Wondering why there’s flight disruption in the UK and Scandinavia? Here’s why.
What intrigues me is that the photographs were uploaded nearly a week ago. What happened in between? Do volcanic eruptions of this sort sometimes decide “No, we won’t spew forth any ash”?
I felt certain that flickr would have photographs of the event. The world of Now is not just about Twitter. It’s about the web. About all of us.
Thank you Steingrimur.
Yesterday I spent some time thinking about what Rachel Carson experienced in the period leading up to her writing The Sea Around Us, and following that up a decade or so later with Silent Spring. How we can learn from those experiences as we hurtle towards wholesale destruction of the internet and all it stands for, particularly with phenomena like the Digital Economy Act, the DMCA, Hadopi and the most appalling of them all, ACTA. I shared some of those thoughts with you here.
Today I want to spend a little more time on the same subject, but from a different perspective. Let me explain why.
Ever since I got visibly involved in the Digital Economy Bill debate, I have been dismayed by the number of people who spend time accusing me of complete naivete when it comes to the download and fileshare debate. The accusations usually begin with an assumption (on the part of the accusers) that I (and people like me) do not want to see “creators” properly rewarded for their work; this is then extrapolated into further accusations that classify unpaid digital downloading as theft, somehow taking the civil offence of copyright infringement and converting it into a criminal offence, despite the “owner” of the asset continuing to have complete and unfettered access to the asset, despite the extreme nonrival nature of the asset.
When I’ve tried to debate with the accusers, their usual stance has been “don’t talk to me about the need to change intellectual property law, don’t talk to me about how badly broken copyright law is, don’t talk to me about downloaders being the primary buyers, don’t talk to me about fair use and free speech and all that jazz. What you’re talking about is theft, pure and simple. Don’t come back until you’ve got sensible proposals for how creative people get paid for their work.”
So that’s where I want to begin.
Making sure creative people get proper payment for their work.
You see, where I come from, software is a creative business. Software is a creative industry… it must be: after all, the fancy figures for illegal downloads include the “lost revenue” for pirated software. [I am now trying desperately not to give in to the temptation to make up sentences that have words like “hoist” and “with” and “own” and “petard”. After all, this is a smelly enough business as it is].
Where was I? Oh yes. Creative people getting paid for their work.
Yup.
Let’s start with Linux. 60% of all web servers run Linux. “It would take $10.8 billion dollars to build the Fedora 9 distribution in today’s dollars“. Just one distribution.
Or let’s look at the Apache HTTP Server, which went past the 100 million web sites landmark a year or two ago.
Or let’s look at the volunteers who keep the Internet Storm Center manned and productive.
Or let’s go back in time and look at the volunteers who wrote RFC 675, without which there would be no internet.
Or let’s look at the people who work for and with industry bodies like ICANN and W3C and IETF and, more recently, the Web Science Trust.
All possible because of volunteers. Yes the volunteers may get paid by organisations that can perceive the value generated by such voluntary activity; but this form of payment is closer to patronage than anything else.
Volunteers.
I could go on and on, but I won’t. I hope I’ve made the point already. The point is that for the internet to exist, many things have to be in place. There have to be people willing to invest in stuff; people willing to connect the stuff up; people willing to run the many-headed beast that emerges as a result of connecting the stuff up; people willing to protect the beast as it mutates organically, naturally; people willing to keep trying to find faster, cheaper, better ways of doing things.
It all begins with a state of mind. A willingness to share. A focus on being open, a focus on enabling people at the edge to do things they would otherwise not be able to do.
Without that state of mind there are no volunteers, there is no set of standards and protocols, there is no process, cumbersome or otherwise, to let the internet evolve: there is no internet.
Without that internet there is no goldmine for “rightsholders” to strip of all value. Without that internet artists will get paid even less than they do currently, however unlikely that sounds.
