The Internet Is Silencing Artists, According To An Artist On The Internet

from the criticizing-safe-harbors-from-within dept

We recently submitted our comments to the Copyright Office's ongoing study on DMCA safe harbors, but perhaps we should have been a bit more creative. At least that seems to be the plan of the Content Creators Coalition, which has made its submission in the form of a video starring producer T Bone Burnett doing his best Werner-Herzog-without-the-accent impression. It's... quite something. (Amusingly it's also hosted on Vimeo, a site which — like all sites hosting user content — relies heavily on DMCA safe harbors for its existence, and indeed prevailed in a major legal battle over that very thing last year.)

Probably the word most prominent in my mind after watching that is dramatic, with optional prefixes such as melo- and over-. It starts out like this:

In its early days, the Internet was hailed a panacea. A global community — unshackled from corporate, military, or government control ready to equalize and connect the world. One of its early false prophets named it a "Culture of the Mind" that "all may enter without privilege or prejudice". But that's not what we got.

Remember, this isn't a trailer for season three of Mr. Robot — it's a submission to the Copyright Office. There's a bit of a problem with that quote, too, but we'll get to that in a moment. T Bone drones on:

Instead of opening up minds, it has closed them down — becoming a restrictive, abusive place where women, people of color, and anyone marked different are shunned, attacked, and shouted down. 2016 laid bare how cyberspace hasn’t rationalized dialog. It's become a megaphone for propaganda and fake news where it’s easier to demagogue and divide than ever. Dreams of a stronger democracy have given way to foreign hackers and corporate manipulation — a shriveled politics indistinguishable from reality TV.

While some of those problems are certainly real, they are a lot more complicated and far from the primary characteristic of the internet as a whole — but more importantly, what does this have to do with musicians and the DMCA, exactly? (By the way, demagogue is not a verb.)

And for artists and creators, instead of amplifying our voices to lead the fight for change, it undermines and silences us. The Internet — with all its promise and beauty — threatens to destroy what it was supposed to save. We can’t let that happen.

This proceeding is focused on the legal safe harbors in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – the law that was supposed to balance the Internet’s openness with creators’ ability to earn a living wage from their work. Those safe harbors have failed.

Wow, smooth transition. If I'm reading that correctly, he's saying that artists could have cured or at least mitigated all of society's woes if only they weren't being "silenced" by the internet. The idea that the internet is silencing anyone, much less artists, is frankly just silly — unless of course you're talking about the people who are directly and unambiguously censored by abuse of the DMCA. The safe harbors have failed, by having a very low bar to get content removed and failing to have any meaningful way of preventing or punishing abuse. And yet even despite this, the internet offers the biggest, most powerful and most accessible platform for artists in history.

(Also at this point, let's revisit that quote from an internet "false prophet". The line is actually a "civilization of the mind" and it comes from EFF founder John Perry Barlow's famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. You'd think T Bone could have gotten the quote right, but you also have to wonder if he knows that Barlow is an artist himself who used to write lyrics for the Grateful Dead.)

The problems are familiar — they are well described in the record of these proceedings from the broken Sisyphus climb of "notice and takedown" to the gunpoint negotiations and pittance wages forced upon creators by the Google monopoly. The Big Tech ITOPIANS can track us across dozens of networks, devices, and profiles to bombard us with micro targeted ads, but they can’t even identify unauthorized copies of our work and keep them off their own servers and systems. Or they won’t.

Ah, Sisyphus — he who evaded his timely death and was sentenced to eternal fruitless toil. Not a bad metaphor for media gatekeepers and the DMCA, actually. Perhaps T Bone can imagine Sisyphus happy. Or maybe instead of wasting all this time pushing boulders up hills, the industry could have embraced digital distribution from the start and helped new platforms emerge instead of hindering them. As for detecting infringing works, ad tracking is just as flawed as any other "if they can do that, why not this" comparison on that front: the issue is not the technological ability to sort content, but the fuzzy definitions of what's legal and what isn't — especially since, despite T Bone's conflation of the two, "unauthorized" does not automatically mean "infringing". Besides, a mistargeted ad just gets ignored; a mistargeted copyright filter shuts down free expression.

