Detroit News Anchor Realizes How Twitter Has Changed How He Engages With Viewers

from the silverfish-hand-catch! dept

One of the key points we tried to hammer home at our Techdirt Saves* Journalism event in June was the importance of realizing that news organizations are really in the business of building community. So many in the news business focus on the belief that they're in the "news" business, but that's never really been the case. The news has always been the piece that brings together a community (and the business of a news organization has usually been to then sell that community's attention to advertisers). The biggest problem that news organizations face these days isn't scary "news aggregators," but that there are now many, many, many other communities that people can join, and most of them treat their members a lot better. Many traditional news organizations, in contrast, seem to have a rather condescending view on "community." They lock up comments, they complain about readers, and they focus on just delivering the news, not engaging with their community or enabling their community to do anything useful.

Thankfully, that's not true of all news organizations (or individuals within news organizations). More and more are recognizing this important point, even if they do so in unexpected ways. krharrison points us to a great block post from Stephen Clark, a newscaster for a local Detroit TV station, about his realization of how Twitter is changing the way he relates to the community of folks who watch the news:

As I've reported in this blog before I have had a very long one-sided relationship with the people who watch my newscasts. I talk, they listen. If they had something to say to me they yelled it at the TV screen like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Twitter changed all that. I can now hear you and I can now answer you...

I can't speak for the dozens of people who check in regularly every night... sometimes at 6 or 7:00.. but mostly 11:00. I don't know exactly what they get out of it except a kind of cool experience of actually conversing in real time with the guy on TV. But I can tell you what I get out of it. For the first time in years I actually feel like I'm talking to someone rather than at them. Frankly it's energizing!

Of course, the next step is to go beyond just talking "to" them and to talking "with" them. But that will come. In fact, getting to that point, Clark explains an amusing way that the community tried to connect with him, picking up on the recent Old Spice commercial meme of "Silverfish Hand Catch!", where some of his viewers started saying that if 100 people retweeted the request, Clark would close the broadcast by saying the line on TV. He didn't get the 100 retweets, and admits that he wouldn't have said it anyways (noting he probably would have lost his job), but he did do an "air" silverfish hand catch surreptitiously, to let folks know he was paying attention.

But, much more interesting was the realization he had while all of this was happening:

It was all a bit silly sure, but I realized something else was going on. The audience of our 11:00 newscast wasn't just talking to me... they were talking to each other! I felt like Alexander Graham Bell when he made his first call to Watson. The backchannel worked!

I know that many folks around here still like to mock and dismiss communications tools like Twitter, but many people are realizing what powerful tools they are for conversations and for building communities where none really existed before. And, in businesses where community and relationships are everything, that's quite powerful for those who figure it out.

Filed Under: communication, community, culture, journalism, news, stephen clark
Companies: twitter

EFF, Public Knowledge And Creative Commons All Respond (Politely) To ASCAP's Misguided Attack

from the I-would-have-been-more-snarky dept

Following last week's bizarre decision by ASCAP to attack Creative Commons, Public Knowledge and EFF as part of its fundraising campaign, all three organizations have now responded, and done so with a bit of wonderment at why they were painted in such a misleading light.

• Creative Commons responded in an interview with Zeropaid, noting how misguided and flat-out wrong it was for ASCAP to suggest that Creative Commons somehow undermines artists' rights, when it's always done exactly the opposite:

  "It's very sad that ASCAP is falsely claiming that Creative Commons works to undermine copyright" Steuer told ZeroPaid. He explained, "Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses -- plain and simple, without copyright, these tools don't even work. CC licenses are legal tools that creators can use to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights. Artists and record labels that want to make their music available to the public for certain uses, like noncommercial sharing or remixing, should consider using CC licenses. Artists and labels that want to reserve all of their copyright rights should absolutely not use CC licenses."
  
  It does make sense because Creative Commons is voluntary. The creator can choose whether or not to use Creative Commons or not.
  
  "Many tens of thousands of musicians, including acts like Nine Inch Nails, the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Radiohead, and Snoop Dogg, have used Creative Commons licenses to share with the public. These musicians aren't looking to stop making money from their music. In fact," Steuer added, "many of the artists who use CC licenses are also members of collecting societies, including ASCAP. Incidentally, that's how we first heard about this email campaign -- many musicians that support Creative Commons received the email and forwarded it to us. Some of them even included a donation to Creative Commons."




