Inspired by the somewhat inside-baseball debate between media types who argue that the “information wants to be free” mantra of the digirati and the traditional print people who wonder about boring stuff like how they’ll pay their bills.
Rise of the Replirati
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Reminds me of when I attempted to reas "The Third Wave" by Alvin Toffler. I got to the part where he wrote "Where will the jobs of tomorrow come from, who knows?", and put it down. That was in 1993. I'm gonna finish "Atlas Shrugged" soon also. Started reading that in 1981 after being held at gunpoint and forced to sing like Geddy Lee. PS The question all the "teabaggers" should be asking is "Who is Ragnar Danneskjold??". Dorme Bene…
One of your best Ted. Exactly right.
I've always said, what if I walked into a Best Buy and just took a $2,000 flat screen TV off the wall. Hey – I think it should be free, so therefore it should be free, right?
Of course, I'd be arrested and I'd do time in jail.
But if you steal billions in free music, nothing happens. Why? Oh right, because the people who have done the mass stealing claim "this is how we want to consume our music." Really? By stealing it? That's a clever argument. So clever it's fucking idiotic.
Frankly, what needs to happen is some of these thieves need to do time. There's college kids who have 10's of thousands of dollars worth of stolen property on their computers, yet nothing is done. And if something WERE done, people would be up in arms about a totalitarian state. But if I steal one toaster worth $100 from a Bed, Bath and Beyond – I'm going to jail. The hypocrisy is damning.
People's livelihoods depend on income from their product, whether it be music, books, art, comics, whatever. The cavalier attitude (last frame) of these thieves makes me really sick.
That's a very unflattering image of Paul Krugman in the fourth panel, you should be more respectful of Nobel Laureates.
Can't imagine this comic not starting up war. Again. Interesting look at the future though Ted!
The intellectual property disputes – and boy, does the "other side" have a case – pale in comparison to the general inequality, the actual trade policies, etc.
It's a lot harder to reproduce dead trees than digits – that technology change has made it harder to make a living in an IP regime. What we're seeing is lazy, opportunistic copying of entire works in news, entertainment, software – by people who aren't giving people anything for hours of hard and skillful work.
But quite honestly, I can't defend a system where I'm on the same side as people who patent animals, other people's DNA, and traditional medicines used for millenia all over the world. People who want to build cultural artifacts out of our common heritage and then deny any payback to that heritage are draining the commons as surely as someone who takes the village lake to water his cows. Look at Bill Gates when he started. He spent all his time ripping off the computing community, but when his clone of the academic-only BASIC language was "pirated" he wrote and widely circulated a famous whining letter about how it was no different from any other theft – identical to the "Anonymous" above.
We need a system where, frankly, your ability to feed yourself doesn't depend on intellectual property barbed-wire. The software you can't archive or transfer, the movies you own but can't make copies of, so they wear out, etc. The long history of opposition to cassettes, to VCRs, etc. etc. etc.
It's also instructive that iTunes Music Store was a raging success – who but the people in Ted's cartoon are buying all these songs?
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/
http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html
This can't be sorted out without highlighting who gets to say what's legitimate use and borrowing (right now? whatever the powerful do) and what's piracy and theft (what the masses do) – and that's a power issue. And highlighting that what's costing most people their livelihood is globalization and lawless trade and mechanization/cybernation – an economic issue.
There is a world out there – that of open source software, free software, folk music, etc. etc. etc. – where people do things not for the carrot of becoming rich or the stick of not being homeless.
What we really truly need is a platform under people so that if you choose to do creative work you can do so without having to waste all your time flipping burgers.
Yes, I'm explicitly rejecting the market as the sole standard of excellence. Sorry, capitalists.
The basic problem has nothing to do with stealing. The problem is the larger one that people don't get paid what they're worth.
Smart alternatives exist to the current situation.
Instantaneous and near-free copying of information is a gigantic advance in quality of life which goes far beyond the music industry. Right or wrong, the success rate of getting humans to give up new technology is roughly zero to date. How's that nuclear disarmament thing going? For better or worse, we have to learn to live with the new technology and find other solutions to the problems it creates. We will do much better finding ways to use the power of digital copying to our advantage rather than trying to restrict it.
Oh, and Anonymous, comparing digital piracy to stealing a $2,000 flat screen is a great analogy, except for a few inconvenient facts such as: that the flat screen is still hanging on the store wall, perfectly ready for Best Buy to sell it, oh and I didn't have to break any glass or run from cops or anything… I just borrowed the item from a friend who legitimately owned it and a few seconds later walked away with my own copy to try it out for myself. Ya wanna throw people in jail when they lend or recommend art to a friend? What a sad world you live in.