Incidentally, here’s a very instructive method of visualising what musicians get paid: [My thanks to @gapingvoid and to @psfk for sharing it with me].
[Also incidentally, Hugh is a good friend, I love the way he thinks, and I really like his recent passion “Remember Who You Are”. He’s got some really great posts together under that banner. Which is why it was a privilege for me to be able to contribute this post over at Gapingvoid.]
Which brings me to the end of this particular post.
We need to remember who we are. Stewards of the internet. The internet, a concept, a state of mind, a set of values, a network of networks of people, things and infrastructure. Where people live and work and learn and read and create. Oh yes, and where people occasionally listen to music or watch videos.
I’m going to continue to think about the internet, particularly in the context of writings like Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet; Eben Moglen’s recent speech on Freedom In The Cloud and David Gelernter’s Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously
The internet was built for sharing. The internet relies on people who share their time freely and passionately.
There is a catch, however. These people expect something in return for the investment they made, the investment they make, the investment they are prepared to continue to make. And that something is this: a free, unfettered internet.
So when the talk in cafes and dinner tables turns to creative people and the need to make sure creative people get paid properly, do make sure you include all creative people and all modes of payment.
Maybe it’s because of the events leading up to the Digital Economy Bill becoming an Act here in the UK. It’s been a bit like Chinese water torture for many months; then, more recently, as the BPI saw their chance to corrupt parliamentary process and took it, it felt more like being waterboarded. I have had it up to here with people who think the internet was built to become a distribution mechanism for Hollywood and Universal Music and David Geffen.
My first objection to the Digital Economy Bill was to do with technical difficulties in proving who downloaded what: the complexity and inefficacy of technical solutions, the guaranteed waste of time and money, the likelihood of erroneous accusations, the unwanted consequence of driving dissent underground. My second objection was to do with the nature of the punishment, completely out of proportion with the crime, possibly illegal in human rights terms and with definite and unnecessary collateral damage on non-participants. My third objection was to do with the manipulation of data, the extrapolation of questionable samples into WMD-like justifications, but then I have to accept that statistics and lies have been kissing cousins for many years now. My fourth objection was to to with the corruption of process, the way the Bill was timed, how debate was avoided, how all parties achieved nothing but grubbiness in the process. And my final objection was to do with the people involved, the vestedness of their interests.
Many of us who opposed the Bill vehemently were quite happy to see legitimate and proportionate action taken against thieves. Legitimate. Proportionate. Against thieves. Sadly the Bill had nothing to do with words like those.
The industry lobby did their work well. Now we have to get used to a world where filesharing and downloading are both wrongly equated with theft, where damaging action can be taken on mere suspicion, and where dictatorial powers may be assumed almost at will. All to try and hold on to a dying business model. There will be consequences, unexpected consequences. [For those of you who are interested, I wrote about the data here, here and here, about the Bill’s inappropriateness of punishment here, about the unreasonable bias here and about the core issues related to the Bill here and here. And if you want to understand how retrograde all this is, read this. ]
What’s done is done. And we will live with the consequences. And learn from them, and maybe even change as a result. The Digital Economy Bill was a skirmish, maybe even a battle, but it wasn’t the war.
The War is about the internet: what it is, what it means, what it stands for, how it works, who it works for, and many such related questions.
It’s been an interesting week or so in this context.
Apple and their SDK terms; Twitter and Tweetie; the Appeals Court and their ruling on the FCC and Net Neutrality; Microsoft and Kin. European telcos catching the Ed Whitacre disease. All this in an environment that has Google and China, Android, the Droid and the Nexus One, all apparently living in perfect harmony.
By the pricking of my thumbs…..
I think we’re heading towards the cyber equivalent of what Rachel Carson saw and understood when she wrote Silent Spring nearly 50 years ago, having established her reputation with The Sea Around Us.