• The EFF responded in an interview with CreateDigitalMusic.com, where it noted, amusingly, that the EFF's long-standing proposal on how to "fix" copyright law, actually is to set up an ASCAP-like system for digital music (this is something that I've long disagree with EFF about, by the way). So it seems pretty silly to claim that EFF is somehow trying to undermine ASCAP. It just takes issue when ASCAP takes a ridiculous stance like claiming that ringtones require a separate "public performance" license -- a position that is clearly at odds with the law.

  "They imply in that letter that the EFF don't want artists to get paid for their work," says Rebecca Jeschke, EFF spokesperson. "For years, we've had a proposal for Voluntary Collective Licensing," she says, a scheme by which users of file sharing services could contribute to funds for artists. She says the EFF has been working on the issue since 2003. "We're interested in making sure that there's a balance, that copyright respects the rights of the creators but also innovators and speakers, and that [the doctrine of] fair use rights [a provision of US Copyright Law] are respected."




• Finally, Public Knowledge responded on its own website, in a response that is similar to the EFF's, pointing out that it clearly supports getting artists' paid, has no interest in undermining such rights, and has advocated models similar to ASCAP's:

  Of course, anybody who has spent more than 5 minutes on our website or talking to our staff knows that these things are not true - Public Knowledge advocates for balanced copyright and an open Internet that empowers creators and the public.  What we oppose are overreaching policies proposed by large corporate copyright holders that punish lawful users of technology and copyrighted works.  We have taken artist-centric positions on a number of critical copyright issues which have put us at odds with some of our copyright reform colleagues.  For example, PK has supported a level-playing field in the payment of performance royalties and called for (pdf) copyright holders to sue large scale peer-to-peer infringers directly, as opposed to holding innovators liable for the infringement of others.  We have also advocated for changes to the law that would make it easier for online music services to license content from music publishers, leading to greater legal use of music and greater compensation for artists.  Finally, and oddly enough, we have emphasized the central role that performance rights organizations like ASCAP could play in a digital world and have praised them for their ability to keep accurate records of who owns what copyright.  So frankly, we're more puzzled by this attack than anything.

So, basically none of these organizations do anything like what ASCAP claimed. It's too bad that ASCAP still seems to be standing by its backwards-looking position.

Filed Under: attacks, copyright, culture, fundraising
Companies: ascap, creative commons, eff, public knowledge

Louis Vuitton Strikes Again: Shuts Down Art Exhibit That Commented On LV Trademarks

from the parody? dept

Earlier this year, you may recall that we wrote about a bizarre and ridiculous lawsuit that luxury goods retailer Louis Vuitton had filed against Hyundai, because for a couple of seconds in a Hyundai commercial, a basketball is seen with markings that sorta kinda mimic (though, not exactly) LV's handbag design. This is the same Louis Vuitton that had sued a fundraiser who had made t-shirts to raise money for Darfur, which included an illustration of a "pimped out" Darfur victim who was holding a bag that also mimicked LV's designs.

I was reminded of both of these cases recently when I was catching up on recent episodes of the TV show Mythbusters. In one episode, the myth being tested is whether or not you can build a cannon out of leather. In the final attempt, Mythbuster Kari Byron decides to "decorate" the cannon, and does so with symbols that, again, mimic the LV design, turning it into a "designer cannon." Unfortunately, it looks like Discovery doesn't let you embed clips (why, Discovery, why?), but here's a quick screen shot that I took: All I could think of was whether or not (a) Mythbusters/Discovery had cleared that and gotten a license from LVMH or (b) if LVMH was going to sue. I have no idea if anything has happened there, but you can rest assured that LVMH is busy on the legal front elsewhere.

ChurchHatesTucker points us to the news that LVMH has shut down an art exhibit in Japan that involved sculptures of nine locusts, that were each made from counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags: The sculptures were clearly meant to act as commentary on the nature of luxury brands and counterfeiting, as they were named Batta Mon, which the article linked above says is:

a play on the words batta ("locust") and battamon (slang for "knockoff"). According to the artist, the works are meant to raise questions about the relationship between authenticity and imitation in a consumer-driven society.

It seems like that's a perfectly good subject for commentary through art, and it seems ridiculous that LVMH is stifling the artist's work. Nothing in this exhibit is going to make anyone think that it was endorsed by LVMH. It certainly isn't doing anything to create consumer confusion. The artist is pissed off, but the museum said it didn't want to deal with a legal fight, so this artist's work gets taken down as yet another company abuses trademark law. Watch out, Mythbusters, you may be next...

