Tag Archives: Piracy

Civil Conversation on IP

T-Bone Burnett and I ventured into the academic lion’s den at MIT on Saturday and had a remarkably civil conversation about piracy, IP, fair use and other touchy subjects. Much of the thanks have to go to my colleague Henry Jenkins the founder of the Futures of Entertainment Conference, who both guided the conversation and provided a constant reminder that in a participatory culture notions of fair use are critical to enhancing creativity. Bone and I made the argument that the main problem that can be solved without legislation is for brands and advertising networks to stop sending millions of dollars of advertising to pirate sites run by organized criminals like Kim Dotcom. This of course put both the Google folks in the audience at FOE 6 as well as some of the branding agencies, in a defensive crouch, accusing us of whining. Questions were posed as to why Google would be interested in helping the music or movie industry at the sacrifice of profits to their own bottom line.

Henry Jenkins’ notion is that there is no reason for technology, content and academia to be in conflict over these issues. We were able to talk both passionately about the right of artists to get paid for their work and the right of the participatory culture to take sections of an artistic work and remix it for non-commercial use. This is real progress and my hope is that the bombast surrounding this issue is slowly surrendering to a more civil conversation that can resolve this important issue. I also want to thank our correspondent Len Bullard for his contribution to the conversation. He played the role of our trainer before the debate brilliantly.

Letter to Emily White

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I want to call the attention of this community to a wonderful post from David Lowery (of the band Cracker) that has been getting a huge amount of attention in the last few days. It was written to a young music intern at NPR’s All Songs Considered who confessed on the air that she had onlyy purchased 15 songs out of the 11,000 in her music collection. Here is a small piece of the article, but I really hope you will read the whole post.

What the corporate backed Free Culture movement is asking us to do is analogous to changing our morality and principles to allow the equivalent of looting. Say there is a neighborhood in your local big city. Let’s call it The ‘Net. In this neighborhood there are record stores. Because of some antiquated laws, The ‘Net was never assigned a police force. So in this neighborhood people simply loot all the products from the shelves of the record store. People know it’s wrong, but they do it because they know they will rarely be punished for doing so. What the commercial Free Culture movement (see the “hybrid economy”) is saying is that instead of putting a police force in this neighborhood we should simply change our values and morality to accept this behavior. We should change our morality and ethics to accept looting because it is simply possible to get away with it. And nothing says freedom like getting away with it, right?

But it’s worse than that. It turns out that Verizon, AT&T, Charter etc etc are charging a toll to get into this neighborhood to get the free stuff. Further, companies like Google are selling maps (search results) that tell you where the stuff is that you want to loot. Companies like Megavideo are charging for a high speed looting service (premium accounts for faster downloads). Google is also selling ads in this neighborhood and sharing the revenue with everyone except the people who make the stuff being looted. Further, in order to loot you need to have a $1,000 dollar laptop, a $500 dollar iPhone or $400 Samsumg tablet. It turns out the supposedly “free” stuff really isn’t free. In fact it’s an expensive way to get “free” music. (Like most claimed “disruptive innovations”it turns out expensive subsidies exist elsewhere.) Companies are actually making money from this looting activity. These companies only make money if you change your principles and morality! And none of that money goes to the artists!

I have been debating this issue for the past two months with young digerati like Alexis Ohanian of Reddit and Mike Masnick of Techdirt. Somehow I feel like the conversation is changing and respect for the creative artist’s rights is coming back. Let’s hope so.

Obama and SOPA

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Obama and Google's Eric Schmidt

The White House has weighed in on the Online Piracy Act. They are clearly walking a tightrope between two competing powers, both of which have traditionally supported Democrats. On one side there is Hollywood and the music industry and on the other is Google. There has been an incredible amount of misinformation floating around about piracy for years and of course there are also some real bully boys who will threaten anyone who opposes their right to “free culture.” We have had these battles for two years on this blog. So here is my thoughts about all of this.

Google- The world’s largest search engine has made hundreds of millions allowing makers of pirated or counterfeit goods to advertise using Google Ad Words. It signed a non-prosecution agreement with the Federal Government and agreed to forgo $500,000,000 worth of counterfeit drug advertising. Google does not want to stop the worldwide revenue it gets from pirated content advertising. Google and it’s competitors could eliminate the need for Piracy legislation by immediately adopting the following rules:

We won’t sell advertising on pirate websites.
We won’t have our search engine link to pirate websites that can’t prove they have legitimate licenses to the content they host.
We will stop pretending we can’t control what gets posted on You Tube.

Hollywood and the Music Business- What I can’t figure out is how did movies and music get to a position that the public feels they are entitled to these works for free? So you never feel you are entitled to a meal at a restaurant for free, do you? What is it about digital entertainment: movies, music, TV and very soon, books that makes them special? Why should the worker in these business not get paid? We built a knowledge society, and the best products we export are all digital objects of desire. But no one seems to care about the notions of intellectual property. It’s so self destructive.

So the President has to thread the needle. That’s why the statement yesterday from the White House was important.

We expect and encourage all private parties, including both content creators and Internet platform providers working together, to adopt voluntary measures and best practices to reduce online piracy.

Google could begin these voluntary measures listed above and reduce the pressure to push a flawed act through Congress. Without some middle ground this whole discussion is going in a very stupid direction.

D.R.M.–R.I.P.

Recession Coming

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The stock market woke up yesterday to an ugly unemployment report that seemed to confirm the recession fears I have been voicing for a while. The Times quoted one analyst,

“There’s no mystery as to why the unemployment rate went up,” said Robert A. Barbera, chief economist at the research firm ITG. “The mystery is why it took so long.”

Actually, it’s not such a mystery. A large amount of the construction labor in the U.S. is undocumented workers and so when they started getting laid off six months ago, the government statistics acted as if it wasn’t happening. Now their reduced buying power is pinching at the retail and services level which reported a 19.6% drop from one year ago. Much as Mitt Romney and other republicans would like to make political hay on the immigration issue, the contribution of undocumented workers to the economy is huge and we are all going to be feeling their pain in the coming months.

The biggest problem is that the Fed cannot aggressively cut rates as they did in the 2001 downturn.

As this chart from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal shows, the reason we are having so much pain at the gas pump is that the buying power of the dollar is crashing. Anyone who has tried to buy breakfast in London knows this, but the average American congressman is clueless. The more we push the Fed to open the monetary spigot and flood the economy with cheap dollars, the lower the dollar will fall and the more expensive oil will get. Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson have pursued a weak dollar policy ostensibly to help the American manufacturer to sell his goods abroad to aid our huge trade deficit. If it was working, manufacturing employment would be climbing, but yesterday’s labor figures showed that manufacturing employment fell almost 2% year over year. 27 years of neoconservative economic policy have hollowed out our manufacturing base, so we don’t make “things” that other countries want. We don’t ship Dodge trucks from Detroit to Beijing and our great multinationals like Coca Cola or P &G make their product in the country they sell it in.

What we do make is software:movies, music, video games, computer programs and applications, drug molecule patents. The irony is that the Bush Administration has created such contempt for “Brand America” around the world, that many people in China or Brazil are just as happy to buy the cheap pirated versions of our software, which returns no capital to the U.S. or to the creators who put their blood, sweat and tears into the song or the movie. What’s worse is that their governments are willing to turn a blind eye to the piracy problem. You don’t think the 50 million pirated DVD’s in China are manufactured on some guys computer one by one do you? Of course not. The huge pressing plants are probably owned by well connected party members.

Jonathan Taplin

Director, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab