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Spin This: Copyright Industries Grow at Twice the Rate of US Economy

A new report released today by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) offers the following big headlines for FY2012:  the copyright industries, for the first time, contributed over $1 trillion to the U.S. economy, accounting for nearly 6.5% of GDP; these industries represent nearly 5% of all private-sector jobs (5.4 million) in the U.S.; these industries grew at an aggregate annual rate of 4.73%, which is more than twice the rate of the U.S. economy (2.1%) overall.

So, what are we to make of these numbers?  Or just as importantly, how will copyright’s antagonists spin this report?  They could try to punch holes in the findings themselves, but that seems unfruitful; numbers this big would have to be grossly inaccurate to suggest that copyright industries aren’t a critically important segment of GDP, as has been attempted in the past.  On the other hand, copyright’s foes could spin this report as “See, we told you internet phenomena like piracy aren’t hurting anyone. Look how good things are, you whiners.” But here’s the bottom line I think we should take away from this report and any pollyanna attempts to rebut or redirect its relevance:  copyright works, don’t break it.

Seriously, the only reason I write about this stuff is that a massively powerful — although not so economically valuable — minority of companies  spend a lot of time, energy, and money trying to reverse, weaken, or obliterate IP laws on a global scale; and if nothing else, I happen to think squandering the economic engine fueled by copyright is a really bad idea unless someone can demonstrate precisely why we should monkey with a trillion-dollars worth of GDP.  So far, for all the academic theorizing and economic divination that claims without any evidence that “copyright stifles innovation,” the record is clear that investment in these industries supports economic health, and that should matter to anyone with a job in any sector.  To put that in perspective, if you’re a truck driver, you are at least 5,000 times more likely to be delivering goods to someone who works in a copyright-supported industry than to someone who works for a company pushing to weaken this legal framework.  It should be understood that the antagonists to which I refer are not all technology companies by any means.  To the contrary, this report includes software and other technologies that rely substantially on copyrights.

This afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee resumes deliberations on an ongoing review of copyright; and while there are reasonable grounds for revising this body of law, the process should, in my opinion, be viewed as requiring surgical revisions with particular attention to more robustly protecting the independent entrepreneur in the digital market.  Beyond that, it is hard to fathom why any American would want to needlessly and recklessly tamper with a system that promotes this kind of economic prosperity.  We have enough real problems.  Copyright isn’t one of them.

Leon Botstein on Education

“The cost of higher education is not a function of bricks and mortar. The cost is people. It is labor intensive. No matter what the technology, the learning is about face to face. The crude analogy I would make is between learning and sex. Technology can greatly improve, broaden and diversify what we define as the sexual experience, but in the end it’s about intimacy and human contact in real time. That’s the case with teaching as well. For all the improvements technology has brought us – in the end, those are all just tools behind the human social character of learning.” — Leon Botstein

I recommend this Q&A with C.M. Rubin and President of Bard College Leon Botstein.  It’s a familiar refrain:  no matter what technologies come along, the stuff of real value requires human labor.

NMPA Targets Top 50 Illegal Lyrics Sites

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.