Filed Under: art, commentary, culture, japan, mythbusters, trademarks
Companies: louis vuitton

ASCAP Claiming That Creative Commons Must Be Stopped; Apparently They Don't Actually Believe In Artist Freedom

from the protectionism-all-the-way dept

About a year and a half ago, we reported on the news that ASCAP, who represents songwriters and publishers as a collection society, was holding strategy sessions on how to "counter" proponents of free culture, as if they were some sort of attack on ASCAP. Since then, we've actually noticed a growth in both the number of hilarious conspiracy-midned "attack blogs" from people tied to ASCAP, as well as an increase in the number of "anonymous" commenters on the site coming from IP addresses used by a few law firms that have connections to ASCAP. Funny that.

Now it appears they're stepping things up to stage two: they've sent around fundraising emails that specifically ask for money to fight Creative Commons, EFF and Public Knowledge. What's amusing (but really sad) is that this proves that the rhetoric out of ASCAP about protecting "artists' rights" is bunk. Creative Commons does nothing whatsoever to undermine artists' rights. It merely offers them more options for how they choose to license their works. It's the sort of thing that ASCAP and the rest of the music industry should embrace. In fact, when confronted, many of these organizations often make the point that they have no problem with Creative Commons, and they're happy if artists choose to use CC licenses.

But ASCAP's blatant attack on Creative Commons (and EFF and PK; both of whom focus on consumer rights, but not undermining artist's rights at all) shows their true colors. They're not about artists' rights at all. They're about greater protectionism -- which is not (at all) the same thing.

Of course, all this makes me wonder why ASCAP members would support an organization that is, in fact, actively trying to diminish their options for licensing? ASCAP has a huge ulterior motive, of course. If alternative business models and things like Creative Commons become more widely used, the reliance on ASCAP diminishes, and ASCAP doesn't want that at all.

Below is the letter itself, which was posted by Mike Rugnetta:

Really sad day for ASCAP that it would stoop so low as to claim that giving creators more options and more business model and distributions options is somehow bad. Pretty much takes away all of its credibility.

Filed Under: creative commons, culture, free culture
Companies: ascap, creative commons, eff, public knowledge

Is Viacom Doing To Independent Content Creators In 2010 What It Says YouTube Did To Viacom In 2006?

from the questions,-questions... dept

Igor Zevaka was the first of a few of you to point to John Green's video where he discusses the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit with a bit of a twist, highlighting the fact that Viacom is making money off of amatuer content, without the rights to do so. Viacom owns Spike.com (a subsidiary of MTV), into which it folded iFilm.com, home of all sorts of amateur content, including content such as a Jonathan Coulton video that has a clear Creative Commons license -- but only for non-commercial use. However, on Spike.com... it's covered in ads sold by Viacom. So, Green wants to know, has Viacom paid Coulton? It's a fun video (though, Green is trying too hard to be Zefrank) that does make a good point -- though, I'm a bit disappointed that it (a) does not link to the Spike.com Coulton video he's discussing (I went searching for it, and it looks like it's been taken down) and (b) plays a little fast and loose with the facts of the lawsuit itself (to the point of being inaccurate at times). For example, he keeps saying that Viacom just wants a cut of YouTube's advertising, but that's not really accurate. It's asking for statutory damages for copyright infringement, which has nothing to do with advertising or advertising rates. It's also not clear where he comes up with the numbers he uses for what Viacom owes Coulton.

Either way, it would be interesting to see if anyone has more evidence that Viacom properties are improperly monetizing CC non-commercially-licensed videos. That would seem like a relevant point in the ongoing lawsuit...

Filed Under: copyright, culture, jonathon coulton, spike, user generated videos
Companies: google, spike, viacom, youtube

Scott Adams: The Economic Value Of Content Is Going To Zero, But Maybe It's Okay

from the dilbert-calculations? dept

Regular readers may recall a few years ago that I got into a short debate with Dilbert creator Scott Adams, on the issue of copyright. I usually find Adams' musings on various subjects to be interesting and insightful, but I thought he was pretty confused when it came to copyright. It kicked off with Adams trying to create an analogy for infringement, while (thankfully!) first admitting that it was different than "stealing" a physical good, the best analogy he could come up with was that it was like someone wearing your underwear all day and then putting it back in your drawer at the end of the day (cleaned and in the same condition he took it). I found that analogy to be severely lacking, and felt he assumed certain rights for creators that don't actually exist -- including the right to certain revenue. Adams shot back, in a mocking tone, again insisting that there were real economic losses in cases where a content creator failed to live up to his or her own marketing plan. Once again, I disagreed. Since then, I hadn't noticed Adams tackling this subject again.

