To: Nettime
Subject: Re:
Eric Miller (Mon 07/24/00 at 12:26 PM -0700):
Indirectly, the celebration over the liberation of artistic intellectual property functions to legitimize theft. Because what Napster does is theft. You are taking an artist’s commodity/product and not compensating them for it. And the argument that Napster represents an alternative distribution channel is weak at best. First, you don’t earn money from it. Second, you have to spend money to promote your work so that it doesn’t get lost in the tens of thousands of other works out there. Third, everyone is refusing to accept any format/plan that involves payment. So it’s a lose/lose/lose prospect for the artist in the long run. Even if you get artistic exposure or publicity from the Web, you still don’t have any viable way to support yourself.
what napster does isn’t theft: to lift a line from the National Rifle Association, napster doesn’t ‘steal’ music — people do.
but do they? most of the rhetoric surrounding MP3s assumes that people are downloading songs they never paid for. that’s certainly true for some segment of napster traffic, but it’s not universally true at all, and if arguments about napster etc are going to valid, they really ought to account for those messy exceptions — otherwise we’re just arguing theology. here’s an exception: i’ve been reconstructing parts of my record collection in MP3 format. i own that music, and have a small wall of end-user licenses to it in the form of vinyl disks to prove it. (there are lots of correlaries to this: for example, if i were to rip MP3s from a scratched-up record, i could sell those MP3s if, with them, i transferred physical possession of the originating vinyl and retained no copy for myself.)
the music industry response to this would likely be that there’s a substantial difference between analog vinyl recordings and digital CD recordings, in that the latter required some amount — in some cases, a substantial amount — of remastering: ergo, the MP3s i have are ‘stolen.’
fine. now, is that form of “theft’ the same as a case in which someone has downloaded MP3s of something s/he doesn’t own in vinyl form? again, the music industry would probably answer: yes. but the very underpinning of their claims against napster — basically, that people are ‘consuming’ without ‘paying’ — falls apart on this point. in one case, we have a consumer who did pay, in the other a consumer who didn’t pay, yet (if my guesses as to what they would argue are correct) both are ‘theft.’ what we’re watching is a process in which the vague assumptions of a prior world — for example, what ‘rights’ one obtained in purchasing a vinyl record — are being ‘unbundled’ over time and treated as discrete options to be bought and sold at a higher level.
when it came to turning singles into albums and vice versa, or turning analog into digital, the music industry was pleased to be silent on these questions: everything was the same, and, oh, look, your contract doesn’t say anything about you having rights to the digital versions of this music, so the revenues devolve to us. ah, but when it comes to MP3s, well, that’s different — that’s theft. and what of the workers in vinyl record plants who were put out work when the industry made the switch to CDs? did the industry stand on the kind of ‘principle’ that posh notions like ‘intellectual property’ would seem to suggest?
‘intellectual property’ is really little more than the bourgeoisie’s attempt to distinguish itself from the working classes by claiming that there’s a qualitative difference between its own labors and that of its economic lessers. but that’s not where things are headed, historically speaking — quite the opposite.
the issue isn’t at all what the music industry is making it out to be. they want exclusive control over the power to transform ONE thing into MANY things — to effect the pseudo-magical transformation in which a singular recording becomes a plurality of objects. but digital technologies, to recite the old saw, put the power to do that into the hands of the many, and the many are exercising their ability to do it. but with one key difference: now it’s a question of plurality compounding itself in an exponential increase. economies of scale are coming home to roost.
and what you say about everyone refusing to deal with an format or plan that involves payment. that’s just not true: lots of people are trying, and then there’s the cypherpunkish notion of reputation markets, which, in any case, were the logic that governed mass manufacture economies.
cheers, t