Copying is not stealing, mmmkay?
I just left this on my friend Richard's blog when he discussed the "copying CDs is stealing" issue. I've been struggling with this for many years (one reason why I haven't made a CD in a while, I'm morally unsure of what it means anymore), but I'm slowly getting to a place where I think I am starting to understand this fully...
"Illegal downloading" is not the same as "stealing" either legally, practically, or morally. If you have a car, and I steal it, then I have a car and you do not. That's the definition of stealing: to take your property and thus deprive you of using it. It is predicated on the law of "scarcity of resource" - that stealing your food means you go hungry, since there's not enough food for both of us. or stealing your money means you can't afford to buy new food.
Digital information, since it is infinitely replicable for negligible cost, therefore CANNOT be stolen BY DEFINITION. Anyone who states that copying their music (or whatever) is stealing money out of their pocket either does not understand this fully, or is deliberately obscuring the real facts in order to profit.
In order to obfuscate this fast, large media corporations have been fighting on several fronts over the past years, such as:
Therefore the challenge for any artist in the digital age is not how to constrain the infinite replication of their work, but how to profit from it, which is a very different thing. Take Magnatune: you can download stuff for free from there or you can choose to pay IF YOU WANT. Seems to work for them and their artists.
Take Radiohead: they offer their album for WHATEVER PEOPLE WANT TO PAY. So Radiohead are stupid, right? No-one is going to pay for something they are being offered for free... right? Hey guess what: the average payment was something over 2 bucks last I looked.
OK says the traditionalist, that a lot less than the $10 cost of a CD or MP3 from iTunes... but hey, guess what? The ARTIST doesn't GET that 10 bucks YOU pay. The record company does. The ARTIST gets a tiny share of that, maybe about... ummm... wow... TWO BUCKS. So how much money does Radiohead lose by offering their album for whatever you want to pay? Answer: zero. They can give it away and MAKE EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY AS BY SELLING IT FOR TEN DOLLARS.
Welcome to the digital economy my friend: where there's a lot of money to be made by giving things away for free. See GNU/Linux for a shining example.
But wait! There's more... Radiohead haven't just made the same amount of money. They have also given the record away to LOTS of people who would not, or could not, otherwise have paid for it. So NOW they have a fanbase who are massively more numerous than before. That's called GREAT MARKETING, and how much did it cost them? That's right: nothing. So not only have they made the same money as before, they've actually added value to their product!
As Cory Doctorow once said: my problem as an artist isn't piracy, it's OBSCURITY. No-one is going to pay for my work if they don't know who I am. Therefore it's OBVIOUSLY better to GIVE THE STUFF AWAY TO PEOPLE WHO WANT IT, rather than NOT sell it to people who don't know who the fuck I am in the first place.
And of course the WORST POSSIBLE THING I could do is hassle the people who WANT to hear my music: they are my FANS, my success DEPENDS on them liking me. So only an idiot would say that their fans are WRONG FOR WANTING TO HEAR THEIR MUSIC, right? I mean, really, what could be DUMBER than my criticising people for actually WANTING my work. But hey, guess again: THAT'S WHAT RECORDING COMPANIES DO.
Any artist who has a problem with people wanting to hear their music is a fucking idiot frankly.
I could rant about this for another couple of hours, but I have initiations to do... And yeah, I know I haven't written here in a while, Facebook kinda took over for a while there, but I have not fled LJ completely yet... :-)
"Illegal downloading" is not the same as "stealing" either legally, practically, or morally. If you have a car, and I steal it, then I have a car and you do not. That's the definition of stealing: to take your property and thus deprive you of using it. It is predicated on the law of "scarcity of resource" - that stealing your food means you go hungry, since there's not enough food for both of us. or stealing your money means you can't afford to buy new food.
Digital information, since it is infinitely replicable for negligible cost, therefore CANNOT be stolen BY DEFINITION. Anyone who states that copying their music (or whatever) is stealing money out of their pocket either does not understand this fully, or is deliberately obscuring the real facts in order to profit.
In order to obfuscate this fast, large media corporations have been fighting on several fronts over the past years, such as:
- creating propaganda to persuade people that replicating an infinite resource is morally wrong (using morally loaded terms such as "stealing" and "piracy" (neither of which it is)
- paying politicians enormous sums of money to enact laws to make the free use and trade of digital information illegal (ironically often the same people who shout loudest about the virtues of the free market economy)
Therefore the challenge for any artist in the digital age is not how to constrain the infinite replication of their work, but how to profit from it, which is a very different thing. Take Magnatune: you can download stuff for free from there or you can choose to pay IF YOU WANT. Seems to work for them and their artists.
Take Radiohead: they offer their album for WHATEVER PEOPLE WANT TO PAY. So Radiohead are stupid, right? No-one is going to pay for something they are being offered for free... right? Hey guess what: the average payment was something over 2 bucks last I looked.
OK says the traditionalist, that a lot less than the $10 cost of a CD or MP3 from iTunes... but hey, guess what? The ARTIST doesn't GET that 10 bucks YOU pay. The record company does. The ARTIST gets a tiny share of that, maybe about... ummm... wow... TWO BUCKS. So how much money does Radiohead lose by offering their album for whatever you want to pay? Answer: zero. They can give it away and MAKE EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY AS BY SELLING IT FOR TEN DOLLARS.
Welcome to the digital economy my friend: where there's a lot of money to be made by giving things away for free. See GNU/Linux for a shining example.
But wait! There's more... Radiohead haven't just made the same amount of money. They have also given the record away to LOTS of people who would not, or could not, otherwise have paid for it. So NOW they have a fanbase who are massively more numerous than before. That's called GREAT MARKETING, and how much did it cost them? That's right: nothing. So not only have they made the same money as before, they've actually added value to their product!
As Cory Doctorow once said: my problem as an artist isn't piracy, it's OBSCURITY. No-one is going to pay for my work if they don't know who I am. Therefore it's OBVIOUSLY better to GIVE THE STUFF AWAY TO PEOPLE WHO WANT IT, rather than NOT sell it to people who don't know who the fuck I am in the first place.
And of course the WORST POSSIBLE THING I could do is hassle the people who WANT to hear my music: they are my FANS, my success DEPENDS on them liking me. So only an idiot would say that their fans are WRONG FOR WANTING TO HEAR THEIR MUSIC, right? I mean, really, what could be DUMBER than my criticising people for actually WANTING my work. But hey, guess again: THAT'S WHAT RECORDING COMPANIES DO.
Any artist who has a problem with people wanting to hear their music is a fucking idiot frankly.
I could rant about this for another couple of hours, but I have initiations to do... And yeah, I know I haven't written here in a while, Facebook kinda took over for a while there, but I have not fled LJ completely yet... :-)