Category: Intellectual Property

Steal a Little: Piracy & the Economy

I’ve wanted a sailing yacht for years but have never been able to afford one — until now.  Thanks in part to a report on piracy and counterfeiting by the GAO and this explication by CCIA (Computer & Communications Industry Association)  lobbyist Matt Schruers, I now have a plan that will put me at the helm of the sloop Larceny by the Summer of 2016.  And the best part is the whole family gets to collaborate to make it happen. According to my rough calculations, all we have to do is steal groceries like a Dickensian gang for three full years, and we’ll save enough for a substantial down payment on the boat.  I’m thinking Beneteau 45ft, but if any seasoned mariner out there has a recommendation, let me know.

Now, you might think shoplifting food is a bit radical as an alternative financing option, but that’s where you’re wrong.  See, if the cops nab me or one of my kids while boosting a chicken from the local farm stand (we’d steal organic of course), all I have to do is point to this GAO report, which according to Mr. Schruers, advocates a truly progressive economic principle most of us have never considered.  If you want more things than you can afford, steal some and pay for the rest. Why is that okay? Because in the economy overall, it’ll be a wash. To quote Mr. Schruers:

“So what is The Issue of Which One May Not Speak?  The fact that money not spent on pirated content is, in many cases, still spent.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office pointed this out in a widely discussed report in 2010, observing that “effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy.”  Money does not “just vanish.”  A Swiss Government commission made a similar observation the following year.”

Go back and read that again. Because full-grown adults are saying without a hint of irony that if you don’t spend the money in your pocket, it doesn’t just disappear but will remain there until you spend it on something else! The concept is quite a mind-blower when you come to recognize its elegance. The money you have is the money you have. It’s zen-like.  I am sorry to report, though, that the money spent to reveal this discovery is in fact gone forever.

Of course, in my scheme, when I do get pinched for shoplifting my way toward boating bliss, I have to hope the prosecutor only reads Matt Schruers’s post and not the GAO report because the report itself mostly says piracy and counterfeiting are likely very harmful to the economy in several ways.  In fact, the report devotes a lot of ink detailing the inconclusiveness of many studies that look either positively or negatively at the effects of piracy and counterfeiting, but if we’re just pulling quotes at will, how about this one:

“For example, when pirated movies are sold, it damages not only the motion picture industry, but all other industries linked to those sales.”

 That’s just common sense, and it seems to me the only point worth making if one is going to assess the macroeconomic pros and cons of actually stealing from any industry.  While it’s true that not paying for selected goods and services  will undoubtedly leave you with more disposable income to spend on other things, the industry you’re not paying for will eventually shed jobs.  And if those jobs were held by people in your community, they will no longer be customers for whatever it is you’re selling.  See how that works?  It’s the same economics we learned in high school because it’s pretty damn basic. Perhaps Matt Schruers skipped class that day to hone whatever budding skills would produce this paragraph:

“Normatively bad isn’t the same as an economically bad, however.  Not all normative transgressions necessarily have macroeconomic consequences.  And yet those two items are invariably linked when studies consider infringement.  Infringement is bad, therefore we must assign an economic cost to its badness.  Hence, study after study makes the repeatedly discredited assumption that every infringement is a lost sale, usually calculated at the highest retail price for which the good was offered, and every lost sale represents a commensurate economic loss.”

Strip away words like normative that make the above sound smart and thoughtful, and it’s really just proposing a thesis — that infringement might be a form of theft that doesn’t cause macroeconomic harm — for which Schruers can offer no support.  In fact, were he to refer to the same GAO report, he would find quite a few assumptions of macroeconomic harm from piracy and counterfeiting.  Instead, Schruers segues to the repetitious, obvious, and irrelevant observation that not every individual infringement represents a lost sale.  One doesn’t need a study to draw this narrowly-focused conclusion, and the lost sale analysis is not an indicator of macroeconomic loss. Also, if we’re just going to repeat the words the average 14-year-old will use to justify torrenting music and movies, it’s a safe bet we’re not riding the wave of avant-garde economic theory.

One of my colleagues in the artists’ rights community asked if I were going to sail my new, ill-gotten yacht to Neverland, and the joke resonated more than I think he intended.    Each time I encounter some new attempt to construct a logical or economic argument for the supposed benefits of mass theft of intellectual property, it feels very much like a visit to Mr. Barrie’s  imaginary island — a place where boys refuse to grow up, where they feast on food that isn’t there, and all they really long for is someone who can tell a good story.

See Chris Castle’s “Stealing is Good for You…”

Copyright and the Creative Process

Ring toss

On July 4th, I announced that I’m rebooting a project that began as a short film in the summer of 2011.  goneElvis is a portrait depicting a day in the life of a female veteran of the Iraq War who is homeless and suffers from PTSD.  As stated in the new post on the film’s website, there are things I like about the short and things I don’t, but I have decided the subject still warrants a fresh approach, probably as a series, and that I have initiated collaboration with some colleagues to begin anew.  I mention the project because its production includes a very common experience in the creative process that contradicts many of the complaints one hears about copyrights stifling new creative or derivative works.  Most often, these criticisms come from people who are not engaged in any creative process, which is why they fail to understand that particularly with art, obstacles can be opportunities at least as often as they are barriers.  In fact, as an aside, I have long felt that one of the reasons many major motion pictures have become so emotionally flat is that the big-money movies are over-produced. When creators can afford to do everything exactly as planned, this removes some of the magic that comes from quick-witted solutions to various limitations.  Any student of film history knows that some of the most highly-praised cinematic moments are the result of off-the-cuff workarounds to technical, financial, or logistical challenges.

