So it looks as if iTunes will be largely DRM-free by April. Will that save the music industry? I'm still not seeing a great deal of evidence that younger people who group up in an era when they didn't have to pay for music will start paying for it like those of us who grew up when the only way to get good sound without paying was to . . . er . . . steal it.
I am assured by Larry Lessig fans that the bands will just make it up on concerts, and anyway, this is good for the smaller indie bands that right-thinking people like. I will be more convinced when I see an actual increase in the number of quality musicians who don't have to supplement their art with a job delivering pizza.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
First tracks I ever bought online were DRM-free MP3s from Amazon. $0.79-1.98 with instant gratification and no locks to pick makes it exceedingly easy to go with the clickety-click.
Apple gets credit for kicking down the door of legitimate digital music distribution in the face of thickheaded industry bigwigs, and making the content-protection concessions necessary to placate outdated thought processes about the nature of distribution, but this move is long overdue.
Or the new equilibrium is that most music will be made by people that can a) make money touring or b) make music while holding down another job.
I don't see this as a particular tragedy.
Q. What is the difference between a 30-year treasury and an indie-rock musician?
A. The treasury will eventually mature... and in the meantime will generate a steady income.
I've never understood why the copyrights for music don't expire, like patents.
I will be more convinced when I see an actual increase in the number of quality musicians who don't have to supplement their art with a job delivering pizza.
Why is this the standard of success? Why is it a tragedy if they make great music, but have to work jobs on the side to make up for it?
I think that the inevitable result of online music distribution will be fewer professional musicians--that is, fewer people making a living from music. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there will be less good music. My experience suggests the opposite.
I think the argument is that this is capitulation to the reality DRM doesn't work. There's no good way to secure music and allow people the convenience of playing it the way they want to at the same time.
TallDave - copyrights for music do expire, just on much longer timescales than patents... and even if they did expire on a patent timescale, do you really care if you can have copyright-fee music that's 17 years old?
Anyway, the reality is also that a large chunk of the music industry already faces the same financial pressures - not making any real money off of record sales as it is. But, the problem for indie music moving forward is that it's been possible to live off of touring and licensing deals, but that's not going to be happening as much in the era of economic crisis. In particular, audiences won't have the disposable income needed to plunk down $20-30 or more for shows. Also, the ability of musicians to pick up part-time/casual work to supplement their incomes will be much less. I expect this to make music scenes much more local.
Perhaps most musicians are too bad to survive without being subsidized by the music companies.
I know the Grateful Dead made tons of money via their concerts. And Ani DiFranco owns her own music I believe.
Perhaps everyone else just has less talent.
The problem with making music is that it's inherently fun and also status enhancing. So people will do it just for the fun of it. They'll even pay (for gear, for lessons) to do it. That's always been the case, but the costs of distribution has fallen to zero. In the past, a just-for-the-fun-of-it musician had no way to get his music out there -- a record deal was required. But now with Myspace, youtube, etc, it costs nothing to give away your music to everybody in the world.
Combine that with the long tail of all 100 years of recorded music being readily available, and it becomes very difficult for musicians who want to sell new recordings -- and that's quite apart from the problem of illegal file sharing.
"In particular, audiences won't have the disposable income needed to plunk down $20-30 or more for shows."
I don't know about that, even during the height of the depression 75% of people still had jobs - and those people flocked to the movies to escape their troubles.
500 people x $10 a ticket is $5,000 3k to the venue and the band keeps $2,000 - that's 10k a week doing 5 shows.
Perhaps more crap to good music, but I have doubts about any great music.
And I somehow doubt that free music will lead to concert revenues making up the difference. Recording, advertising and promotion (which most often comes from those evil record labels) will not be available on such a large scale anymore. The costs for the tour will have to be fronted more and more by the band (not cheap) in the hopes that they can recoup the costs from that tour, and maybe make something off of their work. My guess is it will keep bands local playing smaller venues and having to hold down those jobs, giving them less time to create those great songs. But then again, anyone can write a great song, right?
Who needs bands like the Beatles, Stones, and on and on, when you can listen to your neighbor strum a guitar and play crap? Well, at least you'll be getting what you pay for.
I buy from Amazon because their MP3s are DRM-free. I refuse to use iTunes (or even buy an iPod) because the music is tangled up in DRM.
Megan,
I have to really disagree with you here. You, like the music industry which pushed DRM for years, assumes that every music fan is a prudent predator and will only seek to maximize his short term musical interest. Right now, say, I feel like getting a song from The National's (my fave band) third album, so I will go steal it, according to your view. But if everyone is like me and is merely maximizing short term gain, by only stealing it, I will make it more likely that The National can't make great music that I love anymore. That's why in reality, since I am a big fan of the band, I won't steal their music, but pay for it, because I appreciate their work and want them to make more of it. I think that's really how most music fans actually behave (or at least, enough do that way to sustain musicians). Those who are content with stealing probably would not have bought the music in an all-DRM world anyway.
