A musician speaks about acquiring music without paying for it

[firecat]

A professional musician writes about why free music on the Internet isn't really free, debunks some myths about how and where pro musicians get paid (e.g., most don't make much money on touring; Spotify pays musicians almost nothing), and describes some charities you can support if you end up deciding that you did a wrong thing by downloading free music, or if you just want to help pro musicians.

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

I don't agree with the implication that it's a particular generation of people who are primarily downloading stuff on the Internet in violation of copyright. People of all ages do it.
I also think there are huge problems with copyright law and with the way corporations sometimes go about protecting their copyrights. And I support transformative fanworks, which often involve working with copyrighted material. It's not a simple issue. And I take digital stuff without paying for it sometimes, so I'm not shaking fingers at people.

This issue is also relevant to all sorts of other artists producing material that can be digitized. I find it interesting what justifications people give for their choices. And it's interesting to think about what the availability of free copies of digital stuff means, going forward, in terms of how art is made and who makes art and who can make a living at it and how people get access to art.

Comments

[firecat]

I agree with almost everything you're saying.

The only situation where I am tempted to be judgemental is that if a person wants to own a piece of art (music, writing, etc.) and it is available directly from the artist, and the person can afford it, I think the person should buy it, not take it without paying.

But one thing puzzles me: the notion that if a person can't get something offered for sale from a source that they approve of, or can't get it at the same time that other people get it, or can't get it in the most convenient way, that means it's OK for them to take it without paying. I understand wanting to do those things, and I understand deciding "fuck it, I don't care if it's OK." But I don't understand believing that it's a right.

I'm not saying you think it's a right. But I've seen some commentary that makes it seem like some people do think so.

The idea that it's a right to take something if you can't get it in a legally approved manner mostly doesn't seem to be applied to physical goods as often. So I'm puzzled about how it came to be applied to digital goods. Is it just because it's so easy? Or do other things come into play?

[cleverthylacine]

I'm not trying to put you off or evade this question but the problem is that it's a horribly complex question because it goes into the matter of what "rights" are and what "goods" are.

For instance:

1) If I see you leave your bike unattended and I take your bike, you don't have a bike any more. If I make a copy of some music that you own, you still have the music. If you make a copy of the music, and you give that to me, and you still have the music, I haven't stolen anything from you; if you make a copy of the music, and you still have the music, and you put it up on a file sharing site, much like you might put an old bike on the street with a "free" sign, and I download that copy, I haven't stolen it from you. The artist doesn't want the music back. The artist wants to be paid for the effort that went into creating the recording. The only difference between torrents and mixtapes is SCALE. (The record companies have on several occasions tried to restrict the sale of blank cassette tapes and other recordable media for exactly this reason.) What the entertainment company wants isn't the music back, either; they want to be paid (in part for the real work of distributing it and producing the sound if not the physical media, but also for their armies of lawyers and lobbyists who are trying to take over the internet, and let's not gloss over that in an era where corporations are legally considered people.)

2) There is no good argument that anyone has a right to anyone else's labour or the products thereof. But there are a number of very good arguments that full participation in culture is a human (if not currently a legal) right, which I don't have the time to enumerate. Clearly there should be better channels for compensating people for their labour--channels that don't involve scary spyware or scarier lobbyists. But being able to participate in one's own culture, in the global culture, and not being restricted from acquiring knowledge (textbooks are also an issue here) and learning and becoming culturally literate on the grounds of where you live or how much money you have? There's a real issue there. I mean, this isn't just about whether or not Joe Schmo can put the latest Megaman movie on his iPad for free; this is also about whether or not people in countries where the cost of shipping physical books is prohibitive have the right to read textbooks or enjoy science fiction at all.

And the idea that full participation in culture is a human right is relatively new, but the idea of human rights is relatively new, period. I mean, there are lots of places even today where the right to believe what you want to believe and say what you want to say is not acknowledged; there are places in this country where the right to love who you want is not acknowledged; and the idea that some people don't have a right to eat or to basic health care is currently being contested in this very society. I have no doubt that future generations will think we're all pretty barbaric.