Reader Bluejay alerts us to the news that Adams is exploring the topic again, in a slightly tangential manner. In a blog post highlighting his "theory on content value," where it seems he's reached something like the "acceptance" stage of navigating this particular topic -- though, he's doing so somewhat grudgingly. He kicks it off by noting that unauthorized copies of music represent a huge percentage of the music that people listen to these days (something that I'm not really sure is true) and that as devices like the iPad become more popular, the same thing is likely to happen for books. He's not focused on the locked down nature of the iPad, or its book store, but the fact that it has a browser, and you can find all sorts of unauthorized digital copies of books with little trouble.

From there, he's convinced (accurately) that there's little that can be done to stop this:

Every kid understands that stealing is wrong. But ask the average ten-year old about copyright law and watch for the blank stare. Students are taught to freely download copyrighted content from the Internet for school reports, which I understand is legal in the context of education. And at the same time, every school kid is learning from friends that downloading music and movies from the Internet is common practice. Paying for content on the Internet is strictly a generational thing, and it will pass.

Those of you reading this blog are already savvy enough to find and download any content you want for free. But I'll bet the average 40-something user of the Internet still wouldn't know how to search the Internet for criminally free content. At some point, I assume, a Google search for any popular book title will return an illegal source at the top of the page. When that happens, Amazon.com will primarily be selling electronics, household products, and clothes.

That sounds about right. But what does it mean? Well, Adams has a sort of good news/bad news conclusion that I partly agree with:

I predict that the profession known as "author" will be retired to history in my lifetime, like blacksmith and cowboy. In the future, everyone will be a writer, and some will be better and more prolific than others. But no one will pay to read what anyone else creates. People might someday write entire books - and good ones - for the benefit of their own publicity, such as to promote themselves as consultants, lecturers, or the like. But no one born today is the next multi-best-selling author. That job won't exist.

As an author, my knee-jerk reaction is to assume that the media content of the future will suck because there will be no true professionals producing it. But I think suckiness is solved by better search capabilities. Somewhere out in the big old world are artists who are more talented than we can imagine, and willing to create content for free, for a variety of reasons. And so, as our ability to search for media content improves, the economic value of that content will approach zero.

I'm not sure that the job of "author" will go away. "Best selling author" is a description of a type of author, so, sure, that might go away if people aren't selling books, but I'm not at all convinced the profession of "author" goes away. It's just that the nature of the job changes. I also think his final statement is just wrong. The economic value of that content doesn't go to zero. The price of that content may approach zero, but as we've pointed out over and over again price and value are not the same thing. In fact, there may be tremendous economic value in that content -- it's just that the economic value is realized elsewhere, by making something else gain a higher price. Adams mentions that authors may write books to help promote themselves, and that's an example of how that economic value is realized elsewhere, in boosting the price people may pay for authors who are also consultants, lecturers or something else entirely.

That said, however, it is nice that Adams admits that, even if his gut reaction is not to like this, he realizes that better tools may actually make sure that the results aren't bad at all (and might even be better). Going back to his earlier posts on copyright and content sharing, he's realizing that what he once thought of as a "loss," might really just be a changing market. That's good to see.

Filed Under: authors, content, culture, economics, scott adams

Music Industry Lawyer Complains Both That Musicians Don't Get Paid... And When They Do

from the i'm-confused dept

There's a music industry lawyer named Chris Castle who we've mentioned a few times on this site in the past. He's the guy who used to (don't know why he took it down) have a blurb on his website that referred to Creative Commons supporters as "self-serving shilling for the self-absorbed on the short con." He once complained that next time he wrote a contract for licensing music to a website, there would be a clause that once the contract was over, the website wouldn't be allowed to tell anyone why, because just having the music disappear and pissing off all the users is such a good solution. He's also, on multiple occasions predicted that "free culture" was dead. Lately he's been focused on running a bizarre and hilarious series of black-helicopter-type conspiracy theories about people pushing for copyright law that actually takes consumers into account. And I won't even get into the nicknames he has for everyone. He's a really fun read.

And, it should be noted, he's no fan of the record labels. From what I can tell, he's a lawyer who represents musicians and songwriters for the most part -- and seems to think that the business models that got them paid back when he was a child should somehow be forced by law into never changing and staying that way forever. But since he's so focused on getting musicians paid (and has been known to pat himself on the back when he wins lawsuits for certain musicians) you would think that reports showing new business models that work and help get musicians paid -- while doing so in ways that allow musicians to rely less on the hated labels would be a good thing.

But, no, apparently not. The only acceptable way for a musician to get paid is via copyright, I guess. He recently put up a a rant about the evils of musicians getting money from corporations in the form of sponsorship or advertising.

