Category: Intellectual Property

On Piracy and Promotion

Charlie:  Dad, how can you hate The Colonel?

Stuart (Scottish accent):  Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes you crave it fortnightly, Smart Ass!

– So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) –

As mentioned in much older posts, my father was an advertising professional, principally a creative director but also a manager.  And one lesson he preached to his colleagues, employees, students, and even to his clients was that good advertising can only sell a bad product one time.  In particular, there was one client I remember that probably danced with every agency in Los Angeles at one time or another, convinced that a fresh campaign could sell a particular offering to a certain audience they were simply never going to attract.

I think Dad’s axiom remains sound. If consumers really don’t want something, advertising can’t make them want it—at least not more than once.  In fact, I imagine this principle is more acutely understood in the digital age, given the diffuse nature of all communications; scattered consumer attention; and the capacity of social media to provide rapid-response word-of-mouth that either endorses or criticizes a specific product or service.  This does not mean, of course, that advertising is unnecessary.  Apple, which is arguably in a class by itself as a brand, also had a reported advertising budget of $1 billion as of early 2013.  Anyone who thinks Apple can just turn that spigot off and let social media platforms enable consumers to “market for them” is smoking both ends of his crack pipe.

Interestingly, marketing a theatrical feature film is a bit like selling a product just one time. The production cost of big movies can be so high and the attention span of the market so brief, that opening weekend, box-office revenue has become an even more critical threshold for many films than it was just ten years ago.  Naturally, Hollywood studios did not create the pressures of this market alone; they had help from the same digital technologies that today provide us consumers with myriad other options to entertain ourselves on any given weekend—or even the opportunity to pirate films rather than to see them in theaters.  So, yes, the marketing urgency is fraught with the need to capture the fickle audiences that remain willing to go to the movies. But advertising is still not going to drive consumers to do anything they don’t want to do.

Nevertheless, a strange, complementary sentiment to the trope that piracy is good for promoting movies is one that wants to believe that the official marketing of theatrical features is nothing but a grotesquely expensive effort to “cram lousy entertainment down people’s throats.”* Some readers may immediately notice the contradiction that if the entertainment product itself is assumed to be lousy and unwanted, there’s really no point in discussing its promotion, either by traditional or piratical means. Yet, this rather obvious hypocrisy is overlooked when the pirate user or promoter effectively says,  “I hate Hollywood and its terrible movies, and besides piracy is good for promotion.”

Surely, if both of these statements are true, then one would want to avoid “helping” the industry one hates. But of course both statements are not necessarily true; and in a macro sense, neither statement is true.  If millions of viewers had, for example, no interest in seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight, these same uninterested viewers would surely not be eager to watch ripped versions of the film on little screens. No, the reason the widely reported, pre-release piracy of this movie was a big deal is because the film is already a big deal—and it’s not the piracy that made it big.  Tarantino’s track record and his cast of famous actors were not exactly suffering from obscurity when the group calling itself Hive-CM8 decided to leak the film ahead of its theatrical release. And the suggestion that this kind of blockbuster film needs the pirates to “promote” their movie is adorably silly.

Fueling this rationale, though, it seems it has become more common for consumers—or at least piracy apologists—to feel they have been “ripped off” whenever a film is disappointing.  This trend, if it is a trend, is a strange way to approach the experience of moviegoing.  A film isn’t a fifteen-hundred-dollar appliance you rely on in your home every day; it’s two hours of entertainment shared with family or a date or friends.  It’s an experience that, even if it’s bad, provides a basis for discussion or thought or criticism or ridicule. I say this as someone who likes far less mainstream fare than many viewers; and so I don’t really understand the “consumer protection” attitude being applied to entertainment through the filter of rationalizing piracy.  After all, I would never walk into an Avengers film expecting anything other than spectacle and fight scenes and banter; but I would also never walk into a Spike Jonze movie thinking, “Man if he doesn’t deliver as well as his last film, I’m going to demand my money back.”  That just isn’t how it works.

When I took the family to see the new Star Wars film, I was exactly as entertained and ambivalent as I expected to be because I have never been a big Star Wars fan (cue hate mail). Yet, despite knowing this about my expectations when I entered the theater, I didn’t haggle with the guy at the ticket booth and say, “Look, I’m only half as eager to see this film as that dude wearing the wookie shirt, so I think I should pay half price.” Neither did I go see The Force Awakens against my will because its marketing made me do it. General curiosity and something to do with the kids is ample reason to go to the damn movies.

