| 19 April 2009
The Pirate Bay judgement in Sweden last week, in which the four leaders of
the download facilitation site were sentenced to one year in prison and ordered
to pay SEK30mn (USD3.56mn) in damages (they have appealed), is a victory for
the established music distribution industry, but it is just one skirmish in
a long-term war which the old-style providers cannot win. A much more significant
event during the week was the French National Assembly's rejection, against
the wishes of the government, of the 'three strikes and you're out' law which
would have required ISPs to switch off persistent download offenders. Just as
French parliamentarians refused to bow to the authoritarian agenda of the old
guard, so in New Zealand recently a popular outcry stopped the government from
bringing in a similar law.
It was time that the received wisdom of the sanctity of 'the rights of copyright
holders' received a jolt. In recent years, legislators around the world have
been gaily extending copyright periods, introducing 'droits d'auteur', slapping
fees (taxes) on the re-sale of art works and so on. These rules are anti-democratic
and anti-cultural, on a level with book-burning, and are testament to nothing
other than the lobbying power of the established publishing and distribution
industries.
Copyright and royalty laws and structures are mostly of very modern provenance,
and are a direct result and reflection of the particular distribution systems
that have grown up. Although the Romans issued copyright-style privileges to
booksellers, copyright in the written word didn't really have much of an impact
until well after the invention of printing, and composers didn't start getting
royalties until the mid-19th century. Recent as they are, however, it is absurd
to try to translate these out-dated concepts into the new world of Internet
distribution.
That is not to deny the rights of originators, and even to some extent distributors,
to be rewarded for their labours; it is just to say that the current model is
dead, and needs to be thrown out, lock, stock and barrel.
As in so many other spheres of economic activity, the Internet is disintermediating
the middle-men, giving the end-consumer direct ways of accessing and enjoying
the words and music she wants. That much is obvious: what is missing, or at
least unclear, is the mechanism by which a market discovery mechanism can be
set up through which consumers can reward originators. And originators themselves
will find that the destruction of the old models of content marketing will be
creative for them. There are substantial barriers to entry in many branches
of publishing, as anyone knows who has tried to find a publisher for a book,
or a recording company for a new group.
In the last analysis, words (literature), the graphic arts and music are types
of entertainment, and the Internet will enable direct delivery of a far greater
range of types of entertainment to users. Already in the first decade of the
21st century entertainment and sport are perceptibly merging into one another,
and this process will continue at a rapid pace during the decades to come, as
the world gets richer, and elective activities gradually come to replace more
and more of what had been known (for only 400 years after all) as 'work'.
Another notable feature of the ossification of the delivery of cultural entertainment
that has accompanied the growth of the copyright phenomenon in the last two
hundred years is the distinction between 'professional' and 'amateur'. Amateurs
might indeed sing at karaoke bars, but only professionals get paid for singing.
This distinction will break down during the next 20 years as content becomes
universally available through the Internet. Early examples of universal providers
such as YouTube have run into copyright problems, not surprisingly, but by 2020
technology will routinely enable commercial relationships to be set up between
any willing performer/consumer pair.
We can label such technology KISS (Kontent Identification and Subscription
System), which will come into universal use, even in China, with the value of
any given piece of content, regardless of its origin, calculated in real time
based on its audience, and charged to the (compulsory) account of the user.
Content providers (call them musicians, writers, artists, or whatever) will
still able to put their own price on a work, and to withhold it unless the price
was paid, but hardly anyone will do so, due to the difficulty of marketing what
cannot be seen or experienced in advance. Under the KISS system, the cost of
experiencing a piece of content is incurred incrementally during the experience,
so that if after two seconds you know you hate what you are experiencing, you
just switch it off, and it has cost you very little or even nothing.
KISS technology can be applied to all forms of entertainment, including music,
books, magazines, blogs, news, football, painting, and a range of new art-sport-forms
which will develop under the stimulus of the new media, such as virtual beach
volley-ball, which can be either watched (you pay), or participated in (you
get paid).
One useful by-product of KISS will be the creation of an objective measure
of an individual's 'contribution' to the common weal; and if couch potatoes
come under attack in due course in the way that first smokers and now drinkers
and fatties are being ostracized, it will be those individuals with high KISS
ratings who get the best treatment in society and privileged access to the scarce
resources of our threatened planet. Scary? Not really: it's just a way of redefining
money for the coming post-capitalist world.
You have been reading an entry on the following blog:
Jeremy Hetherington-Gore Unleashed
Jeremy tackles the difficult issues head on!
Contact: jeremy@lowtax.net
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