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The actual quote, which nobody ever remembers, is:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other
Information wants to be free because the cost of disseminating electronic data trends downwards, and the types of information that can be represented as electronic data trends. However, information also wants to be expensive, and one of the reasons information wants to be expensive is because the cost of disseminating electronic data is not the only cost associated with the existence of particular data.
The difficulty is that the music industry has for a long time existed on, basically, a scarcity model. There are a finite number of physical examples of an object in existence - and, until relatively recently, these objects cannot easily be exactly reproduced, because analogue reproduction is always lossy. You can close that gap - putting a reel-to-reel next to a record player is lossier than a hi-fi with a direct link to a metallic tape. However, in any case the original, be it vinyl or tape or CD, has some unique and intrinsic value - not just the object itself, but the quality of reproduction it represents.
If you have access to the Internet, though, and can use it to download exact or good-as-exact replicas of the digital information representing a song, you lose that scarcity model. If there is only one vinyl copy of "Do I Love You" in existence, people who really, really want to own that copy will pay a large amount for it. If there are a theoretically limitless number of exact representations of the song available, what do you do with that model?
The most popular current approach - the one practised by iTunes Music Store, Rhapsody, Amazon and so on - is a kind of emotional surcharge. You get the file, you also get a sense that you are playing the game - remunerating the artist in some way, showing your respect for the system through which the music is created and distributed. The money you pay minus the cost of creating, hosting and transmitting the file is the emotional cost of being part of this system, plus the fee for the tangential benefits of ease of finding, security, guaranteed sound quality and so on - although all of these needs can be served through file sharing. Another approach is the "license" approach - which basically acknowledges that some people like a lot of music a month, others not so many, so charges a flat fee for unlimited downloads - the emusic model. The proposed levy works a bit like this, but it extends it downwards - the logic being that if everyone downloads music illegally, logically everyone should be paying the subscription fee. Like gym membership, this is based on the assumption that almost nobody will actually use more than the cost of entry in using the facilities (in this case, bandwidth and hosting fees). The levy would work for me because I spend more than a few pounds buying songs.
However, the problem with the emotional model, or the opt-in license model, is that there are various ethical arguments against them - somebody may disagree with the record label's policies, say, or the songs might be being released against an artists' will by a record label to fulfill a contract, or they might feel that by declining to rerelease music the record company is seeing to preserve the scarcity model to the point of forfeiting the right to have copyright respected - and somebody with such a conviction at present has almost no chance of being held accountable for the illegal actions that they took in adhering to their principles - it's not exactly like chaining yourself to a nuclear submarine as principled stands go. The current attempts to reconsequence illegal downloading are an attempt to make it feel less easy, and most of all not like any serious breach of the law - I imagine most people feel about it about as they might about stubbing a cigarette out on the street in terms of the risk they think they put themselves at of punishment.
It might be worth thinking of other things distributed along similar channels. Software is an obvious one, but in general software downloading is less common - because free alternatives exist, because often one can legally download trial versions which can be activated by a code, so the download itself need not be illicit, because the files are often bigger and take longer to download, because they are more likely to contain viruses, because they are complex and less likely to work at all if one part of the download is damaged. The main areas where illegal downloading is a problem are programs where the price is so high that the disadvantages are outweighed by the cost saving - Windows operating systems, Macromedia, Adobe, things of that nature. Comics are downloaded illegally, and this causes problems for the comics houses (especially with new or collected comics), but the numbers involved are so small that nobody outside comics cares. What does interest me there is that.. oh, name escapes me. The chap who drew Phonogram. Anyway, he said in his solo comic that while he wanted people to buy the comic (because sales figures are a metric of success and the likelihood of getting more work through that channel) but that he accepted conditions where that was not possible (due to distance from comic shop, for example), and in that situation he was OK with people downloading it, and that, although not legal, the ethical implications of that could be offset by making a Paypal donation to him. I think slightly unwittingly, he set up a parallel, voluntary payment scheme for illegal downloaders who wished to pay the creator (but not the producer, unless he then shared it out) in exchange for the reading of the comic.
You could certainly imagine a "DC pass", say, which not only gave access to scans of some comics on the DC web site, but also gave one the right to download DC-owned material from other sites (that is, sites DC is not paying to create, stock or manage) without fear of persecution - although as we know DC are no strangers to fights about who actually created some of their offering, and given that I've seen people spend £100 in a comic shop on new comics alone God knows how much that pass would cost. But one could see a situation in which one e.g. paid a comics provider (or a record label, or all record labels through a joint agreement or a levy on broadband connections or CD-Rs or whatever) a fee for the right to download, and then paid a download site (run independently) for a guaranteed level of download quality. The rights holder would get cash without distribution overheads, and would retain some revenue stream through premium/personalised (NIN-style)/specifically artist-supporting or ease-of-use/difficulty of finding elsewhere-inspired purchases of MP3s on things like ITMS, plus of course having the remaining, slimmed-down CD/BluRay audio/DVD audio market for traditionalists and audiophiles.
Right now, though, if one can get a song available on sale downloaded illegally for free with the same or less hassle, in a version of equivalent or higher quality, with the same likelihood of being penalised, the question becomes something like "How much would how many people be prepared to spend to feel like they are playing the game?". If the numbers don't add up, the publishers have to increase ease of use, quality or special features, or lower quality and ease of use of illegal downloads and the feeling of impunity of illegal downloaders. |
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