have no problem making a decent living performing concerts.

Hamlet was written to be performed - Shakespeare never imagined that he would be paid purely for the text of his plays, divorced from regular performances.

Ivanhoe is an interesting case - I find it to be painfully trite and not too many consider Scott to be a truly great writer - but it has been enduring.

Scott did write his anonymous historical novels mostly for the purpose of repaying his debts - so there was clearly a financial motive.

Good point.

That's not a bad idea !

A writer named Fred Reed ( Fred on Everything ) suggested something similar with respect to written publications.

I'm hopeful, someday,a reasonable compromise can be worked out : one that lets the producer market directly to the consumer...much like an electronic jukebox, in which the "quarter per song" is pre-paid in the form of a subscription to a site-maintained, perhaps, by a group of artists as a cooperative venture.

If the cost was relatively low, there would be little financial incentive to cheat ( by re-marketing the downloads, for example ) and the studio stanglehold would be broken forever.

I imagine some of the folks reading this discussion are young enough and ambitious enough to start the ball rolling.
I'm a bit long in tooth ( going on 70 ),but I would be among the first to wish you well.

The going $17.00 for a CD is piracy. It is a totally unreal markup. If people really knew what it costs to manufacture CDs, they'd have a cow over the price. The old myth was that you were paying for increased quality over LPs and cassettes. The real truth is that CDs cost considerably less to manufacture than LPs or cassettes. If the recording industry wants to stop piracy, they need to drop the prices and compete honestly in an open market.

Well I think Joe Six-pack is finally catching on. Especially when he can get a stack of 100 blank CDs at Wal-Mart for $20 (twenty cents a CD). And that's retail. I'm sure the factories that crank out CDs by the millions pay far less per CD - probably a couple of pennies per a piece. Throw in the jewel case, the little booklet that goes inside and those annoying stickers and shrinkwrap that you need an Exacto Knife to get off and the total cost of the whole package might approach 20 cents.

And we thought Bill Gates had the monopoly on price-gouging!

I have always stated that if the recording industry was to lower the price-point of their CDs to $4.99 or less - still room for a huge profit margin - they would sell 10x as many CDs. At that price-point, a CD will become an impulse item. People will buy them on their lunch hour and not think twice about it. Yes, people will still download MP3s but if they download something they like, they will likely go out and buy it. For them, MP3s will be a convenient way to sample music. Only broke kids will bother with making homemade CDs out of MP3s. Everybody else will want a clean copy with all the extras like liner notes, artwork, etc. It's why people buy DVDs instead of taping off HBO.

Speaking of DVDs, you might remember when VCR tapes of movies costed $90 or more. They didn't sell too many except to video rental stores. Millions of people had libraries of movies that they taped off the TV. But when the movie industry dropped the pricepoint of these pre-recorded VCR tapes (and later DVDs) to where people would buy them, home taping came to a virtual halt. People don't bother taping movies off the TV for the same reason most people don't make their own butter or brew their own beer. It's much easier and cheaper to just buy it off the shelf at the store. I'm sure that when the supermarkets start charging $17 for a stick of butter, a lot more people will start making their own.

BTW, very good post.

After all, the very first mass market musical recordings were made to promote performers over the radio so listeners would come to see live performances.

I've often wondered why the recording industry is so afraid of people downloading MP3s for free yet so eager to have radio play their songs so that the consumers can hear them...for free! It's an interesting paradox that I have yet to figure out. In fact, there have been scandals over the years (payola) in which the record companies PAID radio stations to play their music so that people could hear them for free!