(One last thing: I haven't ever downloaded anything I could get direct from the artist and pay for, just FYI. In fact 90% of what I personally have torrented is TV shows I already paid for with my insanely high cable subscription that I don't always have time to watch when broadcast, and/or think I will need to rewatch throughout the season in case I forget something--or TV shows that aren't available legally at ALL because very few people still give a shit about them; some of them took weeks to torrent because so few people give a shit about them that hardly anyone was seeding.)

[firecat]

there are a number of very good arguments that full participation in culture is a human (if not currently a legal) right

OK, that's a reason I can understand for thinking one has a right to download stuff without paying, if paying is onerous. Although I wouldn't want to be responsible for deciding what full participation in culture means.

3) but the idea of human rights is relatively new, period.

Yes. Part of my concern is precisely that the concept of rights, and a bunch of pretty basic rights, are under attack; and groups such as corporations are trying to get the concept of rights to apply to them too. And this is judgemental of me, but I think that (e.g.) downloading your own copy of The Avengers isn't as important as the other rights you mention, and I'm worried that trying to equate that with the other rights will end up harming people's access to the other rights.

Maybe it's not really a zero sum game though.

FYI, I don't judge your use of torrenting.

[cleverthylacine]

I wouldn't want to be responsible for deciding what full participation in culture is either, but I am deeply concerned about corporate cultural control. People need to share stories; we've been doing it since forever, and before there was copyright OR patronage, before there were governments, people supported storytellers and artists by making them sacred. I'm not saying that this was a golden age, far from it; for one thing, if your particular story/art wasn't something the people around you liked, the consequences could range from being completely ignored and having to give it up to make a living, to finding yourself on a bonfire for offending the gods.

The problem is now the corporations want to control distribution of the things people like, and as a result:

1) only the artists they think they can sell get wide distribution/exposure;
2) those people don't hurt for money or lose anything by torrenting/free distribution unless they suck, because people spend a lot of money on them;
3) they want to control the branding of those artists by limiting them to producing art they think will sell and not allowing other people to create derivative/transformative/critical works;
4) they're probably not completely unaware that being culturally literate not just in things like great literature but also in terms of what people who matter are watching and reading and talking about is a door-opener, and that preventing oppressed people from accessing that stuff easily in part prevents them from becoming people that other people listen to;
5) people who don't produce stuff that is popular are actively prevented from making any money off it because they're the ones who suffer from every penny lost to piracy;
6) cultural control is reinforced because access to knowledge and information from other cultures (whether that's the latest Utada Hikaru CD, or someone in Saudi Arabia downloading feminist works or porn) is made very, very difficult;
7) American businesses get to sell the stuff they want to promote at huge bonuses overseas while restricting what we can get here from outside;
8) things like YouTube and fanfiction and sarcastic t-shirts about corporate characters get stomped on;
9) it just goes on and on and on.

So IDK, because I wouldn't argue that getting the Avengers movie for free is in and of itself a human right, I would say that it's problematic to decide people shouldn't be able to see the Avengers movie at all legally until it's shown in their country, or to only sell the Avengers movie on DVD or with DRM to prevent people not just from copying it but also from making mashups of it on YouTube, whether it's because they want to make music videos that imply Tony and Steve make out or music videos that criticise some of the militaristic themes, and that it's a problem when a poor kid who is trying to become a geeky kid and develop intellectual friends and interests not necessarily supported at home can't talk about the Avengers with the wealthier geeky kids at school--that one thing won't hold this kid back, but it's one of a dozen small microaggressions constantly reminding that kid and their friends that they're not in the same class, not supposed to be friends--and that we need to remember that in a very real way the Avengers are part of our cultural mythology.

[firecat]

I agree that the degree of control corporations want is problematic. I also think it's against their own interests; if they were able to limit distribution as much as they think they want to, their stuff wouldn't be as popular as it is.

I would really like to see more art being done outside the control of large corporations. It wouldn't have the same global reach necessarily, but it would be more participatory. I feel more connected to an artist if I buy their stuff directly. Sharing enthusiasm about something made by someone else is important, but I feel more connected to a community if we are sharing what we make with each other.

[cleverthylacine]

I absolutely agree.

And there's no reason it can't be global. That's how the internet works.