(And by the way, I didn't capitalize "ITOPIANS" like that — that's how it was transcribed in the Coalition's press release. Apparently someone thought it was really, really clever and wanted to make sure you didn't miss it.)

The problem here isn’t technology – creators welcome the digital revolution and its power to connect, amplify, and inspire. A modern recording studio looks more like a cockpit than a honky tonk, and that’s just fine. The problem is business models — designed to scrape away value rather than fuel new creation, focused on taking rather than making. To restore technology’s place as the rightful partner of tomorrow’s creators, we need change.

Oh I see: he wants artists to enjoy all of the huge advantages created by digital technology, both in terms of distributing and creating their music, but not have to adapt to any of the new challenges created by the same technology. Sure, that sounds fair. He's right that the biggest challenge is business models, but to that I say: physician heal thyself.

The safe harbors must be restored — so only responsible actors earn their protection, not those who actively profit from the abuse and exploitation of creators' work.

People don't have to "earn" critical free speech protections by proving they aren't abusing them. That's exactly the opposite of how it works. But I'm impressed by the creativity and gall it took to describe dismantling safe harbors as restoring them.

The false prophets of the internet may have imagined an egalitarian open source creative wonderland – but what we got was a digital playground for a handful of mega corporations and web moguls living fat off the artistic, cultural, and economic value everyone else creates online. And if our democracy becomes stunted and diverse Americans are shut out, I guess these new Galtian Lords would say, "That’s business."

But artists and creators will never bow to that. We will never accept an Internet that turns its back on the vitality, optimism, and hope from which it was born. We will never allow our democracy to become a mere series of pseudo-events designed to manipulate people into spending money.

This, and the line that follows it, is the last quote I'm going to pick on, because it's where T Bone's bizarre attempt to treat art and democracy as more than related but practically synonyms finally coalesces. Because in the next line he commits to this blunt conflation whole-hog and coins a new term (emphasis mine):

Everyone with a stake in the Internet’s success and the health of our creative democracy must work together to make this right.

Well, coined it in this strange context anyway — though in fact "creative democracy" is originally the title of a 1939 essay that ended with a passionate assertion that "the task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute". Now you can twist words and concepts all day to pretend that the internet somehow stifles artists, but be honest: is there anything in the world that has pushed us closer to that democratic goal than the internet, and the communication and content platforms that rely so heavily on safe harbors to exist?

Maybe T Bone and the Content Creators Coalition think differently, but in that case they should at least take this little dramatic exercise off of Vimeo.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright office, dmca, dmca 512, free speech, safe harbors, t bone burnett

Musicians On The Wrong Side Of History

from the how-medieval dept

Things are getting really odd in the latest music/internet/Silicon Valley skirmishes. It would appear that the step up in anti-streaming music, anti-silicon valley, anti-Google rhetoric by famous musicians is getting heated.

The lexicon is growing: Thom Yorke called streaming music services the last desperate fart of a dying corpse, where "corpse" refers to the recorded music industry. David Byrne joined the fray with an odd article for the Guardian last month that compelled me to write my own Op-ed rebuttal. Mr Byrne was telling of how he had removed "as much of my catalogue from Spotify I can." I believe that is the wrong answer for all musicians, rich and poor.

I also wrote a post that offered a solution. I proposed that if the richer musicians were so concerned for their less well off brethren, and believed that culture and society was about to collapse, then perhaps they should help them out.

Not that that's going to happen anytime soon.

The latest addition to the anti-technology list of musicians is the well-respected T Bone Burnett, who in a Halloween-inspired fit of pique, said in a Hollywood Reporter article titled: T Bone Burnett vs. Silicon Valley: 'We Should Go Up There With Pitchforks and Torches.'

How medieval.

Mr. Burnett has a soundbite for us all -- "Digital sound has dehumanized us." If I think for a moment about the true dehumanization of societies under attack around the world -- Iraq, Syria, Mali to name but a few -- I can only scoff at that statement. It's pure hyperbole.

I saw a tweet from Thom Yorke the other day where he'd taken a snap of a page from a Jaron Lanier book (I'm guessing Who Owns the Future?) where Yorke wrote "I am proudly Luddite if to be so is to criticise the power and destruction of Google etc.. J Lanier again."

