Examples

Tonight I'm going to explore the ways in which the nature of property rights are changing in the face of digital technology. Some of what I'll say might seem a little bit paranoid, but please bear with me.

Digital Rights Management

At home I have a moderate collection of audio CD's mostly containing music. It's not a mammoth collection like some of my friends have-- just a couple hundred classics I've picked up in the time since vinyl records and cassette tapes started dying off back in the 1980's. I own these CD's, and by "own" I mean in the dictionary sense: I have the right to use and/or dispose of them as I see fit. In this case "dispose" probably means "sell" but I could I suppose run them through a shredder. My ownership is limited by copyright law-- I can sell the CD as long as I destroy any copy of it. I can make copies for personal use as long as I don't play it on more than one player at a time. The same rules apply to the cover art, and for that matter they apply to books, magazines, and anything else I can "own" the physical media for but only have a "right to use" the content carried by that media. It's a fair system and it's made a lot of money for a lot of artists, record companies, publishers, and so on. It's also put a lot of great music and literature into the hands of billions of people who might never have otherwise heard or seen or read it by going to concerts or visiting libraries or museums.

But the system doesn't work in a digital era. It turns out the only reason the "right to use" system worked at all is that if you made a copy of a book on a photocopier, or made a copy of a vinyl record onto a cassette tape, the quality of the copy would not be as good as the original. Make a copy of a copy, and things are even worse. A copy of a copy of a copy was probably just unusable. Therefore, the technology of the pre-digital era was perfect for the laws of that era-- it wasn't just illegal to make unlimited copies, it was also impractical-- undesireable-- ugly. If you wanted a clean copy you had to buy one, so there wasn't a lot of copying going on. Digital technology changed all that-- every copy is identical to the original. The Internet made it possible to share a single digital copy with an unlimited number of anonymous strangers. That's great if you're trying to amass a large collection of work without paying for it, but it's not so great if you're an artist wondering how to pay the rent so you can go on creating new art without flipping burgers on the side.

Now it's worth mentioning that unless you're Garth Brooks or some other megastar, you'll make most of your money from concert ticket sales, T-shirt sales, direct sales of CD's at concerts, that sort of thing. A lot of musicians give away perfect digital copies of some songs on their web sites because the money they'd get from a record company isn't enough to worry about, they just want to get their names and reputations out on the street so they can sell concert tickets. The big losers from free digital music sharing systems are the record companies, not the musicians. When you hear about RIAA or MPAA suing another batch of downloaders for copyright violations, that's mostly "big art" flexing its economic muscles-- and the success or failure of those lawsuits won't change the economic outlook for individual artists all that much.

The stages of "big art's" reaction to digital media have been instructive, amusing, and scary. First they said "don't do that!" and demanded that anyone who wanted to see or hear or read licensed material buy a copy. As any of us with teenagers at home could've told them, that's not practical. Eventually they realized this on their own and said "if we can't stop folks from consuming our product in digital form, we can at least make them pay for it." That's sort of where we are now-- if you buy an iTune for your iPod it will only work on that iPod, and so on. But eventually there was a changing of the guard someplace, and the new attitude is "hey! we can make even more money selling it this way!" Except I don't mean, precisely, "sell".

For $25 a month or so, I can rent the right to listen to all the music I want, from Yahoo and several other companies. But there's a catch, several actually. If I stop paying the $25, any music I've downloaded from them stops working. Which means I have to use their player, and their player is a piece of software whose side effects I can't control. At a minimum, their player will report to its mothership every time I play something, since they need that information in order to schedule royalties to the copyright holders (generally "big art"). I might also see a few popup ads. Worse still, I'd have to buy a computer running an Apple or Microsoft operating system, since their player will likely not run well on my Linux homebrew. I'd probably be limited as to which of my laptop or my desktop computers was allowed to play the music. And if I was somehow willing to endure all this, I'd better be prepared to upgrade my Apple or Windows operating system every time another security vulnerability is found, or whenever "big software" decides to release a new version of their operating system. All of which leaves me feeling very monetized, not to mention the loss of privacy and the lost freedom to choose my own players and systems.

I'll tell you what I actually do, though. If I want some new music, I buy it on CD. I copy this CD onto my file server and store the original in a cool dry place. I copy the music to my current laptop and play it using the software of my choice. I do not steal other folks' music by making illegal copies, nor allow anyone to steal music by copying mine. My children say I'm a luddite but frankly they'd be saying that no matter what I did or didn't do, so who cares? I'm in control of "my" music and I know exactly what my rights are and by the end of a few years' time I'll have spent less and heard more than most of the "$25 a month club" crowd. So there.

(If there's time during Q&A I'll tell you my TiVo story.)