[And yes, the internet is capable of supporting piracy as well. But let us first understand what extreme nonrival goods are, how copyright infringements are different from theft. If Labour use unlicensed images in a campaign advertisement, is it called theft? When John Fogarty can be accused of plagiarising himself, is it called theft?]
We will soon begin to understand what the internet is. What identity means in an internet context. What intellectual property means in an internet context. The establishment of a Web Science Trust may well accelerate all this.
When we do learn about all this, we will begin to enact laws. Laws that protect the internet. Laws that make criminals of people who damage the internet.
Rachel Carson may have helped us with an understanding of what it is to become stewards of physical space. We now need to become stewards of cyberspace as well.
In that sense, the Digital Economy Bill may actually be a godsend, bringing together disparate groups of people with common, passionately held aims.
Image courtesy of Drew Douglas duly attributed here
The photograph above was taken at a rugby league game in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in September 2008. In it you can see young children and older youths watching the game from rooftops adjacent to the stadium.
Tho photograph below, nearly a hundred years earlier, shows fans watching a 1914 World Series game in Shibe Park. My thanks to explorePAhistory for sharing the photo.
Two photographs. Nearly a century apart. Of people watching a sports game without paying.
The question is, were they stealing? Would you call it stealing? I wouldn’t. But I know some people who would.
People involved in the distribution of published material have tried their best to call such actions “stealing” since the beginnings of copyright. If you really want to understand what copyright is about, what its origins were, then please go and read this excellent piece. It tells you why copyright had everything to do with distributors, distribution and central control and very little to do with authors, musicians and artists. Why it had everything to do with censorship and exclusivity and very little to do with creativity and free expression. In fact, if you get the chance, spend time at questioncopyright.org; there’s some very useful material there, including this video, Copying is Not Theft.
After 9/11, there were people who tried very hard to conflate “Muslims” with “terrorists”. I have many Muslim friends, and none of them is a terrorist.
During Katrina, there were people who tried very hard to conflate “citizen” with “refugee”. Citizens have rights; refugees rely on the generosity of others. The rights of New Orleans citizens were sought to be weakened by the conflation, a technique that George Lakoff wrote about quite eloquently.
So it is with copying in a digital world. People are trying to make you believe it is stealing. To understand what’s happening, let’s look at the ticketless folk watching the rugby and the baseball from the rooftops.
What are they stealing?
In the same photograph, you can see folks who paid for the tickets watching the game. They’ve paid for the right, and they’re watching the game. The people who sold the tickets make their money, related to the seating capacity of the stadium and the number of tickets sold.
Economists call such “goods” nonrival, to the extent that one person enjoying the good does not detract from the ability of others to enjoy the same good. The people who promoted the games did not incur any costs related to the people on the rooftops. If you can make a copy of something without in any way affecting the ability of others to enjoy that something, economists call such goods extreme nonrival goods. Sunsets and panoramas and views are examples of extreme nonrival goods, as are openair concerts and street theatre.
All these openair events share something in common. They’re in the open. Repeat that. They’re in the open.
People who promote sports events and street entertainment and openair concerts understand this. They know that as a direct result of their actions, others will be able to enjoy what’s happening. For free.
They can stop this. Very easily. By not using open spaces to do this. If they moved openair concerts to closed venues, the possibility of others freeloading diminishes. This open-to-closed spectrum is a continuum rather than a set of discrete outcomes. So, for example, you can build walls around openair venues, as happens with Kenwood. I have paid for, and enjoyed, many concerts at Kenwood, in the wet and in the dry. This summer my children will be going to concerts in Reading, and they will have paid for the tickets. Passers-by will be able to hear the music, but nowhere near as well as people sitting in the roped-off areas.
Shibe Park, in Philadelphia, decided to do something about the onlookers. So they built a bloody great wall around the stadium. Shame, but that is how some people think.
This summer, there are a few concerts taking place around Hyde Park, with tickets and with reserved areas. Can you imagine how it would be if the promoters managed to convince the Crown that a 16ft wall should be erected all around the park, just so passers-by won’t be able to catch glimpses of the concerts?