Cultural experiences, whether high or low-brow, don’t come with warranties. They are, by nature, experimental.  And, it’s very rare to find creators who produce great stuff without also producing not-so-great stuff. Meanwhile, audiences differ on their views about the “best work” anyway. So, as with most advertising, motion picture marketing is largely about letting consumers know the product is out there, while a prospective viewer often knows his/her own interest level the moment a film is announced to be in pre-production or even development.  Beyond that, it’s a huge damn gamble, and when it comes time to release, the marketing professionals are asking themselves, “How do we get a critical mass in the seats on opening weekend?” But they still know that if that first wave of viewers walks out tweeting “This film sucked,” that’s the ballgame.  A $100 million investment that can be DOA in a single night—whether you love or hate the film itself—is a marketing challenge predicated on exactly the opposite logic of “forcing” unwanted products onto the consumer. It’s knowing the consumer will make or break you with the swipe of a thumb and praying you’ve met or exceeded her expectations.

If piracy were really about promotion or exposure, then the pirate sites would ignore Hollywood blockbusters and pre-releases of big films—which are apparently all bad products “forced” onto the public anyway—and the most-pirated films would be independent, small, and obscure works that are simply never going to be hugely popular. (Not that I advocate pirating these works; I’m simply alluding to a hypocrisy in the promotion argument.)  I recognize of course that there are viewers who use pirate sites to access harder-to-find or “out-of-print” titles, but if the piracy market were limited to these audiences alone, the entire ecosystem would shrink by orders of magnitude overnight; and this whole conversation would be very different.  As it stands today, though, there would be no movie piracy without Hollywood blockbusters; and those films really don’t need help with their marketing.

*One finds this theme more often in comments sections than in the body of articles and posts, but it is not an uncommon theme.

No Copyrights for Critters Says Judge

Readers may be astonished, relieved, or understandably apathetic, to learn that a federal judge in California has ruled that a Sulawesi macaque may not sue for copyright infringement.  In fact, Judge William Orrick broadened his ruling to affirm that no animal may own a copyright. The judge swears he looked and looked but could find no evidence to indicate that the rights expressed in the Copyright Act extend to the non-human fauna of the world.  This news comes as a relief to me personally as I’ve been a bit on edge ever since one of our cats made transformative use of an unframed photograph of mine. I am absolutely sure this ungrateful feline, in addition to its habit of biting and scratching, is instinctively litigious.

This recent ruling was a disappointment for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who had filed suit against British wildlife photographer David Slater and his San Francisco-based self-publisher Blurb over a photograph known as the “monkey selfie.”  The crested macaque, whom PETA identifies as Naruto, and who in 2011 snapped a photo of himself with Slater’s camera, would not comment on the outcome of the case or, for that matter, what he thinks of being named Naruto by a bunch of strangers from another species.  Sources close to the macaque, including two tarsiers, a water buffalo, and a Komodo dragon also declined to comment, apparently too overcome with emotion to share their thoughts so soon after the defeat.

For those who missed the original story (and there really is no excuse), the saga of the “monkey selfie” initially exploded onto the Web in the Summer of 2014, when Slater sent a takedown request to Wikipedia, which was making use of the photograph without permission and allegedly infringing Slater’s claim of copyright in the image. The Wikimedia Foundation rebutted that because the monkey had snapped its own photo, the image belongs to nobody and cannot, therefore, be protected by copyright.  The questions raised by this primate picture sparked a considerable amount of professional and amateur copyright theory in the media, and these conflicting views, combined with the cost of litigation, may have been a factor in Slater’s not pursuing legal action to enforce his claim against Wikimedia Foundation.

PETA, on the other hand, decided to assert that the fruits of one’s labor principle is as much an animal right as a human right.  This despite the fact that, given the same evolutionary opportunity as humans, the non-homo-sapiens among us have yet to produce even a modest body of copyrightable works.  In fact, in 2003, researchers at the University of Plymouth, in an attempt to test what’s known as the “infinite monkey theory”, left a computer keyboard in the care of six crested macaques—it is unknown whether any of these six were related to Naruto—to see what literary work they might produce. The monkeys managed to type five pages devoid of a single sentence in any known language, made an abundant use of the letter ’S’, and then liberally relieved themselves on the keyboard.

