The Digital Copying Glass is Half Full
Posted by Kevin Carson on Feb 23, 2010 in Commentary • 5 commentsIt’s common, in jeremiads against filesharing and free culture “communism,” to earn some populist cred by sympathizing with the little guy. Sure, they say, big artists with name recognition can make money from “Freemium” (i.e., using free content to promote the sale of paid auxilliary goods). But the little guy can’t do that.
I’m more than a little skeptical of such claims. I’m more inclined to credit Cory Doctorow, who says that for the little guy, obscurity is a lot bigger danger than “piracy.” I suspect a lot of them are pretty unimaginative when it comes to thinking of alternative ways to monetize their products.
All they’re thinking of is the stuff the record companies can’t charge money for to pay them. They’re not thinking of the new possibilities opened up by all the things they can now do for themselves, at virtually zero cost, that formerly only a highly capitalized record company could do for them. Their entire view of the world is still shaped by a time when producing and selling records required capital assets costing many millions of dollars, and the way to make money from music was to convince some such giant company that your work was worth producing and marketing.
What’s more, even assuming that filesharing really does cut into the total revenues of the little guy who’s trying to make a full-time career out of music, that’s looking at only one side of the picture. It neglects what Bastiat called “the unseen.”
Let’s move from music to writing and consider my case. I don’t waste time pissing and moaning about the sharing of pdf files of my books at torrent sites, or how much money it’s costing me. To me, the proper basis for comparison is the money I still can make that I never could have made at all in the “good old days.” In the good old days, I’d have painstakingly put together a manuscript of hundreds of pages, and then put it away to gather cobwebs when I couldn’t persuade the gatekeepers at a conventional publisher that it was worth marketing. Never mind whether online file-sharing’s costing me money (I don’t think it is–I believe the ebooks are more like free advertising). More importantly, if it weren’t for digital publishing technologies and free publishing venues on the Internet, I would probably have lived and died doing menial labor with nobody anywhere ever hearing of my ideas. Thanks to digital culture, I’m able to make my work directly available to anyone in the world who has an Internet connection. If only a tiny fraction of the people who can read it for free decide to buy it, giving me a few thousand dollars a year in royalties, I’m richer by exactly that amount than I would have been in the “good old days” when my manuscripts would have yellowed in an attic.
For every small full-time musician who has a harder time scraping by, and may have to supplement his performing revenues with a day job, I suspect there are ten people like me who would have spent their entire lives as (if you’ll pardon the expression) mute inglorious Miltons, without ever making a goddamned cent from their music or writing, but who can now be heard. And for every blockbuster writer or musician, who has a few million shaved off his multimillion dollar revenues as a result of online “piracy,” I suspect there are probably a hundred people like me.
I’m sure there are plenty of people like Jaron Lanier and Mark Helprin who wouldn’t consider it any great loss had my work been stillborn in a world without the Internet. I’m just another one of those “hive mind” people who write like Popeye talks, destroying authorial voice, and yada yada yada. Well, fuck ‘em.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
What those arguments also miss is that the "little guy" doesn't make money under an IP system either in most cases until…well…he's something more than a "little guy." Trent Reznor made more while under contract than the local band down the street despite the copyrights involved. And likewise, Trent Reznor today makes more than Trent Reznor as a young artist. That's what being the "little guy" means: you're likely to make less until you are the "big guy." What's needed from IP-proponents is an argument for why we should suspect that upward mobility is impossible without copyright. I don't think they have such an argument. To complain that the little guy can't make a living off of "freemium" is to smuggle in the notion that unknown artists today can make money simply by virtue of copyright law without producing something that people value, which in turn makes them more popular so that they can make more money etc. etc.