In a way, that’s what music and film distributors want to do with the internet. Like Hyde Park, the internet is a commons, something that has been designed with openness and sharing in mind, something that can be enjoyed by people without detracting from the enjoyment of others.
But only if we stop people from erecting hideous walls around the commons.
The Digital Economy Bill seeks to do this. And it’s worse than that. Because it seeks to protect and enhance distributor rights while actually damaging the rights of consumers and creators in many walks of life. Photographers, for example, are heavily affected. Just read Kevin Marks here and Simon Phipps here, or go to Open Rights Group to find out more about what you’re about to lose.
Think about this. If internet copying was really stealing, then there would be an active disincentive to produce digital works. Yet, in the apparent heyday of internet copying, every form of digital publishing is on the rise. There are more books being written and published, more films made, more albums released. Why would this be? Looking for that answer, I spent some time with Paulo Coelho some years ago:
I wanted to talk to Paulo for one simple reason: I’d heard rumours that the biggest pirate site for Paulo Coelho books, Pirate Coelho, was actually paid for by Paulo Coelho. In fact that has since changed: Paulo now hosts them in a subdirectory of his own blog, here. An author who pays others to rip him off? I needed to talk to him.
His answer is best understood in this statement from Wikipedia: In total, Coelho has sold more than 100 million books in over 150 countries worldwide, and his works have been translated into 67 languages. As an author, he wanted to reach as many people as possible, particularly in different cultures and geographies. His publishers had their way of doing this. His fans had a better way.
The internet, with its extremely low cost of copying and distributing things digital, transforms the access and distribution landscape for many industries. Its effect is felt most painfully in the publishing industries: music, film, journalism, books. The pain is at its most intense for those whose function with the industry was centralised control of distribution.
I work for a telco. Before that, I worked for an investment bank. Some time before that, I worked for hardware manufacturers with proprietary operating systems. All my life I’ve been working in industries where the core monopoly rights of the industry have been taken away by technological advance, often aided and abetted by regulation.
Regulation is first and foremost meant to protect customers, to protect the consumer. It does this in many ways, at least one of which is in preventing monopolies and reducing any significant market power.
When it comes to music, film, books and journalism, things become very complex. It’s like having a fire in the fire alarm system. The very people charged with telling you the truth about what’s happening are themselves affected by what’s happening. Which means that with a few exceptions, mainstream media have not woken up to the wholesale damage being planned by the Digital Economy Bill.
Let me end with this. Copying per se is not stealing. After Michael Jackson did his moonwalk, children the world over copied him. They were not stealing. Digital forms of music, film, book and newspapers are cheap to copy and to distribute, because of the internet. The internet is a commons, specifically designed for doing this. For copying and distributing. Throwing that away just to protect the “rightsholders” is questionable in the extreme. Digital assets are nonrival goods, shareable without affecting the rights of anyone else to enjoy the same thing.
We have very little time to act. So please please get going, write to your MP, call her up, meet him, do something. Start off with reading this, make sure your voice is heard.
Do you find it easy to be moderate about things? It’s taken me a long time to learn about moderation, about knowing how to leaven and temper my passion with patience. For most of my life I’ve been an extremist, either full-on about something or not at all engaged. As a result, particularly of late, I’ve had to take time to learn one thing: If you feel really passionate about something, take the time to step back and look at things from the opposite perspective.
Now the Digital Economy Bill is something I feel passionate about, which is why, as we approach Tuesday 6th April 2010, I’ve been writing a post a day on the subject for the past few days. The Bill covers a litany of subjects; the particular bit that bothers me is to do with the treatment of downloaders, the what, the why, the who, the how, the whole shooting match. As far as I’m concerned, I feel that the premise is wrong (illegal downloading does not take place at the levels claimed); the people are wrong (the Bill is being pushed through by unelected people who have clear bias in favour of “rightsholders”); the process is wrong (such an important Bill should not be finagled through parliament without proper debate) and the punishment is wrong (as BT CEO Ian Livingston pointed out recently, a fine is more appropriate for the crime, it’s easier to administer and it does not affect others in the household).