Why is it bad? Well, something about the purity of music the old way. You know, where instead of taking money from corporations to make commercial music they... took money from corporations (record labels) to make commercial music. Oh wait...

We've seen this argument before. A few months ago, someone insisted that Jimi Hendrix never would have chatted with fans on MySpace. In Castle's world, he sees something similar. Would Bob Dylan ever take sponsorship money, he wonders?

It doesn't take a lot of prescience to see where this leads. Ask yourself this--is an advertising-driven model likely to produce the next Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan? If presented with this reality, what would the next Bob Dylan do? Would he still be attracted to the music business or would he write it off as yet one more corporatization, more McMusic? Would popular music become like the jingles in Demolition Man? (Not to mention the cross-cultural issues.)

Really? First of all... last I checked, Dylan himself had no problem with an ad driven model: But, more to the point, the myth that those musicians became successful in an anti-corporate way is a joke. Dylan signed to Columbia Records very early in his career, and they didn't do it "for the music." They signed him because they thought he'd make them money -- and, famously, when his first album didn't sell well, almost resulted in him being dropped from the label and caused trouble for John Hammond, who had signed him. Hammond, by the way, also signed Cohen to his first major label contract... also at Columbia. I'm sure in both cases, it was purely out of the kindness of his heart and the love of music... and the commercial prospects had nothing to do with it. Hell, wasn't Columbia Records run as a charity back in the 60s?

What this comes down to, in the end, is the absolutely worst kind of revisionist history. It's people who pretend that "back in the old days" the industry was about something other than money, and that anyone who talks about money now is creating a problem. And, then, at the same time, they'll turn around and bitch about how musicians won't make music any more because they won't get paid. Contradiction much?

If Mr. Castle really wants to move away from musicians scared away from music because of "more corporatization, more McMusic," you would think he would actually be a huge fan of many of the business models we've written about, because they allow those musicians to go direct to fans and make money in ways that get away from the corporatization -- including the exact corporatization of music that Dylan and Cohen needed back in their day -- but which musicians today no longer need if they want to avoid it.

Filed Under: bob dylan, business models, copyright, culture, leonard cohen

How Many Bad Assumptions Can You Make In A Single Article About Content Creation And Copyright?

from the freeload-this dept

I really like The Atlantic and think they do pretty good work. I also tend to like Megan McArdle's work, which is usually pretty thought provoking. So I was profoundly disappointed with her recent article, The Freeloaders, which makes a bunch of really bad assumptions, tied together with debunked arguments, with claims that simply go against the facts and with a heaping of "oh noes, the pirates are killing content" fear mongering, to create an article that is sort of a parody of itself. After all, the article bemoans the fact that new and high quality works may be harder to come by in the future (based on no actual evidence), but all of the arguments in it are old and derivative themselves (many of which have been debunked), leading to a piece that comes off as downright amateurish.

Let's pick out some of the more egregious mistakes:

But even as I've heard over the past decade that things weren't that bad, that the music industry was moving to a new, better business model, each year's numbers have been worse. Maybe it's time to admit that we may never find a way to reconcile consumers who want free entertainment with creators who want to get paid.

That's simply not true. McArdle is making the same mistake that many politicians and reporters make, despite it being pointed out as an error time and time again: she's confusing the recording industry with the music industry. The music industry is actually doing quite well when you look at the numbers. Switching back and forth between the two, as McArdle does throughout the piece, and pretending they're the same thing at some points, and different at others is really weak reporting. Yes, the numbers for the recording industry are worse, just as the numbers for the horse buggy industry got worse and worse each year as the automobile industry ramped up. Now, later in the piece, McArdle tries to switch back to including the wider music industry, but we'll get to the problems with her statements there later.

Reflecting on this problem, the computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg recently noted that although we have strong instinctive feelings about ownership, intellectual property doesn't always fit into that framework. The harm done by individual acts of piracy is too small and too abstract. "The nature of intellectual property," he wrote, "makes it hard to maintain the social and empathic constraints that keep us from taking each other's things."

In other words, we kept to our rules about IP as long as it was attached to a physical object: a book, a CD, a videotape. Now that it consists of endlessly replicable electrons, we are ethically unmoored.

Now, I know McArdle understands economics, so I'm a bit surprised that she didn't actually look into the economic arguments here, and immediately jumps to the ridiculous claim that people who intuitively recognize that abundant goods are under pressure to be priced at zero are "ethically unmoored," rather than realizing this is just the good old supply and demand curve at work. Supply goes up, price goes down. Supply goes to infinite, price gets pressured to zero. This is why many people intuitively and instinctively do not see an ethical quandary in copying a digital work: because they recognize they're not taking away anything from anyone else, they're actually adding to the overall supply.

