Tag: David Lowery

To Share or Not to Share

Last week, a report emerged from the London School of Economics claiming that piracy is not harming the entertainment industries.  One of my new Twitter pals, Jean-Phlippe Vergne (@pirateorg) sent me a link to the report calling it “scientific” rather than based on “moral claims.”  I read the report, and there’s nothing scientific about it, particularly in that it lacks any statement of methodology (science likes methodology). Like other “studies” of its kind, this one begs the reader to make a very broad and unscientific leap to the conclusion that because gross sales of movies and music went up over a given period of time, we must therefore conclude that piracy is not having any ill effects on those industries.

Never mind that the report appears to double-count music revenues or that measurements like “box office sales” alone do not paint a complete picture of the economic health of the filmed-entertainment industry, but such measurements say nothing at all about the effects of piracy.  It’s a bit like saying America has more millionaires than ever before, so the economy overall must be very strong.  The lack of rigor in the report may be attributable to the fact that its authors are not economists despite the imprimatur of the LSE, but this didn’t stop the pro-piracy crowd from making hay out of headlines like London School of Economics Says Piracy Does No Harm.  After all, nobody’s going to read the report except those of us who play inside baseball.

Regardless, the report itself has already been criticized,  but I want to go back to this refrain my new friend, Mr. Vergne has played, which is the chronic implication that the subject of piracy should not be examined in a moral context.  Why not?  I suspect because it’s inconvenient to go there because even the pro-piracy crowd reveals the subject to entail a moral choice by repeating their favorite chant, “Copying isn’t theft.”  One has to buy that premise unequivocally in order to to believe that piracy is amoral, but does anyone other than a tiny group of soon-to-be-finding-a-new-hobby zealots really accept this premise as absolute?  I don’t think so.

Of the hundreds of millions of users of pirate sites, it is a comparatively small population, who actually copy files and upload them to these sites.  I have several younger friends who have downloaded music and films from torrents and the like,  but these same people would probably not go the next step and physically rip files from a disk to upload to a site, let alone take money for having ones and zeroes on their hands.  Subtle though it may be, I bet even that is a moral step too far for a lot of people, even though they realize that as viewers, they’re benefitting from the fact that someone else has crossed a threshold they wouldn’t.  This is common enough behavior.  Smoking dope is one choice, dealing it is another.

Most of us draw and redraw moral boundary lines while making dozens of choices a day.  We typically break laws in small and presumably harmless ways, but usually within some sort of self-imposed boundary unless we are irredeemably narcissistic.  For instance, I’m betting most of us would agree that speeding on an open highway with few other vehicles around is a choice that is morally superior to speeding on a city freeway. And the uniformity of the law or possible punishment has no bearing on the moral decision in this case. We make these choices and judgment calls all the time, and I don’t think making bad choices necessarily implies corruption.  Corruption begins when we permit ourselves to stop asking the the question, to assume there are no boundaries; and with regard to piracy, this is exactly what its proponents try to do — to give particularly young and inherently narcissistic people permission to stop asking the question.

But what boundaries might exist when it comes to this activity many of us call theft and others would like to call sharing?  By way of example, I recently committed a low-volume act of copyright infringement against one of my favorite musicians, Mr. Leo Kottke (sorry Leo).  My new production assistant is also a guitarist and a singer/songwriter, and while traveling on a recent shoot, I asked her if she knew Kottke’s music because I happened to have his first album loaded in the CD player.  She hadn’t heard Kottke, but she liked it a lot, so I told her to borrow the CD and copy the files onto her Mac.  Her slightly astonished look was more sincere than mocking, knowing that I write this blog and firmly support copyright.  What gives?

Good question.  It’s an argument that’s been made — that “file sharing” sites are just a contemporary and technologically inevitable extension of what pre-digital people like me have always done with media when we share with one another.  But is it the same thing?  What makes the difference?  Is it volume?  Is it about the technologies used?  Is it about presentation or delivery mechanisms? Or is it simply that I in no way profit financially from this exchange with my assistant?  Would Leo Kottke be mad at me?  Maybe, but I don’t think artists have ever cared much about this kind of one-to-one exchange. Plus, I can accurately state that my success rate in terms of fans made in this case as 100% fans for all recipients of the free media. But maybe that’s an excuse.   If I want to be altruistic about it, maybe I should send Leo $12.26 with an explanation that it’s the current Amazon price for one extra copy of his 1969 album “6-and-12-String Guitar.”  Wouldn’t he be surprised?