Notwithstanding all that, let me try and look at this issue from the perspective of the “rightsholder”. In fact let me go further, let me look at it from the viewpoint of the rightsholder after the Bill, in its current state, has become law. Ostensibly as happy as a creature of the porcine persuasion in an environ of excrement.
What could possibly go wrong? Let me count the ways:
1. People stop downloading all digital music, not just “illegal” music
Retaliation: The music industry, particularly through organisations like BPI and IFPI ,has spent a long time telling its customers what rotten people they are. In the latest report issued by Ofcom, the country had around 17.3 consumer and small business broadband lines; which suggests that a very high proportion of digital music customers acted illegally. Irritated by the change in law and by being treated like criminals, people may just give up and stop downloading music altogether, legal as well as illegal.
Fraud: Given the level of internet fraud going around, people may not want to take the risk of losing their broadband connection by buying music in good faith from a pretend-legal site. When they buy anything else, they tend to get their money back from the credit card company. When buying music, even in good faith, they run the risk of losing their broadband connections. So they stop buying music online altogether.
Streaming: Man’s ability to record and replay music is itself less than 150 years old. Newer than the postage stamp, newer than the locomotive, newer than the Grand National, newer than the FA Cup. By British standards, recorded music is a mere stripling, a callow youth. Man’s ability to own the recorded music and retain it for personal enjoyment is even newer, it hasn’t been there that long. And it may not be in vogue for long either: there is a growing body of evidence that the Millenials prefer streamed music to owned music. My own habits have changed. I still buy vinyl, but in dribs and drabs. I still buy CDs, but also in dribs and drabs. For the most part, I use services like Spotify.
So whether it’s frustration or fear or a change of habit, people may use this opportunity to stop downloading altogether. Since digital music sales are reported to be booming, the industry runs the risk of killing the baby goose before it really has a chance to lay any golden eggs.
2. People stop downloading music illegally, but there is no materially positive impact on revenues
Download levels estimated wrongly: The Mandelson 7 million figure turns out to be hogwash. [And, like Churchill, I shall resist the temptation to say I told you so]. So even though everyone behaves legally when it comes to downloads, the market uplift just isn’t there. [ I am so tempted to ask that, in the event of the law being passed unchanged, the music industry is asked to put down 15% of the loss figures it has claimed into escrow in advance, to pay ISPs for the cost of implementing the technical solutions].
High price elasticity of demand: The pirated downloads might have been real, but there is greater price elasticity of demand than was anticipated by the industry. Rolex watches sell for thousands of pounds. Rolex ripoffs sell for tens of pounds. No one in Rolex honestly believes that the customer who paid a tenner for a ripoff was a real contender for paying five hundred times that for the real thing.
The end of try-before-you-buy dampens sales: There is evidence that people who download music are also the ones who buy digital music. After all, they must have the connections, the access and the equipment in the first place. By being denied the chance to try the music out, they may not buy at the levels they used to. So any uplift in digital revenues via the change in law is compensated and balanced by a drop in the revenues that used to be there.
It is one thing to lay out a whole series of “facts” in order to browbeat busy politicians to do something; it is another altogether to expect that those “facts” become real in the process. In this respect, the Digital Economy Bill may turn out to be a case of shutting the stable door after the piglet has bolted.
3. People stop buying from established labels and channels and move to new, independent channels that offer them what they want
In a fascinating study entitled The State of Music Online: Ten Years After Napster, the Pew Research Center makes the following, telling, observation:
While the music industry has been on the front lines of the battle to convert freeloaders into paying customers, their efforts have been watched closely by other digitized industries — newspapers, book publishing and Hollywood among them — who are hoping to staunch their own bleeding before it’s too late. And if the music market is any indication of how consumer expectations will evolve elsewhere, the demands for free content will extend far beyond the mere cost of the product.