While planning the production of goneElvis, I wanted to use my friend Martin Ruby’s cover of “Tonight’s the Night,” famously recorded by The Shirelles, but I was turned down by the publishers when I requested the license for which I could not of course pay.  It seems the tendency these days is to view this kind of obstacle as unfair or muting the creative process of the next generation; but this attitude is a mistake, and I’d venture that almost any serious artist will agree.  Because I couldn’t have what I thought I wanted in the first place, I ended up with something much better simply because I was forced to go look for it.  In this case, I began by searching songs in the public domain, and when I came across the Mexican standard Cielito Lindo (you know the one with the refrain Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay), I got goosebumps imagining what Martin Ruby might do with it translated into English.  Although normally sung at a bright tempo by mariachi bands, Cielito Lindo is fundamentally a lullaby, which immediately resonates because the protagonist in the film clings to the hope of finding the daughter she lost when her husband abandoned her while she was in Iraq.  Knowing that Ruby grapples with his own challenges as a single father of a young daughter, I imagined his rendition of this song might produce something very haunting.  It did.  Instead of a bittersweet cover of a love song, we had a piece of highly-original music that is thematically perfect for the film. Suddenly, my little low-budget short didn’t have a borrowed song — it had a soundtrack.

Any artist lives in a world of obstacles — financial, logistical, legal, and hardest of all, internal.  Very often, it is the obstacles that define both the artist and the work; and I doubt there is a creator in any medium who has not benefitted from producing something he or she never anticipated at the start of a process.  In fact, I would go so far as to generalize that all creators find ways to balance the planned part of the process while leaving ample room for the unexpected. It is this aspect of creative work that is so hard to explain to those who don’t do it, but it is also true that the best results are usually a fortunate harmony of experience, expertise, and inexplicable instinct.  In other words, as a mathematical exercise, there are so many elements that must align to produce something good that it’s almost absurd to predict that any one obstacle might be either harmful or beneficial to the end result. Hence, there is no more reason to identify existing copyrights as stifling creativity any more than it would be reasonable to complain about the vicissitudes of weather.  In fact, speaking of weather, the scene with the police officer depicted in the embedded clip wasn’t written or blocked for rain, and the rain we got forced me to shoot the entire scene from inside the car with available light. Operating a heavy camera, hand-held on a sultry, rainy night in the front seat of a Cutlass is not a set of conditions I would have chosen, but the resulting scene is more dramatic than what I had planned on paper.  But that’s just filmmaking. It’s the norm.

Beyond the myriad reasons why copyrights cannot be viewed generally to stifle the creative process, they also must be understood to support the creative process with regard to the same unpredictable nature to which I refer.  Nearly any artist one listens to or reads about will describe variations on the theme of organizing one’s life to allow the work to happen, and each artist requires different conditions — from asceticism to utter chaos — to foster his or her own productivity.  With successful works, the passive income derived from copyrights, is the means by which artists are able to reinvest in a career based so precariously on the unknown.

 

 

TEDPrattles “Piracy” by Jean-Philippe Vergne

In this TEDTalk, Jean-Philippe Vergne spends sixteen minutes proving one thing:  that piracy is the wrong word for mass, digital copyright infringement.  Those who operate torrent and similar sites should never have been called pirates, a word charged with romance and all too easily embraced as a badge of honor and charming rebelliousness. Never mind the fact that even this romantic image of the traditional pirate is entirely based in fiction, there is nothing nearly so intriguing or sympathetic about the digital “pirate,” and the word allows people like Vergne to distract audiences with charming half-truths about high-seas buccaneers and privateers of the colonial 18th century.  Not that I care in this context, but he even gets his naval history wrong in the “documentary” he shows midway through his presentation.  I know a marketing video when I see one.

In fact, if we want to play the “compare to real piracy” game, let’s do it honestly and more thoroughly.  I say a Somali pirate, as dangerous a criminal as he may be, is arguably more deserving of our sympathy than a torrent site owner.  The former is most likely a displaced fisherman who has turned to piracy in an act of economic desperation; the latter is a spoiled, middle-class punk who could get a job with his programming skills but chooses instead to turn the labor and investments of honest workers into his personal cash machine. As a moral comparison, this is a no-brainer.

Those we call pirates in the digital-age sense should instead be called exploiters, which is less catchy and more accurately descriptive of what these enterprises do, which is to exploit the work of others for profit and without permission.  Had this been the kind of language used from the beginning, I doubt for instance, we would see the rise of the European Exploiter Party, and jokers like Vergne wouldn’t have the opportunity to saunter on stage wearing cute eye patches (the props that go with the concept of exploitation are far less dashing).  So, let’s stop behaving like children, shall we?  Because after the purely semantic, and utterly pointless, comparison between digital theft and high-seas piracy, there is still the matter of a massive, criminal enterprise savaging honest, middle-class labor — and it’s not cute no matter what we choose to call it.