Parroting propaganda from gigantic record companies might be one way to approach the problem, but not until it actually describes the situation.
So long as the entertainment industry keeps pushing the "Piracy = Stealing" canard, I think it inhibits the development of new commercial models appropriate to the new technology. I think they're gonna have about as much luck as the Religious Fundamentalists pushing the "Abstinence Only" line.
Digital piracy didn't get you fired, Ted, digital piracy got you the job in the first place as people passed around your cartoons and you became popular. Obscurity is a much greater threat to artists than piracy.
But, y'know, as Upton Sinclair observed, "It is hard to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it." This is the basic reasoning why, for example, oil companies and tobacco companies fight progress — it's depressing when I see my favorite artists and writers adopting attitudes similar to oil and tobacco companies.
The problem is not the copying — free instantaneous distribution of material should be a huge boon to artists, not a threat. The answer isn't here yet, but we all need to think outside the box a bit more.
The basic problem is how to reward creativity. American business used to do this well 50 years ago, but with the McDonaldization of everybody's jobs, Americans have lost the ability to discern true creativity from finance scams. Until that changes, artists aren't going to be rewarded in any case.
Hey, don't blame me. I just subscribed to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (One Of America's Great Newspapers, according to the masthead). I'm not sure how their dollar a week (7 day delivery) rate is going to pay their bills, but I'm part of the solution. Until they go under, but I'm doing what I can.
Anon 11:11,
Its the attitudes of the "artists" who make me sick.
Take Metallica for instance. Those assclowns built an entertainment empire around nihilism. Then they become passionately concened about the technicalities of copyright law once the profitability of that empire becomes threatened.
All the "peace, free love, and sharing", all the "don't care about anything, 'cause life sucks", all the "fuck the po-lice", all the whatever your favorite genere of music suggests you do ends when it cuts into the label's bottom line. Then the rebellious artist demand the services of the establishment, ie the folks who can send you to jail.
The solution is obvious – people can just put the things they've replicated under a Creative Commons license. That'll fix everything!
Anon@4/27/09 11:11 AM,
Illegal copying may be breaking (current) IP law, but stealing it ain't, at least in the good ol' sense of taking away a material object from its owner/producer/gatherer with no quid pro quo.
Of course, if Ted's replicator existed out of cartoon fiction, replicating your friend's plasma flat screen would be no more of a steal than copying Dylan's latest from the same friend. Economics doesn't apply to a non-scarce resource. Of course, investing in manufacturing would be dumb.
As for Delgado, he's hopeless, but hey, here's a motto for you 21st century Commies: "All property is theft, except for intellectual property."
Hey Marion Delgado,
You call me a whiner? Is Ted whining too? How about Tom Tomorrow who has much the same opinion?
No matter. You're a mediocrity with no facts, which is way worse.
You state Bill Gates "spent all his time ripping off the computing community". Please provide the evidence. Did Bill Gates ever have to settle claims? Again, please link to the facts. Please be specific, and spare us the "Microsoft sucks" mantra.
If there's anyone who's a whiner here, it's you. A typical "Linux" whiner, who wants to beat Bill more than anything else. Whatever. I couldn't care less about Bill Gates or Open Source.
What I do care about is the multitude of great musicians – musicians you'll never know – who are having their material stolen, which has been the difference in their ability to continue making music. You may not care, and are satisfied hearing people create "free folk music". Guess what idiot? The people who are great musicians have to do it FULL TIME to continue creating great music, much as anyone in any field must be dedicated to their work. It's a little harder when everyone steals it, thinking it should be free because "information wants to be free" or some other pseudo-intellectual drivel.
Marion Delgado is the face of mediocrity, and America better get used to that face. His short-sighted and simplistic credo, that "he's rejecting the market as the sole standard of excellence" is a disease of the mind. What Marion Delgado doesn't even understand is that the great bulk of great artists make their living on a very meager amount of sales, but it's enough. Marion Delgado feels that should now be taken away too, ostensibly to make room for mediocre folk musicians who sing about granola.
Thanks Marion Delgado. Thanks for your dedication to mediocrity. Thanks for dragging us all along for the ride.