Let's take a look at what exactly describes a Luddite -- "a member of any of the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, esp. in cotton and woolen mills, that they believed was threatening their jobs (1811–16)." And in a finer description -- "The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labor-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817." [Link]

And so, if we were to take Thom at his word, the fall of Google would cause him and his supporters to dance in the streets waving their proverbial "pitchforks and torches," while denying those in society who are not musicians the benefits of labor-saving technology that Google and other technology companies bring.

That's about as far away from a credible position in this discussion than I can imagine. The real irony there is that the "labor-saving technologies" of today make it easier, not harder, for musicians to reach an audience. Thom's band Radiohead posted a film, Scotch Mist, to the Google-owned YouTube where it has garnered almost 7.3 million views. Just sayin'.

Very recently Tim Quirk, a musician and a friend who I have known for some time now, gave a speech at the Future of Music Summit (you can link to it here.) At its heart Tim's talk was an impassioned plea for musicians to understand the true value of music, not as in a price-point, but at its emotional level. He notes that you cannot devalue music's worth at that level. He understands that musicians are fighting technology because of their misguided, nostalgic view of the recording industry. There was never a "Golden age" of music. Record deals were not built to empower musicians, they were to benefit the record labels. Most musicians hardly ever made a living from music, only those who rose to the top did. Nothing has changed.

Tim provided an image that shows the reality of a music ecosystem:

From Tim:

You can sketch this dynamic with a simple pyramid showing lots of people spending little or no money at the bottom and fewer people spending lots of money at the top. If you’re a new band, you begin at the bottom of that pyramid, but no matter how popular a given artist gets or how amazing her latest single is, there will always, always, always be more people in the world who don't care than who do.

So the goal for every artist and every song has always been to climb this pyramid, convincing as many people as you can to part with something in exchange for listening. At first, you just want their attention. The next step is to get them to give you some money for the privilege of hearing your song whenever they happen to get the urge and as you keep climbing the pyramid, you find yourself with fewer and fewer listeners but each one who remains is happy to give you more and more money.

It has never been any different than it is now in other words. The only change is a societal shift. Young people have voted with their ears. They want to access music wherever they are, they are willing to pay for it too. If they like your music they'll keep paying, if they don't like it they won't bother to even listen to it. Radio has always been free for music fans. If they heard something they liked they bought it. Today -- same as it ever was. (Before you jump in and say the access to "free" music is killing careers, please remember that radio was always free, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Still is. Purchasing decisions are made around it. Online and mobile access to music creates demand if the listener perceives its value.)

Let's take the musician's arguments at face value and tell it like it is: they are demanding that they be singled out as a special interest group that should always be able to make an income from their work. If they hold to that position in the face of how markets actually work, e.g. a superior product at a reasonable price will sell better than an inferior product where demand creates the price points, then they will simply lose face and their audience will move on.

And prices are flexible. Arcade Fire released its new album this week and reportedly sold 140,000 copies. If another band called Arcade Ice was as popular but offered its album at $1 less it doesn't mean it will sell 140,000 copies or more just because it's a dollar less. That's because fans of Arcade Fire and Arcade Ice are not necessarily fans of both bands. Each band therefore reaches the fans that will purchase their respective albums, and each band's income will differ -- not on a price point but on demand.

Musicians are in the marketplace and there's a thing called a Demand Curve:

There's a comment in the Demand Curve article I link to that creates an analogy -- "The higher the price of a Kindle is, the less people want to buy it. If the price for a Kindle is to go up drastically, people will buy substitute goods like normal paperbacks, and the demand for ebooks will fall accordingly."

So underpaid authors should force Amazon to increase the price of the Kindle, right? Oh, wait...

Yelling get off my lawn is not a serious response to a lack of demand.

Dave Allen is the founding member and bass player for Gang of Four ad Shriekback, and is currently Digital Creative Director at North, a Portland-based brand strategy company, where this blog post was first published (along with many other great blog posts).

Filed Under: dave allen, david byrne, history, luddites, musicians, silicon valley, t bone burnett, thom yorke, tim quirk