Still not undaunted by Naruto’s copyright rejection, Jeff Kerr, general counsel for PETA (a human), commented thus:

“Despite this setback, legal history was made today because we argued to a federal court why Naruto should be the owner of the copyright rather than been seen as a piece of property himself,’ Kerr said. ‘This case is also exposing the hypocrisy of those who exploit animals for their own gain.”

It is hard to imagine that PETA is going to make much progress conflating a respect for animals—which is a worthy endeavor—with copyright, or that this is a particularly wise use of resources given the organization’s overall agenda.  Aside from those issues, the animal world can be brutal enough, what with the killing and eating of one another, and it seems to this observer that it would merely introduce a new form of cruelty to subject these poor creatures to the copyright debates.  On the other hand, given a monkey’s penchant for throwing feces, this could provide a needed political boost to the floundering European Pirate Party.

In a related story, cognoscenti in the art world are murmuring that controversial artist Richard Prince may be about to exhibit a print for sale of the “monkey selfie”, which he will argue he has transformed simply by looking at it for a little while.*  When told of these latest developments, the macaque they call Naruto scratched himself and looked toward the horizon as though remembering a simpler time.

*This is satire. I have no knowledge that Mr. Prince intends to make use of the “monkey selfie”.

Don’t call copyright a government-granted monopoly.

When most people discuss or debate copyright’s value in the contemporary market, they talk about the utility of the law—typically arguing the efficacy or rationale of specific contours like term length or enforcement—while generally overlooking the philosophical principles that led to the IP clause being written into the U.S. Constitution in the first place.  This is of course not uncommon with any number of issues.  A particular constituency or individual citizen with a political agenda is apt to read the one sentence or phrase in our elegantly concise Constitution and interpret it as he sees fit.  For instance, the Framers will often allude briefly to a rationale with a dependent clause like “In order to maintain a well-regulated militia …” which is then interpreted as either a still-relevant or now-obsolete explanation for the 2nd Amendment, depending on whether the interpreter supports or refutes gun rights.

Similarly, the conditional expression setting up the IP clause, “The Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of Science and useful Arts …” has been the source of heated argument that copyright’s utility is clearly in the service of society; and this premise then becomes the basis for describing copyright as a “rent”,  “tax”, or “monopoly”, granted somewhat reluctantly by the government to individual authors (and inventors) in order to extract the fruits of their labor for the greater good.

In fact, a few years ago, Mike Masnick riled up his readers at Techdirt over the fact that Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante had the nerve to suggest that copyright serves the author first and society second.  Oh, the screaming and the gnashing of teeth that ensued.  But, of course, from a utilitarian perspective, Pallante was making a perfectly innocuous statement of fact about the only way in which the order of operations can be applied.  Clearly, if the author does not first create, society is never served at all.  But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I recently finished a new book, written primarily for legal scholars, by Randolph J. May and Seth L. Cooper of the Free State Foundation, called The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property:  A Natural Rights Perspective. The book makes a case for the philosophical underpinnings of intellectual property in the U.S. Constitution, beginning with the Enlightenment influences on the Framers and concluding with those principles ultimately being expressed in the post-Civil War amendments ending slavery and affirming the rights of citizens regardless of their state of residence.

Terry Hart’s latest post on Copyhype is a review of this book, in which he rightly points out that the Natural Rights foundation for intellectual property has been largely substituted by a purely utilitarian discussion among most academics critical of contemporary copyright.  And these murmurings in the hallowed halls of law colleges have trickled down into the blogosphere where they have coalesced around the meme that copyright is a government-granted monopoly.  But to ignore the philosophical precedent for intellectual property—regardless of the necessity to debate the utilitarian contours of the laws themselves—is a tragically flawed mistake for any citizen to make, no matter where he or she sits on the political spectrum.  And this is because the intellectual property right is really just one branch on a rather important philosophical tree to which all our favorite civil rights are also attached.