I'm sorry, Ted, normally I'd say you have a keen vision, but the entire I.P. debate as it stands is muddled thinking. For example, your comic. With digital copying I can take an original song and make literally millions of copies without much more effort than making a single copy, and it doesn't consume any more energy than your refrigerator running, nor raw materials (since memory is re-useable). So for the analogy in your comic to be fair, someone using one of the fictitious replicators should be able to take an original lump of coal — or a solar panel, or a barrel of biodiesel, or regular diesel, whatever — and replicate it until it fills a supertanker. So the "energy crisis" you allude to in the comic is simply absurd. Nobody would have to mine any of that stuff ever again.
If we can't figure out a way to make that incredible bounty pay off for the artists as well as consumers, it's only because our profit system is completely f*cked. I know that you know that Capitalism is based on creating artificial scarcities even in areas where the scarcity is false. The music and art industry isn't any exception. Conquering scarcity should be a good thing, not a threat. Scoff as much as you want, but it really is a different paradigm. The toothpaste is not going back into this particular tube no matter how much you want it to.
One more comment: what I've been LEGALLY downloading a lot of lately, are MP3 audio-book short stories from these websites:
http://escapepod. org/
http://podcastle. org/
These sites pay their writers. Yet downloads are free, and they are on a "Creative Commons" license, meaning you can copy and distribute the files as much as you like. (You're just not supposed to charge money for them, nor change them.) There is no copy protection on the files.
This stuff can be done. It is not an impossible Utopian dream. We just have to let go of the business model where rich old fogies control all our media and "trickle down" a few pennies of the profits to the artists or creators. Artists of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains!
S my D and enjoy paying $20 to get one track you enjoyed, while the artist went into debt making the album because the record didn't sell enough in the end. Major recording company artists get paid in advances. Ask a random early-twenties rock star to sit on that pile of money instead of spending some. Ask Steve Albini who's really responsible.
If Ted didn't put his comics for free on the internet, I sure as hell wouldn't go out looking for them and then buy a newspaper solely because it ran the comic. Facts of life for me and millions of other consumers who can't be arsed. The hypocrisy of 'college kids' must seem damning to someone who's lived long enough to ride on so many high horses, but if you can't draw a distinction between couches and ephemeral media you've got bigger problems than these ethics questions.
I'm gonna go surf the Pirate Bay for a while now. Curious question: surely the industry hurt most by P2P has been porn. Why haven't they complained? Answer that one, old and wise nonhypocrites who've obviously paid for every single thing in life they've enjoyed (and walked twenty miles to school in the snow!,) and you'll understand the debate a little better.
Lol. Nice.
If a person is happy to get free
milk by keeping milking a cow without providing food and water,
the cow will die and there will be
no milk, free or otherwise.
Everyone who is defending piracy
here is full of it. People need
to be compensated for their effort or they will stop producing.
It is that simple.
I used to be in a band. We made a damn good record, which was all I ever wanted out of music. The careerism I encountered "on the scene" made me sick, and now I'm a recovering musician. I still have my record, and while I'd like for as many people to hear it as possible, ultimately I don't give a fuck. I'm an "artist", or I used to be. My day job pays my bills. That's how it is.
I can't draw cartoons so I don't know how that works. I do know the Toothpaste For Dinner guy comes home every day from his shitty job, draws a cartoon and puts it up on his website for free. Because of that, and his great content of course, he's my favorite cartoonist (along with Mr. Rall).
Artists who complain about the amount of money they make for their "product" (unless the amount they make is less than the cost of their materials) should shut the fuck up or earn my eternal disdain. Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
P.S. I'm certainly not saying that it's wrong to make money (not even lots of money) for your art. Just quit acting like it's a birthright. And once again, this is mostly directed at musicians.
Also, the original version of this rant was much better and more coherent. My computer crashed and I lost it as I was trying to post it.
Exhibit_B,
Thank you for buttressing my argument. Microsoft has stolen nothing, as evidenced by the result in court. Thanks for providing the evidence that there is no legal case to prove Bill Gates "spent all his time ripping off the computing community". Nothing other than bitter hearsay from a site called "folklore.com" – a fitting name.
Thanks again – I appreciate the footwork!
E_B:
Quite a while back one of our reporters asked me to make a list for her of places that had free digital content for a story contrasting it with the pirate realm.
On the one hand, it ended up being quite a few. On the other hand, other than a few involving pre-madness copyright regimes (c.f. Project Gutenberg), they tended to be somewhat ephemeral. That is, a week, or a month, or a year from when you discovered a source it might very well be gone.
