Learning with the Fang

Within 24hours of Michael Jackson’s death I had seen thousands of links to ILLEGAL video clips and songs passed around as facebook status updates and twitter tweets. At dinner on the Saturday night after his death I heard several stories of people unable to buy CDs of albums they had previously bought at least twice because stock had run-out at local stores. This got me thinking…

The music industry could learn from this in a very positive way by either letting go of restrictions on digital content and concentrating on the sales of physical goods or it could work through the long list of people who shared and downloaded and sue em for stealing their stuff. I suspect the former could make the world a better place and would put a lot more money in the hands of musicians but the latter offers the incumbent power brokers and over-paid middle men a chance to flex their muscles and take some more cash with them on their way down. Human nature being what it is, we will probably see a very messy mixture of both.

Lets start with a look a the positive cues the ‘industry’ could take from what happened over the last few days.

• Many people shared links to Michael Jackson songs and video clips via their FaceBook pages and twitter ‘tweets’. My own house was filled with the sounds of his past work and conversations about everything from our likes or dislikes of the tunes, the impact of his dancing abilities on culture, the length of his trousers in that ‘Billy Jean’ clip to our own obsession with child protection and paedophilia. This is an important part of the healing process in my culture, which would be improved if access to the ’soundtrack of our lives’ were less entangled by record label executives and laywers.
• After the initial sharing of links to Michael’s work, the tone of my twitter stream changed in an interesting and important way. People started complaining about slowness in the iTunes store as they tried to purchase a more intimate experience, others proclaimed they had ‘re-bought’ CDs or albums they already own, still others complained that their local store was out of copies of the particular album they tried to buy while out shopping.
  

  This shows that people love to buy and own ’stuff’ (made out of atoms) and that free distribution of digital content (made out of copies of bits) actually leads to more sales.

• As a side note to the above point, it would be interesting to study the spike in sales of Jackson’s work (amplified by all the digital sharing) with that on the passing of Elvis Presley (prior to the ubiquity of digtial sharing tools). Hat tip to Blakey for his tweet –
• Being the father of two kids who could well end up making their living through musical talent, I think the current ‘get famous and drown in your own river of gold’ model the music industry has created is evil and at least partially responsible for the death of Michael Jackson. I hope my kids get to grow up in a world where they can make a decent living from their creative work, and be rewarded for contintuing to do so. With a bit of luck they won’t make so much money that they stop innovating, and hopefully never get so famous that they lose their sense of place in the world. Imagine what could have happened if Michael were not incarcerated by his own fame and the ongoing royalty stream for work already accomplished. I doubt that he would have felt the need to push so hard to ‘re-launch’ his career at age 50, clearly a major contributing factor to his early demise. Further, without acquiring such monstrous fame and deep pockets, he may have been free to pursue whatever personal quirks he had in the privacy of his own home.

Now lets put on our cynical costume and suggest some nasty implications of what might be that hopefully shed some light on the absurdity of current copyright laws for the digital age. Twitter and FaceBook offer great tools and audit trails to identify and prosecute the people who have been sharing links to Jackson songs. Since you don’t have to pay them for promoting this work (they did that for free), you can increase your profits by sue-ing them for demonstrably illegal activity (under current copyright law in many western countries). As I write, a *woman in Minnesota has been ordered to pay $80,000 per song to record companies for illegally downloading tracks and violating copyright laws.

• Lets start by working through each FaceBook profile with links to copyright material. Since profiles pretty much identify actual people, it shouldn’t be too hard to demand proof of obtaining permission from copyright holder then raking in $80k per unauthorised link.
• Since the links will generally be to centralised servers like YouTube or whatever it should be a piece of cake to count the number of downloads and either server the service provider or demand they give out the IP addresses of the nasty downloaders.
• Repeat the exercise for twitter (making use of the handy search.twitter.com), being careful to remove duplicates from those people who update their facebook status via twitter.
• Of course, it would pay to wait a while to make sure those who were inspired to go out and buy CD’s or records have done so. While they will be paying a lot less than $80k per song, every bit counts. On the slightly less cynical side, there is an absolute gold-mine of data in the tweets and facebook status updates that would make for a great ethnographic or at least market research study. Before I close this post and link to some of the supporting data, please let me vent my spleen on a slightly more technical matter.

Technical Rant – the internet works by making copies of tcp/ip packets (consisting of a collection of digital ‘bits’) and moving them from one computer to another. This copying is a good thing and makes the notion of ‘theft’ or ‘piracy’ utterly ridiculous for anything made out of ‘bits’. Every video you watch or song you listen to on your computer is a ‘DOWNLOAD’, there is really no difference between ’streaming’ services like online radio or youtube, direct downloads of .mp3 music or various video files or the Peer to Peer sharing and distribution of same. They all involve copying bits which get downloaded to your computer. Get over it. Stop splitting hairs. Dont get me started.

Supporting links and background info.

*woman in Minnesota has been ordered to pay $80,000 per song to record companies

• Moby’s blog:
  

  the riaa have sued Jammie Thomas-Rasset of minnesota for $2,000,000 for illegally downloading music.

  argh. what utter nonsense. this is how the record companies want to protect themselves? suing suburban moms for listening to music? charging $80,000 per song?

  punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business.

• The Times online

A woman in Minnesota has been ordered to pay $80,000 a song to record companies for illegally downloading tracks and violating copyright laws.

A federal jury ruled that Jammie Thomas-Rasset willfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs, and awarded record companies $1.92 million.

• Cnet.com

Prior to last year, bankruptcy court would not have sheltered Jammie Thomas-Rasset from the $1.92 million debt she owes the music industry. But a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco could enable her to walk away from the debt, several legal experts said on Friday.

• The inquirer

*the comments on this post show just how nasty people can be
The jury in Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset found that Thomas-Rasset willfully downloaded 24 tunes from the peer-to-peer filesharing service Kazaa, infringing the plaintiffs’ copyrights, and it slammed her with $1.92 million in statutory damages.

That works out to $80,000 per song, or over 200,000 times the actual damages that the recording companies could have conceivable suffered by the loss of those sales.

Tweets n stuff:

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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