Now I understand that the reason the recording industry wants to promote free airplay for their product is so that the people listening at home will run out and buy the product. Well, they can accomplish the same thing with MP3s if they weren't so bull-headed about it. Your average radio station only has an active playlist of maybe 80 songs - usually around 50 current and 30 "recurrent" (older songs brought back into rotation for a short time). Therefore there are thousands of other songs that will never be played on the radio, even though they too are airworthy. The Internet is the perfect medium to get this music heard. There may only be 50,000 fans of a certain brand of music (let's call it Cajun bluegrass for the sake of this discussion). Now chances are, there is a lot of this type of music out there that these 50,000 fans have never been exposed to. Make the MP3s available online at a low bitrate (say 128Kbps) and those 50,000 people will be brought together to the slice of the web in which this type of music is available. You will now be able to target the entire fanbase of this particular obscure brand of music, greatly increasing your chances of selling them CDs (or higher bitrate digital downloads for a nominal fee).

I'm hopeful, someday,a reasonable compromise can be worked out : one that lets the producer market directly to the consumer...much like an electronic jukebox, in which the "quarter per song" is pre-paid in the form of a subscription to a site-maintained, perhaps, by a group of artists as a cooperative venture.

Read post #24

mp3.com served in the niche you're describing. Unknown artists could list themselves on mp3.com, and were paid on the basis of downloads. Then the music industry bought out mp3.com and changed it.

The problem is the music industry does not want any changes that will kill their business. They can afford to spend $billions on lawyers to harass sites into bankruptcy, because if people discover that there are independent artists that are just as good as music industry artists, and who will sell their music much more cheaply, the whole business model of the recording industry goes down the toilet. If a site came up that independent artists could upload their stuff to, it would be in the RIAA's interest for "somebody" to upload some Madonna songs so the site can then be forced into an expensive lawsuit.

The RIAA will first need to go bankrupt before independent-music sites can survive without harasment

I disagree. Labor is a real cost of doing business. Almost all businesses would be insanely profitable if they didn't have to pay employees.

No, it is not, and here we have the crux of the discussion and the reason your argument is entirely fallacious. Your contention that no one writes a great work for "profit" depends entirely on a private definition of that term. To state that "labor is a real cost of doing business" is to state that you can arbitrarily assign any value you like to a writer's time. No wonder you can define your way around "profit"!

That contention flies in the face of specific statements to the contrary by some of the greatest writers and artists in their respective fields, which you choose to either ignore (as in the case of Samuel Johnson) or to wiggle around by a misdirection, as in "Shakespeare didn't write his plays for publishing, he wrote them to be performed." Irrelevant.

Why did Michaelangelo, a great artist, paint the Sistine Chapel or sculpt David, great works of art? For money, to eat, pay rent - and for that little left over that is the real definition of "profit." To claim that it was for a "commission," not "profit" is to try to use that special definition to exempt his case. It does not.

Writers write for any number of reasons - Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, were not written for money, where his plays were - but professionals do it for a living. If you don't believe it, ask one.

Your contention that no one writes a great work for "profit" depends entirely on a private definition of that term.

My definition of profit is not a private one.

The American Heritage Dictionary: "The return received on a business undertaking after all operating expenses have been met."

No wonder you can define your way around "profit"!

I stand by the common, standard dictionary definition.

Why did Michaelangelo, a great artist, paint the Sistine Chapel or sculpt David, great works of art? For money, to eat, pay rent - and for that little left over that is the real definition of "profit."

So we do have the same definition: that "little left over."

As I said earlier, Michelangelo was originally contracted to decorate the Chapel in 1505. He was still working on it in 1541, long after his original commission had been spent. The Pauline Chapel which he also painted for money still exists - and no one cares about it. It just wasn't a great work.

The Sistine Chapel, however, he worked on and worked on, pouring his heart and soul into it long after he had been paid.

He took the job for money - but if it had been about money or even profit, he would have banged it out as quickly as possible, done a workmanlike job like he did on the Pauline, and called it a day.

Great art, the Sistines as opposed to the Paulines, has little to do with money in the final analysis.

With respect to art, and I understand that my opinion may not be shared, it can be argued that no masterpieces were produced in the 20th Century. I am a big fan of classical music but the works I keep going back to listen to are by composers such as J.S. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Handel, and Monteverdi. None of those composers, except maybe Handel (who moved to England), ever came close to striking it rich. I find it hard to listen to any classical piece of music that was produced after about 1910 or so (Mahler).

