Last week, the National Music Publishers Association put the top 50 unlicensed lyrics websites on notice. President of the NMPA David Isrealite had a simple message to these top infringers: “Get licensed, get offline, or get sued.” And with two recent judgments in its favor, Isrealite has little doubt his organization would prevail in its pursuit of these cases. Identifying who the top 50 illegal lyrics sites are is the result of work led by David Lowery at the University of Georgia, where he is a professor. (Note: Link to study contains the list of these top 50 sites.) Known principally as the leader of bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, Lowery’s background is actually in mathematics, and he collaborated in developing an algorithm to identify these top 50 sites. At the head of the list is RapGenius.com.
Lyrics sites make an interesting subject in that, if licensed, they adequately fulfill many of the purported virtues of the internet. When the licenses are paid, all three parties in the arrangement benefit; the publishers (artists) are compensated, the user gets a free information resource, and the site owner can sell ads against the traffic he generates. Contrarily, the unlicensed lyric site represents the end of civilization as we know it. These sites serve nobody other than a handful of poachers using SEO to generate free money for themselves. There’s no innovation, no job creation, no benefit for the original content creators; and there is no end of legal, easily-found alternatives for the user who wants to look up lyrics. In fact, depending on what lyrics you type into a Google search, all of the first twenty or so results could well be licensed sites. I happen to think a songwriter’s or a band’s website ought to be in the top search results, but that’s another conversation. To allow unlicensed lyric sites to continue to operate is tantamount to saying, “Yes, the Internet we want is a place where muggers, thieves, and bottom-feeders are allowed to thrive.”
Unfortunately, where there’s money to be made, there’s always someone eager to normalize what is essentially a sleazy, back-alley hustle and call it business. In this case think Mark Andreeson’s VC fund putting $15 million into the aforementioned RapGenius quite recently. Anyone who claims that piracy is merely a reaction to the producing industries’ failure to adapt, and who wants to maintain a semblance of integrity, should champion the NMPA’s declaration in this case and call the Andreeson VC funding out for the kind of grotesque mockery of capitalism that it is. There is no difference between knowingly profiting off the mortgage-backed securities scam and knowingly profiting off the exploitation of songwriters or textile workers or farmers or anyone else who’s getting hosed. And in this case, it’s in the service of a website that offers the public nothing they can’t get elsewhere and for free! What we do by choosing to allow this is to say that the world belongs to the biggest bullies, in this case using code and basic marketing as weapons. And the reason I think it’s a big deal is that it goes right to the heart of how we hope to shape the future of society in concert with these technologies.
When it comes to post-apocalyptic fiction, we typically see one of two future worlds. In the brutal dystopia, we find a barren and wild landscape where all social order has broken down, and most of what was once humanity has regressed into some primitive form depicted as any of the following: cannibals, mutants, neo-religious psychos, cyborgs, homicidal gangs with colorful mohawks. In the ontological dystopia, social order still exists with the masses comfortably ensconced in some gleaming edifice, blissfully ignorant that they are prisoners of a state where government has merged with some ultra-pervasive corporation monitoring and controlling their every move. In either scenario, the heroes typically represent the last remaining seeds of real humanity, and the plot recreates the Moses saga concluding with the hero leading some portion of human refugees in Exodus toward a new dawn. Music swells. Roll credits.
In considering the matter at hand through the lens of this metaphor, the unlicensed lyric site owners and their VCs are the barbarians who have abandoned social order and who feed off the defenseless in the wild landscape of cyberspace. But there is also an element of the ontological dystopia inherent in this thought exercise, and that’s where the major corporate leaders of the internet industry tell the citizenry living in blissful ignorance, “Take the candy (lyrics). It’s free. We’ve provided it for you.” And the public is mollified by this until discovering all too late that it isn’t just songwriters whose labor can be exploited in this manner.
In his recent article about metadata in The Atlantic, technologist Jaron Lanier writes the following: “Metadata is a slow, relentless concentrator of wealth and power for those who run the computers best able to calculate with it.” This is a profound statement in a world that includes a very real, very powerful, monopolistic, and even secretive company called Google. But as a general principle, if I take Lanier’s meaning correctly, he’s describing a world in which those who wield computing power, and only computing power, will own, will lead, and will decide. Either we say no to normalizing exploitation of all labor or we start getting fitted for colorful jumpsuits.