Think of it this way, the music industry's pro-DRM argument is the equivalent of: "why would anyone rationally buy a Vermeer when they can just buy a really really good photocopy/reproduction for fraction of the cost?" Or why would anyone rationally buy a Noguchi table when one can buy a knockoff. Or why buy an Eames chair. This amounts to the view that buying original or authentic art is irrational (for if you can get the equivalent copy for fraction thereof you should and would do it). This is sort of a self-defeating argument since presumably you claim to be looking out for the artists. There's lots of people who will "irrationally" pay for music because they want to support the artists they like and want the genuine article.
Here's a story.
I like making music. A lot. It's a thing I do for fun. I'm not great at it, but I'm getting better at it all the time. So I'm sitting on this pile of music. If, for whatever reason, I don't think I can monetize my music, or I don't want to monetize my music, and if I still like the idea of having attention and an audience, what incentive do I have, exactly, for not giving it away for free? What if I love making it, but I'm not willing to soften the edges to make it more commercially viable, or to deal with slimy bastard record industry types, or to tour, or to do shows - I really just like writing, playing, and recording music? God knows that the combination of ever-improving sample repositories and software-based instruments, music software generally, and cheap hardware is making it easier and easier to make interesting stuff all the time.
Because the reality is, if there are enough people who fit that description, and if even 1 out of 1000, or 1 out of 10000 makes stuff that is at least interesting - and if there are appropriate communities for sorting and rating the stuff - then there really isn't a natural market for buying recordings of many kinds of music. Right? This is the reality of the market, the thing that blogs have made perfectly clear - there are a lot more people talented and skilled at certain tasks than your instincts would tell you, and it's always a bad idea to try to make lots of money in a space where people love what they do and are willing to work for nearly nothing.
copyrights for music do expire, just on much longer timescales than patents
Yeah, times scales such as in "life of the author plus 90 years," which is the same as "forever" unless the author died a while ago and you are pretty young. And assuming Congress doesn't extend it again, as it has consistently done throughout the 20th century.
do you really care if you can have copyright-fee music that's 17 years old?
I care (a little bit) about the ability of others to make derivative works or incorporate the music license-free into other works, such as movies evoking a particular time period.
The copyright system is really a total mess, even without worrying about infringement.
Err... I forgot I've started using Gene2 since the emergence of another Gene... post made above by "Gene" is by old Gene or new Gene2. I am Spartacus. No, I am!
Another trend that's grown in the independent music scene is the resurgence of vinyl. Sales of vinyl records have skyrocketed in the past year or so and I can see this continuing. I listen to a good amount of punk/indie bands, and although many have been putting out vinyl versions of records and 7" singles for a long time, there's been a big jump in their sales and production, actually leading to a shortage of vinyl (especially colored vinyl) in the past year. This may be a fad to an extent, but I think it's a good example of the industry shifting away from CD sales since they are lagging. People still download the music for free, but will buy the vinyl version for various reasons (having a tangible version of the music, album art, supporting the band, etc.).
Another trend that's grown in the independent music scene is the resurgence of vinyl. Sales of vinyl records have skyrocketed in the past year or so and I can see this continuing. I listen to a good amount of punk/indie bands, and although many have been putting out vinyl versions of records and 7" singles for a long time, there's been a big jump in their sales and production, actually leading to a shortage of vinyl (especially colored vinyl) in the past year. This may be a fad to an extent, but I think it's a good example of the industry shifting away from CD sales since they are lagging. People still download the music for free, but will buy the vinyl version for various reasons (having a tangible version of the music, album art, supporting the band, etc.).
The measure of success is not how many people are delivering pizza, but if the music listener is getting good music. I think there are still plenty of good albums coming out every year, and until that stops or starts really slowing down, I don't really see a big problem.
No one has a right to make a living at their hobby. By all means, make art — but the moment you ask others to pay you for it means you've committed commerce.
I didn't mean the above as a defense of piracy, by the way ... just a refusal to break out the violin over those pizza-delivering moonlighters.
I don't think touring solves the problem. I am like Gene - I still buy my music in order to be legit and support the artists, but amongst my friends and co-workers, I am the only one who does. As much as "don't worry, I still pay for music voluntarily even though I *could* steal it!" made a good argument in the DRM war, I think the stats are gonna show it to be more and more rare.
I think the way forward is the same way that produced some of the best video content - think Dexter, the Wire, Sopranos, Six Feet Under... People might not pay for a CD when they can get it off torrents, but they might pay (or their parents might pay) $10/month or $20/month for a really nice "music service", and that service will have to pay artists to get content.
I know those services (Rhapsody, Yahoo music, etc) aren't exactly conquering the world right now, but I think each year gives us fewer old legit folks buying CDs and more cool kids torrenting. This seems the most workable future model to me, I suspect we'll get there eventually.
As a big jazz fan and former jazz musician I have to object to Ms. McArdle closer there. The jazz guys have more "quality" than most pop musicians going. And, uh, well, most of 'em supplement their art with a job delivering pizza.
I write songs and try and sell them and they're pretty good. I tend to agree with Nathan.
