AUTHOR’S NOTE: TechCrunch has reported that the Iron Maiden story that this article was centered around was misreported, if not an outright fabrication. We have corrected the factual inaccuracies and regret the error.
For years, advocates of strict enforcement of intellectual property law on the Internet and elsewhere have said that the single largest detriment to the music and film industry is piracy: Namely, the unauthorized downloading of music, movies and other pieces of entertainment, mostly for free. According to the RIAA and MPAA, millions of dollars in revenue per year is lost to piracy.
Of course, piracy is but one aspect of the growing decentralization of entertainment. Sites like Spotify and Bandcamp have further weakened the RIAA’s hold on music production and a multitude of video aggregators out there allow independent filmmakers to post their work and gain large audiences.
As much as it’s highly likely that the RIAA is exaggerating heavily in order to curry favor with the public on the issue of piracy, there are artists and bands whose ability to profit off their art has been harmed by the practice.
In a previous version of this story, I mentioned that Andy Patrizio, journalist at Citeworld, erroneously reported, “In the case of Iron Maiden, still a top-drawing band in the U.S. and Europe after thirty years, it noted a surge in traffic in South America. Also, it saw that Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Columbia, and Chile were among the top 10 countries with the most Iron Maiden Twitter followers. There was also a huge amount of BitTorrent traffic in South America, particularly in Brazil.
“Rather than send in the lawyers, Maiden sent itself in. […] The result was massive sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone.”
While the Iron Maiden story turned out to be unsubstantiated, instances of this kind of activity still exist. Bloomberg Businessweek reported back in October that alternative artist Moby not only released his new album, Innocents, via BitTorrent — he released the masters to each individual instrument track, allowing fans to remix and recreate his music in unique ways. He joined music and culture magazine Vice, metal/hip-hop group Linkin Park and hip-hop band Death Grips on the roster for a new initiative by BitTorrent to bring artists closer to their fans (and reshape their image in the process), called “BitTorrent Bundles.” Writers Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow have embraced file sharing as means to obtain their work and broaden their reach.
So, what does this mean in the context of the long-ongoing Intellectual Property War?
In short, it signifies that piracy — far from an aberrant act practiced by a few brazen rulebreakers looking to shortchange honest artists (and the people who own them) — is in fact a much-needed market correction in an environment that has long favored oligopolies over independence and decentralization. What’s known as piracy is only a few steps removed from the DIY activities of punk bands and indie artists who eschew major record labels and professional distribution models in favor of touring, merch sales, vinyl, tape and CD sharing, and posting their work on the Internet for their friends to see.
Hopefully we’ll see more of this as the war rages on.
Citations to this article:
- Trevor Hultner, Music piracy as market correction, Thomaston, Georgia Times, 12/31/14
- Trevor Hultner, Music piracy as market correction, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age, 12/29/13
- Trevor Hultner, Music piracy as market correction, The Suncoast News [Florida], 01/03/14
- Trevor Hultner, Protecting intellectual property, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation, 12/30/13
- Trevor Hultner, Music piracy as market correction, Newberry, South Carolina Observer, 12/29/13
- Trevor Hultner, Music piracy as market correction, Union, South Carolina Daily Times, 12/29/13
Ye know what? This reminds me of Gutenberg, who destroyed the Catholic Church's monopoly in using Bible to scare the masses into giving them money.
Yes!
Music and movies is JUST the begining. Have a 3D printer? No? Go get one for 3000 USD buy it then go online and download the specs for every plastic/ceramic product from tooth brushes to dinner plates to a host of things you use every day. The trick is finding the feed stock for the machine in a form the 3D printer can use.
Have a bit more money and you can make virtually anything with a 3D printer. The prices for these machines are are dropping slower then computers in their heyday but probably fast enough so the children of our teenagers will look at us funny if we express a desire to go and buy something relatively simple at a store.
Those kids of the near future will probably just say… "Why not just download the specs and read the instructions and feed the plastics, cloth, metals, fibers, sinew or any other powdered feed stock into these machines and have all the clothing, belts, tooth brushes, water bottles, key chains, machine tools, fire arms (yes it has been done with expensive 3D printers), solar panels, solid metal objects like street lamps, and and any other small to medium sized item imaginable.
The whole distribution of everyday goods will be going through what the music industry is going through now. Small farmers, Anarchists, everyday lefties of all stripes, repairmen, libertarians, hobbyists and people in the third world are about to see their wettest dream come to life. Professionals, managers, factory floor techs, the automobile industry, all types of planners, government officials, and every form of nosy busy body will soon see their worst pants shating nightmare take form in the real world.
When 75% of the people meet a change with orgasmic joy and the other 25% of the people stand to loose their easy meal ticket via the same change we can safely predict turbulence ahead.
My recent post Confessions of A budding Sci Fi novelist
Intellectual Monopoly helped Monsanto (& the GMO inductry) to abuse farmers in the most abhorrent ways:
Farmers cannot save seeds they had legitimately bought from Monsanto (meaning that Monsanto had given up ownership of those seeds). If a farmer plants one GMO seed "owned" by Monsanto, Monsanto claims all seeds produced by the plant which had grown from that one seed. It never matters that Monsanto had sold the seed & no longer owned it; it never matters that the seed could only have grown into a plant & produce similar seeds thanks to farmers' mixing their labors with the soil furnished by nature (thus not owned by Monsanto), with fertilizers, invented by Monsanto but already bought by farmers & thus no longer owned by Monsanto; it never matters that nature & the farmers' labor, not Monsanto, had produced identical copies of the seed whose ownership Monsanto had renounced when selling it.
On the contrary: if Monsanto's pollen had been carried by winds & bugs, then had landed on organic plants' flowers, and had produced hybrid organic-GMO seeds which the farmers hadn't waited for, Monsanto used the state to sue farmers whose harvests had been ruined by Monsanto's malpractice before those farmers could even use tort laws to sue Monsanto for ruining their organic crops.