It seems to me that capitalism is "big guy" system, so all of the discussion of the role of IP may be somewhat separate from the questions about how creative people make a living. When I started making all my work available online for free, it was largely in imitation of this old anarchist text:
"I shall issue this book without copyright. In so doing I claim no superior virtue over those authors who avail themselves of that advantage. If the people permit of special privileges by law, no blame can attach to those who accept them. The beneficiary of the copyright law is exactly like the beneficiary of any other legal privilege. He is no more entitled to it than the patentee is to his patent, or the landlord is to the land. They are privileges which exist by virtue of the statute, and will expire with the statute. But copyright cannot possibly help me. I am writing this book just as other men write books, mainly for whatever distinction or honor it may bring me; and secondly, to obtain a present subsistence. For the first, if every publisher in America would reprint it, it would increase that honor, to secure which I need no copyright; and for the second, it is certain that none will reprint it unless it shall prove sufficiently popular to insure a large demand, in which case I shall obtain enough from the earlier editions to fairly compensate me for the labor of writing it, and provide for present needs." — William Henry Van Ornum, from the preface to Why Government at All? (Charles H. Kerr, 1892)
I don't know that we have ever stated the case for copyright-free distribution any better than this. But we're still left with the issue of "present subsistence," and I wonder if an anarchist — and particularly a mutualist — approach to the question of intellectual property might be able to separate whatever right of property there may be in intellectual labor from the obvious abuses of IP law. Essential agreement with Proudhon's judgment that "property is theft" has not prevented us, or even him, from working towards perfecting (chattel and real) property protection, making it just and "social." I'm not sure what, other than some notions about the nature of "property" that may well be extrinsic to the traditions of mutualism and individualist anarchism, prevents us from attempting a similar "perfection" in the realm of IP.
Really, just look at the artists who line up to defend the IP status quo. Not a lot of independent artists, but yeah, Metallica.
Shawn, (1) do you think the alternate revenue models Kevin has mentioned are insufficient secure a creator’s “present subsistence” and (2) to what extent do you think a creator could secure her “present subsistence” contractually, rather than by means of a property claim?
This debate has been around a lot longer than digital copying technology, or even the big fight over whether people should be allowed to record TV shows on their home VCRs.
I like Samuel Clemens' take on the matter: "Write without pay until somebody offers to pay."
When what you produce is of value to someone else, they'll willingly pay you for it. That's the whole idea behind capitalism, anyway: the voluntary exchange of value for value.
In the mean time, get your work seen and heard by as many people as possible, because that's how you find the ones who will value it enough to pay you to make more. There's a word for that in English … it's called "marketing".
Not everybody who sees or hears or otherwise benefits from a creative person's work has to pay for it, in order for the creator to earn a living. The "shareware" model for computer programs demonstrates this: "Download this for free, and if you find it useful, please send me a little something so that I can afford to continue making things like this." A sufficient number of people who find these shareware programs useful, make donations to the authors for continued development.
A hybrid model also works well, where people can download and use the programs for free, but with partially limited functionality or an expiration date, or no expectation of tech support. If they want to continue to use the software, or have access to all of the functionality, or technical support from the author, they pay to register.
If these models weren't profitable, they wouldn't have endured across several decades in one of the most fiercely competitive and dynamic creative fields.
Another system that has been proposed is called the "Street Performer Protocol", where a creative person releases part of a work (one song of an album, say, or one chapter of a book, or a handful of photographs or illustrations from a larger body of work) for free, circulates it widely, and then releases the rest of the work contingent upon a specific sum of money, say $1,000-, being deposited into an escrow-like account. It doesn't matter if 1 person contributes a thousand dollars, or a thousand people contribute a dollar each, when the asked-for sum is reached, the remainder of the work is released.
There will always be freeloaders. Some percentage of the population will always consist of moochers and looters. When governments step in and start creating protected classes, the number of moochers and looters will always increase. When the percentage of moochers and looters grows too large, the productive people will stop producing, because there's no longer anything in it for them, and the entire system will collapse. That's why the Soviet Union fell, and it's why all collectivist systems will, and must fail.
I'm a photographer. I make my living by providing a good and a service to people who are willing to pay me for it. Many people who have never paid me anything enjoy viewing my work, both in person (I proudly display my photographs in a number of locations around where I live, and my clients invite their friends over to see the photographs they proudly display in their homes) and online. That's how I find my best new clients – they saw photographs I made for someone else, and they want me to make something like that for them. Everybody wins. I get paid a fair price for my work, my clients get photographs that they value to own and display in their homes and hand down to their children, and everybody else gets some free eye candy.
Personally, I don't really mind if people share my work around. All I ask is that if you share it, please do me the courtesy of providing a link back to my web site or email or phone number, so the people you're sharing it with know where it came from, and thus have an opportunity to commission new work from me.