The myth that there's not a lot of 'great' music out there is exactly that. A myth. Actually, there is. The reason is that, using traditional chord and melodic structures, making something that sounds good is really not that difficult.
Getting it to great is typically a factor of emotion and honesty (and production values).
So a surfeit of very good-to-great music means that the market for great songs becomes more competitive and the ability to charge for them is correspondingly reduced. So, no music industry.
Hard things to do (those requiring additional technical skills) center around scoring and composition for film and television and that's the area of the music "industry" that still pays.
Perhaps it was just an abnormality that writing three chord pop songs ever paid anything at all. But that doesn't mean it can't be beautiful or authentic or, in the end, great art.
A person who bashes copyright laws has probably never had the experience of someone taking his work and present it as their own - and get paid for it. It's a rather annoying experience. Ideas are not copyrighted, but the worked produced by those ideas - whether scientific research, a novel or a song - should be protected for the benefit of person who did the work.
Why do people think it is probably OK to download and share a song without paying the creator of the song? What gives any individual the right to distribute anything they didn't create without permission or reimbursement to the person who created it?
If an artists chooses to give their art away - whether it is a painting, a poem or a song - that is there choice. But just because it is easy to freely distribute music without the artist being compensated doesn't mean it should happen.
The best thing we can do to improve music is kill music departments at all State schools. Let the private colleges handle it, and let the Punk bands rise from the alleys.
(That we subsidize a broken music culture should not escape us.)
Yikes, the most common position reported at PayScale for a Bachelors in Music is "Director, Music Ministry" at $29K per annum.
Doug: "A person who bashes copyright laws has probably never had the experience of someone taking his work and present it as their own - and get paid for it."
I've shipped a bunch of AAA giant budget video games, all of which were at points pirated, and I will _absolutely_ bash copyright laws. Their death can't come soon enough.
Their Disney-financed perpetually lengthening terms are a travesty. Their enforcement problems make them essentially untenable now (go ask Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, how much they care about copyright - the fact that they rely on the physical characteristics of server-side software lets them escape from the whole quagmire). Copyright, combined with the goofy nature of the network-effects of sales in media, mean that hard work is almost never rewarded, and that winners-take-all lottery effects rule the day. It's not obvious to me why I should want anyone to make more than, say, 100k a year doing something they like, particular when the lottery effects are taken into account. Almost every industry where money is made via copyright, because there are talented creatives who are lousy at business, starry eyed, and easily duped, end up with the lion's share of rewards going to people incidental to, or even antagonistic to, the creative process. Because we're willing to be Nazis about the duplication of specific instances of expression, but not general patterns, templates, and styles (Nirvana can be inspired by the Pixies, but that's not a commercial transaction), there is massive distortion about what capital will and won't fund, and some real peculiarity about what we consider thievery and what we don't. And, last but far from least, at this point, if you pay for a CD or DVD, you are essentially funding the litigation of other consumers.
To hell with all that, I say.
I am interested in supporting artists, especially artists who are underpaid or are trying things that are interesting or hard to sell or that look like they might be promising down the road - but at least from my perspective, copyright, as the set of governmental constraints we impose to encourage such things, has proven to be orthogonal at best to those goals. Give me a chance to support patronage, not rent-seeking.
Please, stop with all of the moralizing. Downloading a CD is a copyright violation (most of the time), and not "stealing" in the sense that most people understand that word, unless you define stealing as not paying someone everytime he/she thinks they should get paid, whether they deserve it or not.
This is all a huge grey area. When my wife moved in with me, I doubled my cd collection and put a load of them on my ipod. Was I stealing from the artist (I probably would have bought some of these cds)? What about when I buy a used CD, why isn't that stealing? The artist didn't get paid and multiple people got to enjoy the music. Libraries MUST be stealing too. I read ten books from the library without paying the writers a cent. What about putting music you bought on your ipod? You are making a copy that you didn't pay for.
I'm sympathatic to struggling artists (I used to be one but gave up for lack of talent)--and I buy way more CDs than the average person, I'm sure, but the idea that it's stealing everytime a corporation claims you should have to pay them is absurd. Technology has changed the economics of recording music, and the recording industry needs to come to grips with that fact.
... and even if they did expire on a patent timescale, do you really care if you can have copyright-fee music that's 17 years old
Michael Jackson seemed to do well with the Beatles collection.
I know the Grateful Dead made tons of money via their concerts.
Phish even lets you record the concert. They don't seem to be starving.
And I've seen people spend thousands of dollars on Phish collections getting all the rare imports.
Fun fact: the top selling album on Amazon.com was available for free.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090106-free-nine-inch-nails-albums-top-2008-amazon-mp3-sales-charts.html
Reznor put it up under a creative commons license (one of them licenses that Larry Lessig came up with).
Lots of people like to draw comics. Lots of people distribute their comics free on the internet.
And a few people make really awesome comics, develop followings, and become full time cartoonists ( Like Unshelved and Day by Day.)
Future music may follow the "Strong Bad" model. Create an awesome product in your spare time, gain a following via word of mouth, and make enough off of merchandizing to do what you love full time.