In the decade since Napster’s launch, digital music consumers have demonstrated their interest in five kinds of “free” selling points:
- Cost (zero or approaching zero).
- Portability (to any device).
- Mobility (wireless access to music).
- Choice (access to any song ever recorded).
- Remixability (freedom to remix and mashup music).
All of this makes for a tall order, but if history is any guide, music consumers usually get what they want. And as researchers look back on the first decade of the 21st century, many will no doubt point to the formative impact of file-sharing and peer-to-peer exchange of music on the internet. Napster and other peer-to-peer services “schooled” users in the social practice of downloading, uploading, and sharing digital content, which, in turn, has contributed to increased demand for broadband, greater processing power and mobile media devices. Further, the Napsterization effect extends to non-media areas such as sharing health information, oversight of politicians, access to government data and online dating via free social networking sites.
Remember this is about digital music consumers, not “dirty rotten illegal downloaders and filesharers”. The people who crafted the current version of the Digital Economy Bill appear to have thrown away all the input and consultation to do with the consumer side of the music business and concentrated on the “rightsholders”. [I suppose this should have been expected, since that is the precise problem with a lot of modern copyright law, too one-sided to be useful or progressive]. Consumers want the five things stated above. If they don’t get it from the established digital music industry, they will go somewhere else to get it. Which gives independent labels and new entrants the chance they’re waiting for, to drive a bus through the barndoor of opportunity that’s opening up for them. Artists have the opportunity to set up their own label and distribution capability, like the Grateful Dead did nearly fifty years ago. There are many who are watching and learning from the Dead, from Radiohead, from Nine Inch Nails, and so on.
4. Content is not king: simplicity and convenience rule
There was a very interesting article published by Andrew Savikas in the middle of last year, talking about content being a service business. In it he quotes from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails:
[W]hat you NEED to do is this – give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people’s email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special – make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters… whatever. [emphasis added]
Reading through what Reznor had to say in his original post, I found another extract telling in the extreme:
The database you are amassing should not be abused, but used to inform people that are interested in what you do when you have something going on – like a few shows, or a tour, or a new record, or a webcast, etc.
Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace – it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don’t autoplay). Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any – Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.
The key phrase for me is this one: make it simple to navigate and easy to find and hear music.
When I read the Savikas article, one of the points I understood was this: the success of iTunes lay in the quality of the service they offered, the simplicity and convenience, rather than in premium content. In fact, the pricing of digital goods tends to reflect this: prices for songs, albums, films and books tend to be very similar for a given class of digital good, suggesting that the content behaves like a commodity, that the perceived value is in service simplicity. When you take into account recent developments such as Ofcom’s stance on Sky’s exclusive premium content, there is every possibility that there’s going to be downward pressure on the prices of premium digital content.
So let me summarise. I don’t know much about how the world is changing as a result of the internet and the web, as a result of digitisation. What I do know is this: these changes are putting real structural pressure on a number of industries, particularly on the “publishing” industries of music, film, journalism and books. Every participant in the supply chains of those industries is feeling that pressure.
During such a time of flux, the customer becomes even more of a scarcity, even more of an asset. Any action you take which alienates customers, you take at your peril.
In this context, the actions of the music industry at this time, particularly in the context of the Digital Economy Bill, seem foolhardy in the extreme. Foolhardy enough for shareholders and activists to look at the consequences very carefully, and to take legal action against the decision makers.
You know something? If I was one of those people who’d lobbied to put all the garbage in the Digital Economy Bill, I would start praying. Now.
And I would write to my MP and ask that the Bill be withdrawn. Even if I worked for the BPI. Particularly if I worked for the BPI.
Sometimes it pays to Be Careful What You Wish For.