The argument that people don't think about it because "the harm is too small" is also questionable. People don't think of it that way because they don't see it as harm. Making a copy of something is effectively obtaining the work from a competing supplier offering a better price. If there's no ethical issue in saying I'll buy lunch at this sandwich shop instead of the grocery store across the street because the sandwich shop is cheaper, then there's no ethical issue in getting content from a different supplier as well. It's a matter of competition.

They are Generation Free, and they just might kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

A pithy statement based on nothing. In fact, the evidence suggests exactly the opposite. Once again, the evidence:

While album sales have generally fallen since 2000, the number of albums being created has exploded. In 2000, 35,516 albums were released. Seven years later, 79,695 albums (including 25,159 digital albums) were published (Nielsen SoundScan, 2008).... Similar trends can be seen in other creative industries. For example, the worldwide number of feature films produced each year has increased from 3,807 in 2003 to 4,989 in 2007 (Screen Digest, 2004 and 2008). Countries where film piracy is rampant have typically increased production. This is true in South Korea (80 to 124), India (877 to 1164), and China (140 to 402). During this period, U.S. feature film production has increased from 459 feature films in 2003 to 590 in 2007 (MPAA, 2007).

The golden goose doesn't look like it's dying. It looks like it's going in the other direction. And even those numbers appear to undercount reality. Soundscan is notorious for undercounting many new music releases, and if you go beyond the MPAA's feature film numbers, you find that the the number of movies being made has increased a lot more than the rate of growth in just feature films.

And the same thing is true on the money front. Depending on which research you look at, the overall consumer dollars spent on music have increased between 5% and 66% in the decade from 1997 to 2007. And the movie industry, of course, keeps setting records at the box office. The golden goose is alive and well and laying bigger and bigger golden eggs.

Isn't that worth mentioning in a story about what's happening in the market?

Can the market evolve fast enough to keep up with the expectations, and predations, of Generation Free? Even if the music industry manages, what about all the other businesses that depend on intellectual property--including (gulp) my own?

Considering that it already has and continues to do so, this seems like an odd question.

Yet even if die-hard music buffs spend more on albums than the guy who buys one box set a year, they're still buying less than they used to. Moreover, spending less on recorded music doesn't necessarily mean you spend more on shows; the savings could just as easily go toward beer. And even avid music lovers in urban areas can see only a few shows a week. To raise revenue, you have to get new customers in the door or raise ticket prices.

Yes, but we have numbers on this, and the money isn't actually going to beer. It's still going to music or music related goods, which is why consumer spending in the market has increased. And, yes, getting new customers in the door is key. And here it would be worth pointing out (though, McArdle doesn't) that research has shown that (at least in the UK, though I would imagine the results are similar in the US), 60% of the population didn't buy music anyway. So getting any money out of them via alternative offerings is better than nothing.

Concert-promotion mogul Michael Rapino has said that just 2 percent of Americans attend more than a couple of concerts a year, which leaves plenty of room to increase attendance, but also suggests that most people don't particularly care for live music. It's far from clear that free MP3s increase the number of concertgoers, instead of just changing the mix of shows they attend.

But that's a totally different argument. I never really understand this line of thinking. You have people saying "well, no money is being made." Then you point out that money is being made, so they say "well, fewer works of art will be created." So you point out that more works of art are being created. And then they say "well, very few people attend shows." So what? If more works are being created and more money is being made... then what are you complaining about?

Also, while live shows are an important and growing part of the music industry, it is still just one part of the music industry. Here it seems that while McArdle has moved away from pretending the recording industry is the music industry, she now thinks that the live industry is the only other part of it. It's not. There is a large (and growing) B2B side of the business that McArdle doesn't even acknowledge, and there is a growing direct-to-consumer part of the business as well.

This fragmentation has been good news for performers like Jonathan Coulton, who makes a decent living selling quirky songs and related merchandise on his Web site. But the broader music industry, like other entertainment fields, has always worked on a tournament model: a lot of starving artists hoping to be among the few who make it big. What happens to the supply of willing musicians when the prize is an endless slog through medium-size concerts at $25 a head?