Not to be fabulously, Mick Jagger wealthy, but to earn a decent income doing what you love.
The death of DRM may well lead to MORE great music being available, just like the death of print is leading to a better variety of daily strips.
Is this still a libertarian blog? Here's the thing. The whole idea of "intellectual property" is a relatively modern construct and our current IP system is badly in need of overhaul.
Granted, copyright has been around forever, and industries like pharmaceuticals rely heavily on patent protection to amortize r&d costs, but the system we have today has been so badly mangled that its primary use is to stifle competition and award excess rents to well endowed and politically connected corporations.
Initially, Thomas Jefferson was loathe to support the fledgling patent concept and he indulged in this government intrusion only because he believed society would benefit from the public sharing of ideas that it would encourage. He never believed that an inventor had any God-given "right" to exclusive use of their ideas or their inventions. In its initial conception, the grant of a patent was provided only as an inducement and compensation for an inventor to publish their ideas. That's it. There was no property or right. Only a trade. Share the idea with the world and get a reward.
IMO, we should abandon this pet idea of lawyers and large corporations that there's such a thing as intellectual property rights that the government should enforce. If we want to create a system where the government picks winners and losers by granting special monopolies for the good of society, we should make sure that the benefits and costs are well aligned and that the inefficiencies are tolerable. Today they are not.
To see the inefficiencies of government intervention on the copyright side, look no further than the DMCA, which was invented for and by politically connected companies so they could use government power to collect excess rents and stifle competition and innovation. The funny thing is that the record company and movie execs that bought and paid for this dumb legislation were too stupid to understand that it would help lead to their undoing.
Baen Books has been selling every book it produces via Webscriptions since 1999. It has never put any sort of DRM on any of its books.
It's makes a nice profit on Webscriptions, AND sells lots of books on dead trees, too.
It's really simple: when you don't treat your customers like crooks, your customers tend not to steal from you.
I will be more convinced when I see an actual increase in the number of quality musicians who don't have to supplement their art with a job delivering pizza.
We aren't seeing that already? The fact that the internet makes people more aware of a greater variety of music, doesn't result in simply the illusion of greater prominence for indie bands, does it?
I am in a band (The Motion Sick) and have always been a rabid music fan/consumer. I don't think the removal of DRM means anything to indie artists. I think it does mean that the music industry is a step closer to what I see as the necessary scenario to "conquer" piracy; make music cheap and make it easy to download, use, and port. It's hard to know if the industry dragging its feet for years has discouraged "kids" from ever adjusting to the buy paradigm. We shall see.
For indie artists, ourselves included, the primary difficulty is the very solid wall transition between casual knowledge of your brand/songs and the willingness to actually put dollars toward that. We've had some major media coverage (SPIN Magazine) and we currently have a song in a major video game series (Dance Dance Revolution) and this translates to surprisingly few sales (at least compared with my once-naive expectations). We actually make more money from licensing our songs out for random things like vitamin commercials than we do from selling music. I don't think it's DRM. I don't think it's piracy. I think it's market saturation. Too many bands and too few rely on music financially, so they are allowed to exist as unprofitable entities eternally, which means virtually every band is forced to exist as unprofitable. Music has lost its value because it's too cheap to produce and too hard to compete with people who don't care about never making a dime.
It's the art/commodity problem I suppose.
I've been married to a jazz musician for 30 years; and I STILL don't see a viable way of money-making with music as a performer/recording artist without CELEBRITY in your pocket.
The only exceptions to this people who teach and people who license out music for TV/Radio/Advertising/Movies, as Mike Epstein suggests up-thread. I've a friend who makes sound clips for a popular cable channel, and does very well by it. Others friends who've had episodic pop hits that produce income, but never enough.
A master musician can charge between $50 and $150/hour for private lessons. Particularly if they've got something other then the Mel-Bay basics to teach. Sound breathing technique? Great modal insights? Haunting harmonic structures? Syncopated dance beats in odd signatures? You'll find students. (Sorry, too many public-school teachers don't count because they can't play, otherwise I'd include teaching in a school.)
Another method of avoiding the pizza-delivery fate (isn't that typically a night-time job? Musicians work day jobs so that they can gig at night,) is having the techie skills to do production. Some folks are able to run great businesses doing recording/mixing/mastering of demos, ads, etc. for local musicians. But you don't get to do much playing anymore. You've given up your day job for a night-time job with musicians, but the axe in your arms is a computer keyboard and microphones.
Most of the musicians I know do multiple duty; and far too many get tired of it and retire or have a spouse that can't stand the schedule.
Right now, my sweetie is in his room, playing the piano. Physical injury (playing music is athletic,) has made him diversify; he also plays sax, slide guitar, harmonica, and melodica. Every day, he works at being a musician. He does it because he's not happy if he's not playing.
And when he gets up on stage, it looks easy and fun.
In the end, that's what music is really about. As a now-infamous club-owner once told him, "You're a healer of spirits, that's your job." Healer of spirits and farmer of songs. When you can heal people with fun, who needs money?