My choice to “share” in this instance is bound by certain conditions that, absent the larger debate about piracy, I doubt I would examine consciously.  Nevertheless, the first condition is that I would never think of the word sharing to describe an exchange that does not involve transmission of media to an actual person I know.  Absent the connection made, the rapport built, the camaraderie fostered by introducing someone to a particular work based on some quality I recognize in the individual, the exchange would be meaningless and empty.   As such, I find the conceit of piracy’s defenders who call that activity “sharing” to be a devaluation of human interaction in the same way mass IP theft itself is a devaluation of the human labor that produced the work in the first place.  Does anyone rationally believe they can “share” anything with several hundred million complete strangers?

A component of this condition that I share with an actual person is that I have a measure of trust in that individual — that she isn’t going to do something irresponsible with the files, but almost more importantly that she’s accepting the gift because she actually gets something out of the music.  We’ve seen evidence that the free media bonanza has led to a kind of habitual gluttony among younger users who may have thousands of songs on their iPods but have little to no relationship with much of the music they’ve collected. This phenomenon was in part highlighted when David Lowery wrote his famous letter to NPR intern Emily White after she boasted that she had 11,000 songs but only paid for 15 CDs in her life.

Another component of sharing only with a known person is of course a matter of scale.  After owning Kottke’s album for two or three decades, I personally increased the number of individuals with bootleg copies by one.  By contrast, were I to upload those same files one time to a pirate site, I’ve made the album available to roughly 2.5 billion people, which is to say the entire Internet-connected world.  It’s frankly shocking that any of the debate about piracy continues to get bogged down in comparing a 1:1 exchange with a 1:2.5 billion exchange, but I assume that’s why folks like Mr. Vergne prefer semantic games and a pretense of socially progressive philosophy (i.e. bullshit) over anything so clear-cut as numbers.

And scale aside, giving the Kottke files to my assistant remains within another boundary  in that I did not serve up this artist whose work I love to be exploited for profit by the owners of pirate sites. It doesn’t matter that Kottke’s music would be downloaded substantially less than, say, Lady Gaga.  It wouldn’t even matter if Kottke’s files were never accessed via pirate site simply because his fan base likely skews toward a demographic that doesn’t generally use these sites.  What matters is a gut instinct that if I could ask Leo Kottke his feelings on the matter, I’m guessing he’d be cool with the exchange with my assistant but would be insulted and furious at my uploading his work to the entire world so some parasitic individuals can profit from its trade.  And in this simple, old-school exercise of putting oneself in another’s shoes, the moral choice is clear.

Lessig Mixes it Up

Attorney and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig considers the current copyright system to be generally antagonistic to contemporary culture.  In fact, any number of common assertions about copyright’s supposed obsolescence in the digital age are very likely derivative of something written or said by Lessig, who has devoted a fair amount of energy promoting the value of the remix.  In at least two video versions of this talk, he prefaces the subject by quoting John Philip Sousa, who in 1906 decried the new “talking machines” thus:

“When I was a boy … in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today, you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.”

You might expect this quote to be used as a segue to criticism of anachronistic fears of new technology — like Jack Valenti’s infamous exaggeration about the VCR as a “Boston Strangler” — and in fact this Sousa quote has been referenced by scholars and technology advocates in this context.  But in this case, Lessig cites the composer for a very different purpose, which is to tee up his audience for a chat about rediscovering what he calls “read/write culture.”  In essence, Lessig claims a kinship with Sousa, pining for the days when people sang (i.e. shared) songs with one another through the nexus of their front porches.  Thus grounding viewers in this nostalgic idyll, Lessig then proposes the reasonable enough notion that YouTube (or any social media) is the new front porch of our digital times. This, he tells us, is how “the kids” are sharing the songs of the day — through mashups, through bedroom performances, through remix in many forms — and it is, therefore, wrong to criminalize “the kids” for engaging in a new variation of a bygone pastime.  And by “criminalize” of course he means enforcing copyrights through takedowns, C&D letters, or even lawsuits.

Now, Mr. Lessig is a controversial figure among those who care about artists’ rights and digital culture, but he is also a highly qualified legal scholar, and I would not presume to question his knowledge of the law itself.  I leave such criticism (and there is plenty) to Mr. Lessig’s peers.  But I do know a sales pitch when I hear one, and I certainly have a bone or two to pick with what Mr. Lessig appears to be selling.

Right off the bat, he takes Sousa’s concern for the American vocal cord entirely out of context, omitting the fact that these words were uttered as a preamble to testimony before Congress in favor of stronger copyright laws.  Specifically, Sousa hoped copyright would expand to protect sound recordings, which didn’t happen for another seventy years.  Regardless, even cherry picking the sentiment, I’ll buy Lessig’s comparison between the porch of yesteryear and the virtual porch of today, but I have to stop myself from being sucked too deeply into the metaphor when I realize he’s constructing a straw man.  Or in this case, straw kids.