Again, we have the answer to that: it grows. Why? Because the folks like Coulton who can make a living doing medium-sized concerts at $25 a head wouldn't even be in music five or ten years ago. The Coultons and Corey Smiths and Matthew Ebels of the world who we've talked about, are all folks who likely would be working day jobs instead of making a living in music. That's because under the old system, the only way to make a living making music was to get a golden ticket: get signed by a major record label and then be one of the 5 to 10% of major label acts that the label decides to really push each year. Otherwise, you're back to your day job. But today, with the ability to take control over your own career, you can actually make a living in music (if you're good) without a record label. So the barriers have lowered, and that's why there are more people making music today than ever before, and more people making a decent living from music than ever before. Just look at some of TuneCore's numbers. These are the sorts of facts that an article like this should be highlighting. These are the sorts of numbers of what's really going on -- not just what the major labels are complaining about.

Moreover, whatever the sins of the big labels, they invest heavily in finding, promoting, and recording new music... People tend to underestimate the extent to which the old industry supports things like... concert attendance.

No doubt. The big labels have always invested heavily in finding, promoting and recording new music. But no one said that's the way it always needs to be. The money is there, it's just in different places, and as long as the money is there, there are clear incentives for others to provide those services as well. In fact, they'll probably do it a lot more efficiently and economically, without having to waste millions on the sorts of things that record label execs are famous for wasting money on.

A smaller, more amateur music business is possible, if not optimal.

How can anyone say this when the numbers show that the amateur music business has exploded? I mean, it's just flat out wrong.

But I doubt that YouTube can substitute for Hollywood in a world where "cheap" indie films can cost millions.

Ah, the YouTube fallacy. Apparently there's nothing in-between a major motion picture and YouTube. Those are the world's only two choices. And, yes, a cheap indie film can cost millions, but we're seeing all sorts of innovations that make the cost of making movies cheaper and cheaper, and we keep hearing about indie movie makers experimenting with interesting business models. Why assume that they won't work?

Children's films might be made at a loss to sell action figures--but how do you finance The Godfather? With a co-branded line of frozen cannoli?

At this point, we point out, yet again, that box office attendance has hit record highs, despite widespread unauthorized file sharing, and that the top movie downloads also seem to be the top at the box office. So, it certainly looks like you finance The Godfather the same way The Godfather was financed when it was made: by selling tickets to the theater.

We have yet to figure out how to make IP work in the new era.

No, you have yet to understand new business models in the new era. That has nothing to do with "IP." If anything, "IP" is holding back many of these new business models by giving folks a crutch to rely on, rather than experimenting with smarter business models.

Even if we don't, people will still make pictures, sing songs, and write stories--just not as frequently, or as lavishly

Except, again, all of the evidence says that they're doing so more frequently because everything about making pictures, singing songs and writing stories has become cheaper. It's cheaper to create. It's cheaper to promote. It's cheaper to distribute. And, as your basic economics will tell you, if you make all of those things cheaper, you tend to get greater output. Why McArdle would just assume lower output... well that's not explained.

But even if we do, file-sharing will probably alter the form of the works we do create. The popular arts may come to look more like the rest of the Internet...

Is that a bad thing? So, rather than having mass produced pablum forced down our throats by a few gatekeepers, there will be a wider variety of content, created by people who really love to create? Doesn't that seem like a good thing?

As a postscript to all of this, Boing Boing points us to an amusing musical rebuttal. It turns out that the image used to illustrate McArdle's article used non-public domain music, which some musicians noted highlights how wrong McArdle's article is, in that she seems to draw "a clear line between right and wrong where there is, in fact, significant ambiguity." So, the musicians recorded an album based on the notes. Is this ethically unmoored? Is this the result of "freeloaders" creating less works? It doesn't seem that way.

Filed Under: copyright, culture, freeloading, megan mcardle

Content Creation Is An Evolutionary Process

from the where's-the-darwin-of-copyright? dept

We recently wrote about Julian Sanchez's video explanation of how culture is often a more important part of remix culture than the remix itself. That is, the act of sharing an experience with others is often the key to culture, and those that focus on the content alone often seem to miss this aspect of it, which explains why they often seek to limit the ability to share that culture through copyright. Of course, as with any such debate, when supporters of stronger copyright fail to have significant reasoning for how to counter such an argument, they tend to fall back on the "but it's not art" or "if that's the type of creativity that we get from remixing, we're better off with out it" types of arguments. That is, they begin to focus on the subjective quality of the content, not realizing that such content often isn't directed at them as a target audience, and the people it is directed at, who do enjoy it, really don't care what they think.