I also disagree with the idea that the death of DRM equates to more piracy. In fact, it's the opposite. Ditching DRM will help the music industry.
If a song costs $0.69, can function on any player I chose, can be format-shifted, and has arguably better-than-CD quality, then there's no reason why I'd go for the pirated version. The pirates were successful at least in part because they were offering better product than the music industry. Now, the monetary costs of getting the same benefits is so low that piracy just doesn't make sense any more. Why bother with firing up a P2P app, performing an inefficient search, hoping you don't get sued by the RIAA, and maybe getting what you wanted when it's easier to just go to Amazon or iTunes? The opportunity costs of piracy are now much higher than the monetary costs of buying legitimate.
Same with video sites like Hulu. In the pre-TiVo days, if you missed an episode of a TV show, the best way to see it on your time was a torrent. The studios lost revenue because time-shifting was a pain and the opportunity costs of piracy were so low. With Hulu, it's the best of both worlds - the shows are free, the ads have thus far been unobtrusive, and there's no real need to pirate anything.
Same with movies. What's easier, finding a pirate site to get a movie or renting it from iTunes. Even with all the restrictions with that model, legitimate producers have finally started meeting in the middle with consumers who want easy access to movies online.
The reality of our world is that the cost of distribution of creative works just went to virtually zero. Nothing is going to put that genie back in the bottle. That's bad news for the IP cartels of the RIAA/MPAA, but there are a lot of independent producers out there that benefit from cheap and virtually limitless distribution. That's a good thing for artists, not a bad thing.
I've never understood why the copyrights for music don't expire, like patents.
What, really? What's so mysterious about it? There's 1) a very well-funded congressional lobby that ensures the passage of copyright extensions every few years or so, and 2) a Supreme Court that has ruled that extending copyright protections by n number of years every few years doesn't violate the Constitutional prohibition against eternal copyrights, even if you pass extensions an infinite number of times.
Copyrights aren't allowed to expire because it makes Disney a shit-ton of money. What's to be puzzled about?
Is this still a libertarian blog? Here's the thing. The whole idea of "intellectual property" is a relatively modern construct and our current IP system is badly in need of overhaul.
If you're going to tell me that intellectual property is not property, well, then, certainly you can provide an explanation of what property is, right? I've only ever heard two arguments about the root of property.
The first is that property is an arbitrary convention, derived from nothing but force and accident, necessary because people can't make use of the same object at the same time. In that case, of course, "intellectual property" isn't property, because there's no physical possession problem.
However, that eliminates any libertarian moral arguments against theft of physical property; it is only wrong insofar as it interferes with the practical benefits of the recognition of property. And then you run into the fact that, if the similar practical benefits can come from government enforcement of "intellectual property", it's just as legitimate as the government enforcing laws against theft of automobiles.
By now you've pretty much moved into full alignment with thinkers like Rawls, who are only willing to tolerate inequalities in distribution of physical wealth insofar as they are necessary to keep the economy functioning. You can argue that that's a lot more inequality than most followers of Rawls tolerate, but there's no difference in principle left between you and the average reader of The Nation on redistribution of wealth.
So, the second theory of property I've heard of is that it is (properly, at least) the result of labor being applied to the natural world. You don't so much own that ore you mined, you own the labor you put into it, and if somebody takes that ore, they have appropriated your labor for themselves. Taxation and theft are wrong because they steal your work from you.
But then, intellectual property is entirely justified. You own a song you have written, because it is your labor that created the song. In fact, since a lot more of the value of the song comes from your effort of writing than the value of the ore came from your effort of mining, intellectual property is actually the purer form of property. Physical property, since it's bound up with atoms and such that you did not create, is inherently less property-like than intellectual property.
IP Lunatic,
The fact that the same benefits arise from the government grant of both intellectual property rights and physical property rights doesn't mean that each are equally deserving.
Here's a bit from Jefferson:
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody...(letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813 as cited in Kock & Peden, 1972).
http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/winter2000/jefferson.html
Copyright laws as they exist are far to complicated and have often been created for the wrong reasons. However, that doesn't mean the concept of intellectual property protection should not exist.
As for Jefferson, he was talking about ideas - not the work produced by those ideas. You can start a restaurant that specializes in burgers, fries and a soft drink quickly. You just can't call the restaurant McDonald's and your big burger a Big Mac.
If I build bird houses in my garage and choose to give them away, that's my business. If I decide to sell to cover the cost of materials, that's my choice. If I try to make a living (or supplement my other income), it remains my choice.
How that is different from creating music has still not been explained by those complaining about copyright and anti-pirating laws. If I choose to give copies away, that's my choice. If I want to charge 10 cents for each song, that's my choice.
No one else should be able to dictate that I must give away the product of my work. If there is no market because my product is bad or really not popular, I'll need to rethink how I generate the income needed to survive.
The protection of intellectual property (the products, not the idea to do it) has become more prominent in the past generation because of the ease with which we can reproduce those products - whether they are songs, columns or books.
It's basic economies of scale. An mp3 is an unlimited good, therefore the price on this good will eventually drop to zero.