As Lessig is free to generalize in his talk — to gloss over the case-by-case realities of various infringements, fair uses, takedowns, or suits — I’ll claim the same privilege and generalize that very few rights holders are in any way interested in “criminalizing” the kind of remixing that could arguably compare to the social celebration evoked in Sousa’s yearning plea. In fact, here’s a video of some ladies singing just one of the songs of the day (the mid 80s anyway) on both a virtual and literal front stoop just as JP Sousa would supposedly have it.

This ukelele trio that calls itself No Skanks On Sunday offers a charming rendition of “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” written and originally performed by David Lowery’s band Camper Van Beethoven.  And you know who’s just fine with this video remaining on YouTube?  David Lowery and Camper Van Beethoven.  That’s the same David Lowery who, through guest appearances and his blog The Trichordist, has become one of the most outspoken opponents of piracy and other forms of mass digital infringement. But when I asked him about this video, his response was, “Yeah, we don’t care about that stuff.”  And I’ll bet my paycheck against Lessig’s that the majority of rights holders feel the same way about this kind of use.  So, if we’re going to generalize, I think it’s accurate to say that remix culture, for better or worse, is doing just fine and that the number of wrongful, mean-spirited, or aggressive takedowns represent the exception rather than the rule.  So, while I don’t know the law well enough to tangle with Lawrence Lessig, I see little evidence of rampant “criminalization of the kids,” which makes me wonder if Lessig is really concerned with defending culture, or is he concerned with selling books and making a career out of addressing a problem that isn’t a real problem?

Meanwhile, what is certainly offensive to artists and bad for culture at the same time is what happens when one types “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” or just about any other song title, into a search engine. We’re supposed to be 20 years into “the information age,” but good information is actually becoming harder to find if search is the tool being used.  The top results will be a handful of YouTube videos of CVB playing their song, none of which are by permission; then the obligatory Wikipedia entry, which is an okay first source but requires fact-checking; then there’s a smattering of unlicensed lyric sites selling ads and only sometimes crediting the songwriters; and then we get into torrents and other means of downloading unlicensed versions of the song itself.  Nearly all of this activity directs money into Google’s coffers, and neither the band nor the public is particularly well served if the initial search began with “What’s that song? Whose is it? I want to know more?” For all the noise about “connecting with fans,” search is actually a wonderful way to disconnect works from their authors and to hijack potential fans away from patronizing the artists themselves. I think we all have a bit of ADD on the web; we set out looking for something and can be easily distracted by the offerings in the top results.  Think Google doesn’t know this?

I remain confused as to why a band’s official website is not among the top results when one types in famous lyrics or song tiles; and I know what SEO is, but if cultural diffusion is the goal, shouldn’t the digital-age version of the album cover be among the first  sources discovered by someone searching a song?  CVB’s site offers lyrics, notes, guitar tabs (all free); and the user just might, I don’t know, learn something about the band and discover more tunes he or she likes.  That’s connecting with fans; but the company that owns the only search engine to speak of and the only ad server to speak of doesn’t really support traffic directed in this way.

So, as a legal layman but active observer of these things, it seems to me Mr. Lessig’s presentation, though charming, contains at least two fallacious premises.  The first is that the positive aspects of remix culture are actually threatened by the copyright system; and the second is that remix culture is universally positive.  I don’t know of any cases in which rights holders are stopping “the kids” from singing the songs of the day on YouTube.  But there are plenty of cases in which adults are profiting from remixing culture in ways that benefit neither fans nor creators. While it’s almost rote these days to call everyone a shill, I don’t think this is very helpful. I prefer to assume intelligent people mean what they say and believe in their positions, and Lawrence Lessig is certainly an intelligent man.  Of course, that might be why his ideas are ultimately so dangerous.

Summer Daze by the Music Stream

Photo by Ardevins
Photo by Ardevins

As we approach the dog days of summer, the blogosphere is heating up on matters pertaining to music and the stream in which it now swims.  Practically on the heels of Pink Floyd’s public warning to artists against falling for Pandora’s recent attempts to lower licensing fees, Thom Yorke of bands Radiohead and Atoms for Peace pulled his music from Spotify in an act of what he calls solidarity, saying, “Make no mistake new artists you discover on Spotify will not get paid. Meanwhile, shareholders will shortly being rolling in it.”  And indeed, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek was just named to the Sunday Times’ Rich List with his estimated fortune of $307 million. Meanwhile, artists’ rights blog The Trichordist, primarily edited by David Lowery, reminds us that the ever-present option of piracy remains a relevant factor in the bargaining positions of both sides trying to conduct legal trade.