Julian has now built on that discussion, first pointing out how obnoxious it is to denigrate these works of art, when nearly all artwork comes from similar derivative processes, but then taking it a step further to point out how the creative process is evolutionary:

Current intellectual property law frowns on "copying" as opposed to mere "influence." If I write and record a song that is manifestly influenced by the sound of the Beatles, that's just how culture works; if I remix or reperform a medley of their songs, that's infringing. One way to think about the distinction is to ask how much mutation of the original work has occurred in my head before I send it out into the world. We can imagine my sitting with a guitar playing "Taxman," beginning by improvising new lyrics, and gradually altering the melody until I've produced a song that is sufficiently transformed to count as an original work, though perhaps still a recognizably Beatlesesque one. I'm free and clear under copyright law just so long as I only record and distribute the final product, which consists of enough of my own contribution that it no longer counts as a "copy."

Implicit in this model is the premise that creativity is fundamentally an individual enterprise--an act of intelligent design. Yet so much of our culture, historically, has not been produced in this way, but by a collective process of mutation and evolution, by the selection of many small tweaks that (whether by chance or owing to some stroke of insight) improve the work, at least in the eyes of the next person to take it up. Perhaps ironically, this is the kind of evolutionary process by which myths evolve--myths of life breathed into mud, or of Athena springing full-grown from the head of Zeus. Our legal system now takes these evolved myths as its paradigm of creation.

In the past, we've frequently made the point when it comes to innovation, inventing and patents that innovation is a process, rather than a single burst. In fact, innovation is an ongoing process that never ends. And yet, patents treat innovation as a once-and-done "flash of genius" sort of thing, despite little evidence that innovation ever happens this way. Effectively, this is the same argument that Julian is making, but for content, rather than innovation. And it makes a lot of sense. The problem that we've seen with patents, where sticking monopoly rights and privileges into the middle of that process leads to hindering the forward progress of that process by limiting how others can continue the innovation, can also apply to content and copyright:

The Romantic model of creativity as an individual act of genius excludes the form cultural creation has taken throughout most of human history, and the legal regime best suited to promote and incentivize individual acts of creation on the Romantic model may be quite hostile to the aggregative process of creation on an evolutionary or peer-produced model. The law says, in effect, that we will protect creativity that occurs all at once, in one brain, or at least as the upshot of a planned and organized effort--but at the cost of forbidding the individually derivative elements of distributed and spontaneous creation.

The point of all of this becomes clear quite quickly, once you think about it. We often have copyright defenders in our comments make a statement like: "please show me any new content that is actively hindered by copyright." But, of course, that's trying to show a negative. How do you show the content that wasn't created? But what Julian is pointing out is that so much content really is an iterative, derivative, transformative process, but the monopoly rights put forth by copyright law effectively hinder that process in the false belief that creativity and content creation is separate from such a process, but springs fresh from the minds of geniuses, without acknowledging the fact that they are merely building on the works of those before them.

Content creation is an evolutionary process. Stifling evolution through blocking important mutations via copyright law creates a loss for society and culture, and doesn't seem to "promote the progress" at all.

Filed Under: content, culture, evolution

Remix Culture Is About The Culture As Much As The Remix

from the killing-culture dept

Over the weekend, I finally got to watch the film Copyright Criminals (after having seen clips and a discussion about the film at the Fair Use Film Screening put on by Public Knowledge back in January). I have to admit, the film was pretty depressing. While it may seem like I pick on lawyers a fair amount, I actually tend to like most lawyers I meet -- but I don't know quite how they did it, but every lawyer who showed up in that film just seemed to ooze smarmy. They appeared to smirk through their interviews, as if they knew what they were saying was ridiculous, and the whole thing was all about getting as much money as possible, rather than having anything to do with fairness or creating art. Meanwhile, the actual content creators -- they seemed pretty much defeated. They had worked on amazingly innovative and cool projects that had nothing to do with "copying", and everything to do with creating beautiful new works of art that people loved. And they got sued and shut down over and over again. It's a shame. But not just because of the art that wasn't created, but the potential to connect culturally through it.

This is a point that often gets overlooked in these discussions -- that art is about more than the creator. We've tangentially discussed this idea in the past, but Julian Sanchez put together a little video last week that does a nice job demonstrating this in about eight minutes: What he points out is that for culture to matter, it goes beyond the artwork itself, to the people who experience the artwork and then share it with others -- thereby connecting with each other and the artwork itself. And while people sit back and claim that remixing is "stealing" or "lazy" or "not art" at all, that's totally missing the point. Art is not about just the creator. Without the shared experience, it's a lot less valuable -- and what we've done with copyright laws is make it that much more difficult to share that experience through our own eyes and our own cultural views. And if you don't see the shame in that, then you're missing a lot.

Filed Under: copyright, culture, remix