I'm not an economist, and I'm often lost on some of the posts and discussions on this blog, but this is simple. Give away the unlimited goods and sell the scarce goods (concerts, artwork, etc.)
The music industry is an aberration that lasted just long enough to fool people into believing they were institutionally necessary for the creation of culture.
The next thing on the horizon the libertarians in the audience can worry about is compulsory blanket licensing for media through your ISP. Copyright is a government granted monopoly, and like so many of them, the response to threatening technological innovation is to attempt to tighten the regulatory grip.
If I choose to give copies away, that's my choice. If I want to charge 10 cents for each song, that's my choice.
Sure. But if I decide to download it free from the internet instead of paying your ten cents, isn't that my choice? Remember your candle isn't darkened because I lit mine; you still have as many copies of your song to give away as you did before.
And, indeed, if I determine that your song is not worth ten cents, there's really no possibility I was ever going to pay you for it, so it's not like I've deprived you of a sale, either.
Nobody's saying that the record companies can't charge 10 cents, or even ten dollars, for an mp3. The question is - from what moral basis can they claim it's "stealing" when I get the same music, at a cheaper price, from somebody else. Isn't that just competition?
The real obscenity that has not been addressed here is that in the majority of cases, non-indie musicians do not own the copyright to their own works. Record companies used to offer promotion and marketing and advertising that the musicians could never aspire to; now, with the Internet, promotion and advertising is cheap and available to musicians wanting to get their music out there. Nevertheless (lacking big-stardom and the influence that comes with it) recording-contract music is work-for-hire and the musician makes diddly off the CD sales--why subsidize the RIAA and its witch hunts? IP laws should make sure the artist gets a more reasonable reward for his or her creativity, not management.
The dilemma for the emerging indie artist is different. The problem is not people stealing your stuff but people not KNOWING about it. The true fans will pay for the CDs and go to the concerts. From a true indie perspective, piracy is promotion and marketing, and pays for itself.
The spouse has been a truly independent musician in a niche genre for over a decade. We sell over the internet. It won't ever be anything but a night job (the fan base is truly not big enough) but it pays for itself. It is really easy to undersell the store prices of CDs because CDs are ludicrously cheap to manufacture, and a downloadable track costs little more to distribute than webhosting.
We've offered subscriptions to CD series and I think that's the wave of the future, honestly. $20 a month for all the tracks you can download vs. $20 for ONE CD? Many more people would be honest and pay for their music if it is easy and reasonably-priced to be honest. And a lot of us would rather see a larger percentage of our money going to the artist.
Intellectual property is an "ends justify the means" scheme. The "means" is a legal monopoly--an exclusive right to sell a work. The justification is that the monopoly profits create an incentive to creators.
But, monopolies cause a loss of consumer surplus and deadweight loss. The monopoly will sell a lower quantity of goods at a higher price than firms would in a purely competitive market. More is created; that's great. Less is used, that's bad.
In the case of music, for example, the lower consumption is not just less listening, it's also less reuse, less remixing, less standing on the shoulders of those before. So, our culture is poorer.
Copyrights aren't allowed to expire because it makes Disney a shit-ton of money. What's to be puzzled about?
That's sort of true for the extensions granted 30 years ago. But the latest wave of extensions were spurred by a desire to comply with international treaty obligations.
Chet: You propose that if you want something I've produced and don't believe you should pay for it, I have no say.
Some products are easy to reproduce at little or no costs (a song in mp3 format), while others are much more difficult (a house or a car). How does that change the concept that I produced something and should have a say on how it can be reproduced or distributed?
If there is no market for my product, I'm out of luck on the selling it option. However, taking someone else's product for nothing and arguing that is OK because I've got plenty more is hardly and argument against theft or copyright protection - it is an example of why it is necessary for those people who choose to see the product, whether it is a song or a house.
As for the the monopoly argument, how does that apply to an individual artist wanting control over the product they produce? If the means of distribution is through a music company or on their own website, those producer of the product decides that. If you are correct in applying that idea of a monopoly, then I should be able to start making Big Mac's and calling them that to break McDonald's monopoly on Big Mac's.
It's gonna be interesting when Kindle (and successors) reach ipod level market penetration and we have a large group of writers getting their material downloaded without compensation and nobody can justify it with "but they'll make more at their concerts." Will proffesional writers all live offa paypal tip jars?
"It's gonna be interesting when Kindle (and successors) reach ipod level market penetration and we have a large group of writers getting their material downloaded without compensation and nobody can justify it with "but they'll make more at their concerts." Will proffesional writers all live offa paypal tip jars?"
The writers do book tours, can sell autographed merchandise, do speaking engagements, offer plans to subsidize the writing of their next book. Just because the end of this business model doesn't immediately open your eyes to the next one doesn't mean it's the only good model.
How much are you paying Megan to read her blog?
I pay her nothing, you are absolutely correct!
That's kinda the problem ain't it? I dunno a lot about magazines in general or the Atlantic in poarticular, but I figure I'm just free-riding 'til they go the way of the newspaper business.
