An incidental comment from a talk by Adam Russell on AI:

Technological change is quick. Cultural change is glacial.

Nothing promotes cultural change like positive values, and the higher the value to people, the bigger the wave a zeitgeist can ride. A multitude of peers are the best marketing and distribution arm possible, near optimally communicating things that don’t make it through the narrow straights of MSM filters.

This kind of interaction is a fundamental mechanic of human cultural activity. As always, I’m not talking about Culture with a big C, but the process of culture, the large scale interaction of any social species. It was fettered and channelled by large twentieth century institutions, but this was not an opposite state, it was a bias. Even in the heyday of Big Media, it’s not like people didn’t already share stuff, it’s just that the practice wasn’t so widespread and there wasn’t the technology to track it.

While I’m gazing at YouTube absorbing advertising that’s so undemanding of me that I don’t even recognise it as such, jealous rights holders are saying this is copyright infringement and tearing the videos down with the cooperation of the site. Meanwhile, the market stall pirates who were so demonised in the 80’s and 90’s now have an interesting but largely untold story:

Tony started his life of piracy sometime in the 1990’s working markets, car-boot sales and pubs in the UK, selling counterfeit PC applications/games and console discs for a fraction of the retail price. “The profit was amazing back then” he recalls “We were getting £25 ($48) for a couple of PSX games and £15 ($29) for a single CDR with the latest utilities on. We couldn’t make them fast enough.” Things were looking good for his little enterprise and before long he was clearing up to £1000 ($1,942) profit each week.

Tony is very clear about why his rags to riches story has gone back to rags again. “File-sharing, P2P – call it what you like. When you asked a customer why he wasn’t buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was ‘BitTorrent this, LimeWire that’. Add that to the fact that huge numbers of PC users have burners and fast broadband and its obvious why I had to get out and earn a living another way. We had it good for a while but I don’t think those days are coming back.”

I get the impression a bunch of people don’t want to listen to such a story because it punctures a whole lot of flaws around the terms “pirate”, “sales”, and “copyright”. It’s not a moral issue, it’s one of utility: Even though subjective values thoroughly deflate Homo Economicus as a realistic model, people still tend to maximise returns while minimising expenditures. Market stall pirates were cheaper than the businesses offering the same products at the same time, then P2P undercut both not just financially, but in terms of time, effort, space, diversity and flexibility.

Artists and labels alike are still talking about copy protection as if it has a hope in hell. I have only one suggestion for them: Try using at as a consumer. You’ll soon switch to something like David Byrne’s stance:

He said at that point, record labels will be faced with a sort of choice — to ramp up marketing services to use music as a loss leader for tours and merchandise revenue, or aim only for international stars of the ilk of Britney Spears.

He said he buys most of his music online via eMusic, or obtains it illegally, due to the file constraints on files sold on iTunes. Byrne predicated that once DRM is removed, iTunes will no longer “have a monopoly,” and labels will be better prepared to deal with Web sales.

I am “getting stuff for free” by spending my time and bandwidth. It “infringes copyright”, and in doing so, instigates me to discover and remember people, and if there happens to be digital media without DRM at a price point I like, I buy their stuff. If the barriers to me getting it are lower than those to the presently illegal alternatives, buying it is the better course.

Constructs of morality derived from legislation have nothing to do with it. I’ve had a good long taste of media models with the highest utility yet, and there’s no way I’m going back. The only danger posed by that is to people who refuse to understand. Nevermind. Their lack of insight means the chances of them having anything meaningful or salient to say to me diminish by the month, and plenty of people are clamouring to take their stage.

Media funding will clearly change in some way, as will copyright law. Set against technological and cultural change, copyright law as it stands is a dumb techno-cultural relic, and I suspect it might leave a wake of unenforcable legislative fragments. Around it, come war, famine, ebola and recession, the people who remain will continue to share resources, make media, entertain and stimulate each other. That’s culture with a small c, regarded as emergent rule sets, social nets and mechanics. It’s where markets come from, and business has to follow, not browbeat.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 23:36 and is filed under Copyfight, Culture, Media, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.