Right now, for instance, the best way to get songs royalty-free without being accused of piracy is on YouTube – if you put a show up, they wave the pirate flag, but if you put up a song video, you're seemingly in the clear.
BTW, Ted's acknowledging the problem with the law enforcement angle and arguing for a standard of personal responsibility and morality. It's incomplete but not basically wrong.
The current recession/depression will test the internet models of support sorely. One insight that I think escapes even Ted entirely is that I like my giving back not to be dictated by the laws and rationales of fundamentally evil and insane people like the capitalist elites currently ruining the world. At some point I simply switch them off and decide my own moral path ala Sartre or something. I think I'm not alone, I just have the guts to say so openly.
Kudos to Ted for sparking such a great discussion, and Kudos for the really interesting responses here. IP rights are one of those areas where it seems that Pandora's Box is wide open and the debates over how best to manage the problem in the age of replication.
Marx once said that a fairly strong observable phenomena is that the closer a person is to the actual production of something, generally speaking they are paid the least amount of the total end value. That's because value is added through the process of artificial scarcity (commercialization), as Exhibit B correctly pointed out.
Unionization was an attempt to make labor scarce in the absence of the old Feudal system of trade guilds, which excluded certain types of people from their trade (women, minorities, the usual suspects).
Industries are quickly co-opted by midstream leeches who suck off loot and claim that they provide a valuable service in the process. Exhibit B is correct that the information age is challenging the entire notion of profit generation.
The only problem as I see it, and as the Swedes see it in their lawsuits over internet pirates, is that WHILE we're figuring out a new way to do this, we probably shouldn't be screwing people over and making some do "hard time," because it's impossible to apply a just legal standard in this situation. Yet the old mass owners of content have teams of lawyers and they're fighting this the old fashioned way. Here in America, too many people get a sense of gratification when someone gets thrown in prison. It goes back to that torture porn thing.
Pay for art has always been a contradiction. After all, how can inspirational work be compatible with material desire? Well, when I go out to a club to see a band perform live, whether they're just a cover band or they write their own music, I general pay a cover charge, and can purchase the band's CDs, T-shirts and other paraphernalia at the show. I'm actually in a band that's working toward this, writing and recording, so I know a little bit about it.
Live performance still pays. High end live performance can pay a substantial amount. No offense to Ted, whose art form is intertwined with social critique, but as a general rule I find that the artists who stand behind the middle-men of their industry (the record labels, for example), know that they are unwilling to make the material sacrifices necessary to make it without a price-fixed, artificially crafted market that lives off of pre-teens paying $20 for a CD because they live in a harsh, fascist world of teenage American public school prestige.
Don't be a leech, Ted, be true to a balanced social critique that acknowledges industries based off of intellectual production don't fit the hyper-individualized and artificial commercial market of today's consumer wasteland, and boldly join us in concluding that the current model of intellectual property rights is, as Exhibit B puts it, "f*cked."
Reverend,
From what I know, the "Toothpaste for Dinner Guy" (Drew) and his wife Natalie Dee make their living selling merch from their comix. They don't have a shitty day job (though packing merch all day probably isn't a blast, at least they can do it from home).
M
So very often, recorded music is ahead of the curve technologically. It's an excellent place to look to see where other media is headed.
So, I stole some songs using P2P and now I feel bad about it. I'm going down to the record store to replace all of these ill-gotten gains with legitimate, legal purchases.
Hey! It's a USED CD store. These used CDs sure are cheaper than the new ones! And the artists get nothing! It's totally legal!
I didn't realize that I could be paid cash dollar for selling other people's intellectual property! I'm going home to gather up all of my illegal MP3s so I can sell them to the used CD store.
What's that? You won't buy my used MP3s? Used MP3s have no actual market value? So what exactly was I stealing then?
Oh, I get it. Each MP3 represents a lost Potential Sale. So, if I write a bad review of the new album by the Corporate Indy Tools, am I a pirate for costing them Potential Sales? If I buy a CD solely because I was impressed with the illegal MP3 is that piratical marketing?
If you try and do the "right" thing with recorded music, you end up heading right down the rabbit hole. It's already been documented that P2P pirates spend more money on music than anyone else (I am a living example of this as I own thousands of CDs and LPs). I'm also a musician with a day job. Steal my music, please.
From what I know, the "Toothpaste for Dinner Guy" (Drew) and his wife Natalie Dee make their living selling merch from their comix. They don't have a shitty day job (though packing merch all day probably isn't a blast, at least they can do it from home).