Chet: You propose that if you want something I've produced and don't believe you should pay for it, I have no say.
Yes, why should you be paid everytime I use something you produce. If a friend gives me a cd he is tired of, why should I have to pay you? Should I have to pay you if I put your work on my ipod? Borrow it from the library? Play the song on my guitar in the park?
Copyright was NEVER intended to be a property right, like owning say, a car. The idea is to give limited protection to IP producers to incent them to produce more, and not to pay an artist or copyright holder everytime that someone uses their work and the artist/copyright holder thinks they should get paid. The copyright system is out of whack and way too tilted towards the copyright holder, and making a copyright violation akin to stealing is just silly propoganda; it's like saying that everytime I go over the speed limit and don't pay a speeding ticket that I'm stealing from the government.
Justin: I didn't say every time you use something I produce. It is about the actual copying of that product for use. The product is not the CD or the mp3. The product is the song. If your friend gives you a CD they no longer listen to, then the friend no longer has access to the product - the music on the CD. Nothing was copied.
If the friend downloads a song and then e-mails you a copy, that is the violation that is the problem. It's not that I would expect payment every time you listen to the CD that you purchased because that was part of the agreement when you purchased it - you get to listen to it as much as you want. You just don't get to make copies of it for all your friends without reimbursing me.
If you play the song I wrote on your guitar for pleasure and gain no monetary gain from it, it's not an infrigement of copyright anyone will likely protest. But if you charge money or sell recordings, why should the creator of the song not get compensated in some way? It doesn't have to be a royalty system for compensation.
Copyright protection isn't silly. It gets a little out of control when payment agreements include royalties for the people who did the original work - such as music, television or movies. They are the ones who have a problem with reuse without payment.
However, that is part of the problem of the production company just paying the performer up front as a way of hedging their best on something they are not sure will produce profits.
I don't know whether copyright was ever intended to protect music, writing, etc., in the same way it did a car, but it was also a product of the times. When copyright was introduced it was a lot more complicated to copy music than it is today. Even 25 years ago, recording a vinyl record or the radio onto a cassette tape was more complicated and time consuming than copying an mp3 on the computer. Times changes, and the laws need to reflect those changes. But it shouldn't take away the ability of an artist to decide how her product is available to the public.
If I do the work and have ownership of it, unless I chose to do otherwise - which includes the decision to work for someone else or an organization in the first place, and then they own the product of my work. I may only write one song, whether I'm paid to or not. But I also might only build one house. The key question in the argument is what's the difference when it comes to protecting the rights of the person doing the work to make either of those products?
Doug,
Your argument is very flawed because you're talking about owning a song. It's an intangible, unlimited good. Now if you write a song, and I perform it and make money from that, then sure, you should see some money for it, whether it's agreed to upfront or on a royalty basis. But if someone just gives a copy of a song to a friend it's called promoting a band. We used to do it all the time before mp3s with mix-tapes.
"If the friend downloads a song and then e-mails you a copy, that is the violation that is the problem." What the problem is in this scenario is that the artist now has two potential fans instead of one, not that something was stolen.
It's not the same as stealing a painting. A painting is a tangible, one-of-a-kind (hopefully) good, an mp3 is not.
You propose that if you want something I've produced and don't believe you should pay for it, I have no say.
You produced it? If I'm the one who made a copy off some Russian website, I'm the one who did the work; I produced it - "it" being the specific mp3 file that I now have. You produced one mp3 file, and thanks much, but that was like a thousand copies ago.
How does that change the concept that I produced something and should have a say on how it can be reproduced or distributed?
It certainly changes the concept of "value", and what it means to "take", when my copying of the song from someone completely unconnected with you doesn't deprive you of anything in any way. You produced one mp3 file, of which an infinite number of perfect copies can be made. Thanks for doing that, but you're charging too much, so I'm going to go get it from Mikhail for free.
What you're asking for is for the governments of the world to create an artificial scarcity of mp3 files, so that you have a monopoly on handing them out. Which is good for you but not so good for me. Why does the fact that you made an entertaining song mean you get to redefine "stealing" for all the rest of us?
If you are correct in applying that idea of a monopoly, then I should be able to start making Big Mac's and calling them that to break McDonald's monopoly on Big Mac's.
Well, anybody can make a hotdog, now. Without having to pay royalties to Tom Dorgan. And thanks to there no longer being a copyrighted monopoly on the distributions of hot frankfurters inside of buns, innovative venders created the Chicago dog, the chili cheese dog, and the corn dog, among others.
And in a just world, where copyrights expire in reasonable time, you can offer the world your idea of the Big Mac. It is stifling that you can't present your take on that hamburger.
But if you charge money or sell recordings, why should the creator of the song not get compensated in some way?
Why should they be compensated in any way? Because they'd like to be?
I'd like you to be paying me for the copies of my words that now exist in your memory. You've made a copy that I didn't authorize. Do you want to PayPal me the $100 I usually charge, or would you like an address to send a check?
This is a supply and demand argument.
