Monday 10 February 2003

Pic of the day: CD rack. All mine, legally bought. And there's a couple hundred more scattered about home and work, I guess. Uhm, that's a couple hundred CDs, not racks. Though I guess some have that too. And some have the MP3s. Or both.

Who's the pirate?

I wrote two days ago about the growing practice of sharing files over the Internet. These peer-to-peer networks work by making files on your hard disk available directly, rather than having to upload them to a central location.

I am considering this for my journal archive, actually. As of yet, it seems to work better to upload it to a server. But often I will find spelling errors in a year-ago document and fix it on my hard disk, yet not upload the new version unless it is something dramatic. The last year or more also exists on the Norwegian server that hosts my recent journals, and this archive is not updated at all, not even with the monthly index pages. It would have been so much easier to have it all on my hard disk (and on backup, obviously) and just make it available for those curious enough to look. I have no idea how many that would be – there are no statistics gathered from my archives. None. But it would hardly overheat my machine, I think.

This kind of sharing is not controversial at all. It may not be the most practical, at least until P2P becomes standardized. And this may be a long time in the coming, as long as it is mostly used for illegal activities. It is kind of hard to standardize crime, as it makes it so much easier to discover.

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Of course, not all of this illegal activity is dramatic. Child porn and such is shared in more circumspect ways, where people get to know and trust each other first. This may happen by swapping, where both sides have to contribute incriminating evidence at the same time. Or so I understand ... I'm hardly the type of guy who would be invited into such networks.

I do however participate in downloading and uploading fansubbed anime, Japanese cartoons that are not available abroad except that amateurs have translated them into English so non-Japanese fans also can enjoy them. This community holds itself to high ethical standards. When a series is licensed for sale abroad, it is immediately removed from the network. On their side, the Japanese copyright holders have been quite lenient. If anything, they seem to use the fansubs as a test, so that only the most popular series are licensed. This could be a coincidence, of course ... these series were probably most popular in Japan too.

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In marked contrast to this attitude is the war over music piracy. The major record companies take a very dim view of sharing their music over the Net. This is also a somewhat different matter, since music can usually be enjoyed on its own regardless of language. And much of the shared material is of western origin anyway.

The music recording industry has over the last couple years complained over large economic losses which they attribute to non-sales distribution of music. This seems uncertain: It could just as easily be that there is less high-quality, innovative music available recently. Or even that people buy less luxury goods when the economy takes a nosedive. Until recently, studies also showed that those who downloaded the most music, also were those who bought the most. This correlation has recently started to change. With the aggressive litigation from major labels in the recording industry, hostility is also building the other way. More and more people say: "Fornicate the big labels! They're nothing more than greedy bastards running with working people's money and raping teen girls who think they can sing."

This is of course somewhat distorted. Many honest people work for the recording companies, they just don't become bosses and managers. And when you stop buying CD's, the first to be hurt are the office workers and technicians. The bosses will hold on to their benefits until the bitter end; this is the nature of that caste.

Yet the fact remains that the practices of the recording industry are not too glorious themselves. Common artists live in a state of serfdom, owing more money to the company than they can hope to pay back during their career. Only the very successful have the power in their own hand and can walk out unless they get their will. Artists can tell horror stories about the way they have been treated, and woolly expenses being tabbed on their accounts to sink them into lifelong debt. I'm not sure that all suicides in this line of work come from too much drugs, although it certainly helps. But the idea of your social security going to the people who exploited your soul is probably not good for sanity either.

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The ethical state of our current copyright laws is also a sore point. You would expect copyright to be a tool to encourage creativity, by letting creators reap the fruit of their creative labor. But in the music business, copyrights almost automatically fall to the corporations rather than the creators; and it stays there for 70 years after you're dead. How do these 70 years in any way encourage creativity?

None of this should surprise anyone. Despite hinting that they do, the recording companies do NOT work for the benefit of the creators and the artists. The recording companies exist for the benefit of their owners, of course. Just like the grocery shop has no interest of maximizing the profit of the farmer, but only its own profit, so the recording companies have no interest in the welfare of the creators and artists as long as they stay alive and supply cheap goods to sell for a profit. How could it be otherwise? This is how capitalism works. If you don't like it, there's still North Korea where you can seek asylum. Expect a strip search.

Since a small number of major labels share most of the CD market, they can be expected to act as an oligopoly. Less familiar than the monopoly, the oligopoly has much of the same effects. The freedom to set prices is not absolute, but competition tends to be moderate, and the major concern is: How much greed will the suppliers and customers accept before they give up trading at all? The answer used to be "quite a bit".

A small number of well organized companies are the only link between two large groups of poorly organized people, the suppliers and the customers. Now one of these categories, the customers, has got access to a new technology that gives them the upper hand. As you can expect from human nature, by and large they are as ruthless and as careless as the group that was in power before them. The welfare of the creators and artists is no more on their mind, though at least they don't have the opportunity to physically rape wannabe artists. But a true balance cannot be created until the supplier side gets organized in a powerful way.

I don't know how that will happen. But some artists already have started to trade directly with the listeners. Some provide all or some of their art for download, while selling CDs on the side. Some people are willing to pay for conscience, if it is cheap. And compared to the conditions offered by the major labels, it could be an attractive alternative. MP3.com* has for years distributed music legally this way, financed through advertising. If the traditional recording industry collapses, such models may be the only way for mainstream artists to reach their market. But so far, the technology is mainly giving power to the consumers. The recording industry is fighting this through police and lawyers. But they may be too late. Their greed may already have sunk their ship.

Now to keep this from happening again, as the consumers disregard the needs of composers and artists to the point where these give up, and we're left with only hobby music. Not that this necessarily is the worst thing that could happen, but I for one like the work of several full time creators and artists. Would there be a Leonard Cohen, a Chris de Burgh or an Enya if file sharing existed a generation ago? Perhaps we do need some central forum to bring the exceptional talents forward, even if at a cost to some others. Think twice before you close that door...

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(*EDIT: Some time after my writing this, MP3.com was bought up by an enemy which instantly closed it down, and later put up a different but still music-related site at the same address. None of the praise I have given to MP3.com through the years applies to the current address.)