As mentioned, May and Cooper’s book is written by academics for academics, though it is entirely accessible to any reader, if constitutional scholarship on intellectual property is your cup of post-revolutionary tea, so to speak. But in simple terms, the first part of the book supports the view that the appearance of the intellectual property clause in Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 8 of our Constitution is an expression of the principles articulated primarily by English philosopher John Locke in his Two Treatises on Government. First published in 1689/90—exactly a century before the first U.S. Copyright Act—these treatises imagine the individual in a hypothetical State of Nature in order to then express what Locke sees as the purpose of entering into the social contract we call the state or government.  In the State of Nature (i.e. a condition in which the individual enjoys what we call Natural Rights), Locke argues that the individual has a “property in his own person” and that part of the purpose of government is the security of his property, which is more commonly known by Americans as the pursuit of Happiness.

Locke uses the word property in a much broader sense than we generally to use it today, which is to say that each of us has a property in our being—our bodies, our minds, and our faculties.  We still believe in this principle, of course, we just don’t generally use the word property to talk about it.  But from this Lockean notion of property comes the idea that if your hands and mind are yours, then what you produce with your hands and mind—whether it’s a harvest of wheat or a novel—is logically also yours.  Critics of intellectual property will often bypass Locke’s definition of the word property in order to draw contemporary attention to the logic that physical property like a car is fundamentally different from intellectual property like a copyright in a song.  This argument carries particular weight in the digital age when copies of intellectual works are now profoundly non-physical; but as May and Cooper point out, the differences between these types of property are appropriately reflected in the contours of the laws themselves—and remain amendable according to changes in market and social conditions—while the foundational principles for both types of property remain sound and relevant.

The Lockean notion of a property right in the fruits of one’s labor should not, in my opinion, ever be relinquished to the authority of the government as a privilege—which is what a monopoly technically is—rather than asserted and protected as an expression of our Natural Rights as individuals.  As May and Cooper demonstrate, both physical and intellectual property act to define and limit the role of government, which is entirely consistent with American constitutionalism, whereas fostering monopolies is anathema to those principles. Government’s mandate to protect both types of property, the authors argue, acts as a hedge against “centralized decision-making,” which is to say a society that is not composed of free-thinking individuals. There is no question that May and Cooper approach their argument for the foundation of IP from a libertarian/conservative perspective of limiting the power of government; and this is actually refreshing inasmuch as I have never quite understood those academics of the same political stripe, who have lately portrayed copyright as a government-granted privilege.  That seems to me like surrendering considerable ideological territory in a way that is inconsistent with the advocacy of limited government.

At the same time, for those of us who lean more politically left, I would add that I believe the fruits of one’s labor principle also acts to limit the power of capital, which is particularly relevant today when so many people are frustrated to the point of concluding that capitalism is only capable of producing wealth consolidation, a foundering middle class, and corporate control of government itself.  In the same way that I would advocate fixing capitalism rather than throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, I would point out that the fruits of one’s labor concept—as it is specifically expressed through intellectual property—really implies a much larger social contract than the incentives of copyright and patent holders.

The idea that your labor is your own until you provide its fruits in fair trade to someone else is the basis of every hard-won labor and civil right—because these rights are often intertwined—over the worst abuses of either corporate owners or government agencies.  This is also consistent with the views of the Founders, who sought to foster neither an intrusive government nor a new nobility that would give rise to new forms of feudalism.  And because too little of the former provides opportunity for the latter, and vice versa, it is our fate to constantly seek to balance these opposing forces.  Hence, the fruits of labor right vested in every individual citizen acts as a balancing force against both extremes; and IP rights are merely one specific expression of this much larger principle.  Even free speech itself is an extension of this Lockean principle that the individual has a property in his person.

With 1% of the population owning more than 50% of the nation’s wealth; with direct assaults on labor rights in certain regions and economic sectors; with technologies threatening to devalue human work in various ways; and with extreme examples of certain corporate owners getting away with imposing their own morals on employees, this is a terrible time to be calling intellectual property a government granted monopoly.  I would never want to cede the logical conclusion of that argument, to suggest that every citizen’s right to the fruits of his or her labor is in any way a privilege, which may be argued away on the basis of apparent utility alone.  Ultimately, we’re talking about a human right that was forged in the crucible of a century and a half of English civil strife over religion and the divine right of kings.  It may be just a short sentence in the Constitution, but it has a long and bloody intellectual pedigree.