Personally, I think there is still hope for an equitable solution to streaming services that pay fair rates to artists.  There’s nothing wrong with the technologies or the concept, only the present business models; and it doesn’t really matter if Pandora and Spotify fail. Someone will come up with the right formula, or at least one with which all parties can feel relatively satisfied. What caught my attention this week, though, was a pair of articles that ostensibly have nothing to do with one another, but side-by-side, expose an interesting dichotomy in the value placed on music streaming and social media.

The first article was this most recent post from music industry writer Bob Lefsetz in which he blasts Thom Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich for removing their music from “a platform that hasn’t gotten any traction anyway,” accusing them of “wanting to jet us back to the past” because “streaming won,” and the kids just listen on YouTube and other unlicensed platforms.  In all fairness, Lefsetz is dragging out a Straw Man that is pretty stale itself — the overused accusation that musicians are  lazily clinging to old models and delivery platforms.  This isn’t true in general, and it certainly isn’t true with regard to anything Yorke and Godrich have said about Spotify, as their criticisms are entirely about revenue sharing and not about whether or not streaming should exist. But having grounded his thesis in the matter of new vs old, Lefsetz gets to then recycle many oft-repeated proclamations about progress and the typically unspecific theme that the future is for winners who do great work and adapt to the changing landscape, whatever that quite means.  “The truth is,” writes Lefsetz, “if you’re a superstar, there’s still plenty of money in music. And superstars are the future, because no one’s got time for any [sic] less. Just like there’s one iTunes Store, one Amazon and one Google, we don’t need a plethora of me-too acts, we just need excellence.”

And that’s right where I smacked hard into article number two written by Mat Honan for Wired.  It turns out July 15th marked the one-year anniversary of the record-setting “Gagnam Style,” the first viral video ever to cross the one-billion click mark, which is cool; but in his ebullient article, Honan asserts that  thanks to “Gagnam Style,” “music is forever different.” He cites the nature, causes, and results of the K-Pop star Psy’s explosion into global, namely American, culture thanks mostly to the power of populist, rather than corporate, decision-making.  Let me say that I have nothing against Psy or his viral video, and I’m glad to see any entertainer enjoy success if he/she makes people happy; but if Honan thinks this is truly revolutionary, I’m going to guess he’s too young to remember The Hustle, The Electric Slide, The Macarena, The Achy-Breaky…shall I go on?

It’s important to distinguish between a revolutionary cultural phenomenon and the technological means by which a classic phenomenon merely scales in a new way.  For nearly as long as there has been recorded music, we’ve seen these out-of-nowhere, fad hits accompanied by some goofy dance that gets even goofier when we get Aunt Betty to give it a go after a few highballs at the family reunion.  What’s different, of course, is that YouTube enables an exponentially rapid diffusion of something like “Gangnam Style,” and it is also the same platform that enables parodies, derivatives, and, yes, even videos of someone’s Aunt Betty gyrating away after a few highballs.  It’s all good fun, and I’m the last guy to suggest anyone should get out of the pool, but “change music forever?”  Please let’s hope not.

If we read Leftsetz’s implication that the digital age inherently demands “excellence” along with Honan’s claim that “Gagnam Style” is transformative, it raises the question as to whether or not only one of these premises can be correct, and which one?  In every medium and through every distribution method, the stuff we call art — and I would argue that only art earns the superlative excellence — usually struggles for popular attention in contrast to the more transient and facile media we typically call pop culture.  Web platforms like YouTube don’t necessarily change these dynamics or redraw the lines between art and pop culture so much as they accelerate and more widely diffuse behaviors that have been part of human activity since long before the first node of the internet was built.  If anything, the high-volume consumption that internet platforms tend to foster does seem to result in more tangential and fleeting relationships with all media. If this is true, this means that the “excellence” to which Leftsetz refers can be as likely diluted by these platforms as they can be theoretically supported. In other words, an occasional “Gagnam Style” is just fine as long as we don’t destroy the market that will  produce the next Radiohead or Pink Floyd. Because they ain’t the same thing.

As with just about anything that’s carefully crafted — from a fine wine to a gourmet meal to art that truly confronts its audience — the attention demanded for appreciation is exactly the opposite kind of investment one makes by watching “Gagnam Style” on YouTube. Art’s job, in contrast to pop culture, is to be a little bit difficult, and it requires an investment by both the creator and the audience in order for it to become something truly significant. So, if we want to build a future that does enable artists to invest over a lifetime in striving for excellence, I think it’s a foolish mistake to dismiss the warnings of these music veterans as though they are nothing more than the dusty ravings of has-beens.