I stand corrected. I haven't checked in awhile, but I was under the impression that he did it on the side. Still, he's not syndicated. Good for both of them. Also, I hate that comment I left. The original version was much better. Oh well.
Anonymous who wrote the tirade about used mp3s: That is the most concise and brilliant argument for "pirating" music I've ever read. Definitive, even. Please write for my blog!
Yes, Bill Gates made his fortune by cleverly screwing people left and right, the whole time, right from the beginning. The Gates family was already rich when he was learning to tie his shoes, and it made its money in law, not electronics. The facts are widely available and universally understood by anybody who's really interested in the subject. Do your own homework.
> pre-teens paying $20 for a CD
You'll see (some) pre-teens paying $20 for a CD because they have literally every other expense they could possibly have paid for them. If they happen to have $20 in their pockets, what else are they going to spend it on?
Also, as the age at which people figure out how to download whatever they want gets lower and lower, the industry has to target younger and younger victims, er, customers in order to move any product. College campuses used to be ringed with record stores, and they're all gone now.
> Everyone who is defending piracy here is full of it. People need
> to be compensated for their effort or they will stop producing.
99% of what is pirated (at least) would never be purchased. It's not lost revenue, it's irrelevant to revenue. Asking that people give up 99% of what they're listening to, or watching, or whatever, because 1% of the money that they will otherwise pay for the 1% of the product that they will otherwise purchase might actually end up in the hands of an artist, does not make enough sense to anybody that it's going to change their behavior.
> Microsoft has stolen nothing, as evidenced by the result in court.
Clearly, and also Al Capone never did anything bad except fill out his tax forms wrong.
One wonders what motivates somebody to wander around the internet sucking the dick of wealth on random blogs.
I refer everyone to Adam Duritz's blog on this. Counting Crows has sold 20 million plus albums in the last 15 years and still enjoy a following big enough to sell 13,000 tix in most cities. I am lucky to know some of the guys in the band (who are among the nicest most generous people I know), and in spite of Adam's famously getting to dip his wick in most of the hot movie stars of my generation, the guys ain't rich. Adam is kinda rich, but the band isn't. The drummer has a nice but not super nice house (just moved from a condo) after playing with Ben Folds, Sheryl Crow, etc. Turns out that Crows dumped their record label and their latest album actually started to sell and get air time. Go figure. adam.countingcrows.com
Synic said…
> Everyone who is defending piracy here is full of it. People need
> to be compensated for their effort or they will stop producing.
Gee, that's funny. I started out my defense of piracy by saying "The problem is the larger one that people don't get paid what they're worth." It's towards the top of this page, look it up.
That same post also linked to two different methods that artists can get paid without restricting the copying of their work: "Smart alternatives exist". (Read about 'Banda Calypso' on that _Wired_ page, just to be specific.)
Anon 1:57 raises a much better point, although it's been debated extensively here and elsewhere without any result. I can't believe anyone posting here (with the barely-possible exception of our Benevolent Host, Mr. Rall) will ever get paid a red cent by any gigantic record company. Yet Synic apparently doesn't care whether artists get paid, his scruple is that artists get paid in a certain manner and through established channels.
Tea-Baggers hit the streets by the dozens a couple weeks ago, protesting a President who cut their own taxes and raised them on people far richer than the vast majority of Tea-Baggers can ever realistically hope to be. People who wanted the President to have the ability to torture anyone on a whim are suddenly rather dismayed when those powers pass to a different President.
What makes people who are clearly outside the elite, defend policies that benefit the elite at their own expense? Can Pavlovian loyalty really be bought so cheaply as a few patriotic/Capitalistic words and a pat on the head? Geez, I guess the answer is obvious.
Hey Anon 9:18, you're welcome, and I very gratefully appreciate your thoughtful, well-referenced, and reasoned counterarguments to the other four pages of arguments that I posted apart from Bill Gates. Boy, did _you_ change my mind about the strength of your position!
Ted,
I would certainly have sympathy for you if copyright terms were reasonable. The problem is that, thanks to Disney and other big media groups, copyrights are now life + 70 years (or is it 90?). If copyright terms were reasonable, say the 20 years that patents get, I would be all for prosecuting the daylights out of copyright infringers (don't call them pirates – we have real ones in Somalia now). But, when downloading a movie from 1920 can still get you in trouble with the MAFIAA, there is something seriously FUBARed with copyright.