Like it or not, in today's world, the supply of a song, once released to the public in any way, becomes virtually unlimited. Things that are unlimited in supply have a value approaching zero. No one who lives near the beach will be likely to buy sand no matter the cost.
In the past, the recording was two things - a product and a marketing tool. It could be sold on the one hand and used as advertising on the other. Incidentally - this was very handy for the record companies who first charged musicians for the privilege of recording that music and then reaped most of the benefits by using that recording to advertise them on the radio - creating demand for the record whose sales went to pay for the creation of the thing in the first place.
This is no longer the case and the record companies need to adjust their thinking. Today, the recording is no longer the product - it's now *just* a marketing tool. It's an advertisement and just like advertising in a paper or on teevee, it's an expense, not a profit generator. If you want to advertise somewhere you typically pay for the privilege you don't demand that the receiver of the advertisement pay you.
The products are now the live performances and/or non-reproducable non-digital items like collector cds, albums, t-shirts, artwork...etc.
Give away the music for advertising and hope you create demand for the products. If you do, you'll make money. Otherwise, you'll fail.
When copyright was introduced it was a lot more complicated to copy music than it is today.
Dude, you have no idea how slow internet connections were in 1790.
Broadly, however, this discussion is about rivalrous vs. nonrivalrous goods. So the question I have is, what (if any) protection do nonrivalrous goods deserve? Are the pro-downloading folks here OK with, say, 20-year copyright, but harsh penalties for infringements? Or should there essentially be no such thing as copyright at all? And do you think differently about music as opposed to say, novels, movies, or scientific textbooks?
Oh, and how to people feel about patents?
Rob, I'm older, but not that old. I have heard computers were also hard to find and internet providers were a pain to deal with (some things don't change).
I don't believe copyright should be for an unlimited period of time, but the work that goes into producing a song or a novel deserves the same kind of protection as the work that goes into a car or a house.
As for patents, I'm a little mixed. The specific design for new widget is a product, but how long should one person or organization hold those rights? It's a little like the research behind drugs. The debate is about how long that research is protected from copying, not that it isn't deserving of protection. It really is about people having control over their own work - and how it is used or distributed.
The music industry, in addition to much of the rest of the arts and entertainment industry, has been slow to adapt to the internet and downloading. They continued to price their products beyond the willingness of many consumers to pay - and a black market developed while they twiddled their thumbs. It also doesn't mean everyone believes the price should be zero. The artists themselves have the right to be compensated for their work, if they choose it.
There is some things I do for free - like volunteering my time for some organizations - but my current job would have a hard time finding someone to do it for nothing. If I choose to give away my work, that's my choice to make. I don't get to take your car because I want it. And you do get to read my thoughts on this blog for free - that is one the conditions of posting here. If you want to charge for your musings, don't post them on a free-access blog. It's your choice.
To Rob Lyman,
Since you asked...
On copyrights, I haven't had much first hand experience except as a consumer. I think 10-20 years is probably reasonable, but fair use exceptions have to be part of the equation. Also, infringement has to be sent back into the "tort" arena and the DCMA criminal stuff needs to go. If works creators made crappy rights-management software that I can crack, that's tough luck for them except for the civil penalties resulting from my actual infringement.
On patents, I've had lots of first hand experience as an engineering exec at a large networking company. I'd say about 1-2% of patents should be granted while the rest are crap. The problem is devising a system to capture the correct 1-2%. One easy step is to eliminate all software and method patents. That change was a big disaster for everyone save patent attorneys.
For a radical overhaul, I wonder about changing the system so inventors get an ongoing tax credit against profits from their invention. I'd abolish monopoly rights and instead tie the value of a patent-tax-credit to the r&d expense that went into the invention.
I understand this is total pie-in-the-sky due to many factors including logistics, entrenched interest groups, and international treaty agreements, but as long as we're dreaming...
The fact that the same benefits arise from the government grant of both intellectual property rights and physical property rights doesn't mean that each are equally deserving.
That one type of goods is rivalrous and the other is not does not, itself, establish one as deserving of being treated as property and the other as not. Certainly, I cannot take physical property from you without denying you use of the atoms. But just as surely, you cannot possess atoms as property without denying use of them to me. The fact that control of atoms has to be exclusive does not explain why you should have any particular set of them instead of me, or the backing of force to keep me from taking them from you.
Here's my challenge, clarified:
1) Explain why rivalrous goods should be protected as property.
2) Explain why that justification does not apply, mutatis mutandis, to non-rivalrous goods.
You have to do #1 first; you have to have the justification for the existence of property before you can explain why it doesn't apply.
1) Explain why rivalrous goods should be protected as property.
Because by definition they're scarce and require the creation of an allocation scheme to prevent chaos. Property rights provide that allocation scheme.
2) Explain why that justification does not apply, mutatis mutandis, to non-rivalrous goods.
Since non-rivalrous goods aren't scarce, there's no need for an allocation mechanism. Any government intervention in the market for non-rivalous goods is a subsidy. That's fine as long as society gets something in exchange for the subsidy that's greater than what they pay.