Intellectual Propriety
June 8, 2000
The entire concept of 'intellectual property,' artistic and otherwise, is in for a wrenching re-examination.
It should be obvious by now, but, in the Information Age,
information
is proving hard to control. From porno to bomb-making recipes to personal
financial records, data tends to slosh promiscuously around cyberspace,
free for the downloading. And unprecedented problems arise where "free" is
not what the information's creators intended.
Information includes "intellectual property": music, film,
books
-- copyrighted material that artists and their related industries depend on
for their livelihoods. Once digitized, their work merely joins the slosh,
and, while traditional copyrights may still win some battles in court, the
war in the real world may already be lost.
Hard rockers Metallica recently sued the popular Napster
Web site for
facilitating free downloads of the group's music. Napster is one of several
Web utilities that have made collecting music very easy -- and very
disagreeable for some artists. Paraphrasing Metallica's Lars Ulrich: "If my
auto mechanic downloads my music for free, he can fix my car for free." The
argument seems fair (although, significantly, it fails to distinguish
between intellectual property and fee-for-service enterprises).
In any case, the public seems unpersuaded. Some years
back, cassette
taping of music and movies was likewise labeled "piracy" by entertainment
industries. Lawsuits blossomed. Celebrity witnesses sang the blues before
congress over millions lost each year -- not just to mob outfits operating
rooms full of VCRs, but to individuals making copies for their own "fair
use." Add all those buccaneers together, the arguments went, and the sky
will fall.
But not entertainment revenues. These rose right along
with theater
attendance and ticket prices. The video rental market boomed. "Pirated"
music won interest for groups that might never otherwise have been noticed.
The new-won fans then bought the artist's CDs, concert tickets, T-shirts.
So the industry quieted. Yes, they lost some ordinary
revenues to
technically illegal taping. However, considering the ravenous appetite such
"piracy" stoked, it could easily be written off as an incidental
promotional cost. The Bottom Line was as it remains today: firm.
Now comes the Internet, with "MP3" yet another harbinger
of doom. A
format for compressing large digital audio files to as little as one-tenth
their original size with little loss of quality, MP3 makes for a fairly
quick exchange even at the creeping 28.8 speed at which most users connect.
Get cable or some other high-speed connection, and you can download an
entire CD in minutes. Further, CD "burners" are now under $200 and
increasingly required to back up data against viruses. They can record
perfect CD copies for a couple bucks each. Argh, mate. Blackbeard's fleet
is once again poised on the horizon to raid the entertainment industry's
coffers.
Apart from the "cry wolf" aspect, one reason the public
remains
skeptical respecting music is the rip-off price of CDs, much higher than
cassettes despite the fact that cassettes are far more expensive to
manufacture. The Federal Trade Commission recently found the industry
guilty of years of price fixing. For film, rising ticket prices and the
Large, Super Large, Gigantic popcorn option further annoy consumers already
burdened with an ever-rising "information" tab.
Perhaps most important, superstar lawsuits generate about
the same
level of public sympathy as major sports player strikes. Have any
entertainment conglomerates or their artists come anywhere near financial
ruin thanks to piracy? Bad marriages, good whiskey, crooked management,
perhaps. But pirates? Joe Blow is unimpressed by the claim that pirates
cost Big, Inc. a billion dollars last year when they cleared ten. Besides,
even with a virtual Web Gestapo, how are pirates to be stopped?
Assuming that Metallica, et al, virtually shut down
Napster.com, there
is no practical way to stop JoeBlow.com from trading his own CD collection
online, never mind new, more slippery takes on Napster like Gnutella,
Freenet, Scour.com. As for copy protection, schemes have been tried ad
nauseam for years, but you can still record an excellent "audio out" copy
of virtually any music CD, and, if you have a CD burner, a byte-perfect
copy of data CDs like Windows 2000. When the likes of Microsoft give up on
copy protection, perhaps info-slosh has won.
Nor has Microsoft lost. To the contrary, their success
has run them
afoul of anti-trust law. "The Phantom Menace" seems likewise to have made
money. Stephen King recently by-passed his own middlemen and published
direct to Web. Metallica currently boasts an entire philharmonic orchestra
for sidemen. Is this digital dispute going to end up like analog tape,
essentially an increased promotional expense that "drives profits down"
from the grossly obscene to the merely obscene? Or will artists actually
quit? "If I can only make one billion a year and not three, I may as well
be flipping burgers."
Musicians are crazy, not stupid, and I write as lifer who posts his own music on the Web. I also write columns, novels, screenplays. All are duly copyrighted, and, being genuinely poor, I would like to get many dollars any time anyone so much as sniffs at one of them. But I suspect this is unreasonable. More to the point, and again, I suspect that in the Information Age, it's impossible. The entire concept of "intellectual property," artistic and otherwise, is in for a wrenching re-examination.
A futurist and commentator, Travis has been published nationally and internationally since 1978.
Copyright © 2000, Travis Charbeneau, All Rights Reserved.
travchar@mindspring.com
http://www.richmonder.com/charbeneau
Please share your thoughts and comments regarding this feature. You can do so by posting to our Hot Topics Forum.