I'm not sure how that ties into your argument that nobody writes a great work for profit, but that has been my observation. I'm quite sure that if anybody today wrote a symphony that could compare with one written by Beethoven in the early 19th Century, he would be greatly rewarded monetarily. Why then, hasn't anything as good as Beethoven ever been produced in the past 100 years?

Hamlet comes to mind.

As does Ivanhoe.

Why bother. Whatever example you produce, wideawake will find some way of disqualifing it as "great art" or "profitable".

You can't win an argument when the Rules of Engagement are a moving target. The fact that artists in every field of endeavor have managed to make a good living off of their art while creating enduring works will be shrugged off.

Nevertheless, off the top of my head:

Writers: Dumas, Verne, Dickens, Twain, Frost, Heinlein, Asimov, Machiavelli, Doyle

Artists: Rockwell, Parrish, Picasso, Dali, Shultz, Nast, Wyeth

Playwrights: Gershwin Bros., T. Williams, Shaw, Moliere, Mamet

Musicians/Composers: Presley, Sousa, Armstrong, B.B. King, Cohan, Smokey Robinson

Filmmakers: Disney, Welles, Hitchcock

This is a interesting point.

I would argue that across the arts, from sculpture to painting to music to writing, the 20th century lost track.

I guess it's aprtly due to the fact that while the nineteenth century focused on technical perfection, the twentieth focused on newness and difference.

In my opinion (and I realize I'm now moving into a purely personal realm of taste) the last truly great prose was written by Beckett and Robbe-Grillet.

I'll use them as an example. They both did very bold new things and violated the rules of grammar and narrative in their work. But they shared the nineteenth century notion of perfection: they carefully worked on their writing - every aspect of their work is intentional and fits into a larger whole.

The problem is, anyone else can now come along, write a jumble of hard-to-parse words nearly at random, and claim to be just as entitled to respect as a Beckett.

That's the paradox - if Beckett wanted to he could have written a near-perfect parody of Samuel Johnson or Cardinal Newman or any other great English prose stylist. In his work you can catch echoes and snippets of the KJV or Sterne. He knew perfectly how to write in a traditional, conventional way. Whereas "avant-garde" writers today could never do so - they do not have the craft, the skill and knowledge that Beckett had.

But throw hard-to-read prose by Beckett and by a scribbler in front of the average person and they will be equally unimpressed.

I suspect it's much the same with music: the really excellent musicians can interpret the classical tradition. But new movements like Serialism tend to eliminate all possibility of craft from music.

Beethoven is now so long gone, as is his world, that it would be tough to create music like his today without simply being labeled and old-fashioned rip-off artist.

You make many assumptions yourself.

How many copies of The Prince were printed in Machiavelli's lifetime? What did he make in royalties from his most famous and enduring achievement?

Answer: nothing.

Isaac Asimov one of the world's great writers? There's not much consensus there.

Citizen Kane is the essence of Welles' legacy. He knew it would be a complete flop - he actually misled RKO executives about the plot, budget, etc. just so they would make it - and it was a complete fail ure at the box office.

Dali and Picasso are excellent examples of artists who got paid well for their substandard work at the end of their lives while getting paid nothing for their truly great work in their prime.

As I pointed out above, Twain made his money as a journalist - his classic writings were done for his enjoyment at his own pace.

Mamet is a prime example - he himself says that he wrote or cowrote his less inspired scripts (like the Costner vehicle Untouchables) for a paycheck so he could finance his true legacy: Glengarry Glen Ross, etc. And even in movies like that he acknowledges that not only do they lose money, they would have lost more if they didn't have stars like Pacino, Lemmon, Steve Martin, etc. in them.

What Mamet considers his greatest work he produces knowing full well that he will lose money.

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