Matt Yglesias

The Internet is Good for People Who Listen to Music!

One of the crazier things about contemporary life is that you see tons of words spilled on the question of how much the internet is hurting the music industry. This goes on even though I’ve never heard anyone even attempt to argue that a person in 2009 looking for some good music to listen to is in a worse situation than was a person in 1989. Tobi Vail, guest-posting for Carrie Brownstein, isn’t quite focused in on that point, but I think it’s implicit in what she says:

I asked a younger friend of mine if he thought the Internet had eliminated the hierarchy of “cool,” and he said, “Instead of hanging out with annoying record-collector guys, kids today just read that guy’s blog, but the same guys still get to decide what’s considered cool.” I think he’s right regarding hipster culture, where there does seem to be a handful of male-dominated music sites that exert a disproportionate influence over what’s trendy. But women have thrived in the past 10 years, and our history is being documented and preserved like never before.

Today, previously hard-to-find records by ’60s soul queens Irma Thomas, Marva Whitney and Betty Davis are readily available. People know who Betty Harris, Meredith Monk, Karen Dalton and Patty Waters are, and if they don’t, they can easily find out once they hear a name. Listservs such as Typical Girls offer a place to share information about out-of-print recordings by esoteric post-punk groups like Y Pants, Bush Tetras, Fatal Microbes, The Mo-Dettes and Snatch. A new generation of all-female bands such as Erase Errata, Mika Miko, Wet Dog and Finally Punk were informed by this history. “Feminal” all-female punk groups The Raincoats and The Slits reunited, and still play to responsive crowds who know all the words to their old songs; original members of both groups are actively pursuing solo careers. ESG, Pylon and Young Marble Giants are groups everyone has heard of, if not heard. Yoko Ono has a new record out at 76!

Which is just to reiterate once again that to make minimizing violations of intellectual property law the goal of intellectual property policy would be circular and pointless. Making the goal to maximize producer income would be non-pointless but illegitimate. The goal ought to be to ensure as widespread availability of works to consumers as possible. And all indications are that consumers are much better off than they used to be, and increasingly so. When people start reporting some practical difficulty in finding new music recordings, then call me about strengthening enforcement.

Parody Time

Good times: “Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has produced his own Downfall parody video, making fun of the fact that Constantin Films has issued DMCA notices to remove all of the Downfall parody videos from YouTube.”

The issue with this kind of thing is that the social losses involved in cutting off all the parodies and remixes far, far exceed any actual losses incurred by the copyright holder. Whenever you strengthen IP protections, you do increase the financial incentives available to creators. But you also increase the burden on users and creators. There’s an appropriate balance to be struck, and banning these kind of parody videos doesn’t strike it.

Socially Optimal Copyright Infringement

Tim Lee argues that it’s appropriate that the burden of enforcing copyrights is on the rights-holder. I agree with what he says. As a further consideration, it’s also worth recalling that the socially optimal level of copyright enforcement is higher than zero. A rights-holder is going to price access to his works at the profit-maximizing level. But there will always be people for whom access to the work is worth more than $0 but less than the profit-maximizing price. When those people infringe they gain a real benefit, but the rights-holder incurs no real loss.

Yesterday, for example, I linked to what I take to be a pirate copy of Michael Dummett’s article “Bringing About the Past” and I’m fairly certain that none of the people who clinked the link and downloaded the paper yesterday (myself included) would have done so had there been no alternative to paying the copyright holder for the privilege. Completely eliminating copyright infringement in the digital age would not only be difficult, it would represent a massive loss of social welfare. Forcing the burdens of enforcement onto rightsholders has, among other things, the impact of ensuring that copyright enforcement remains imperfect. In particular, it makes it relatively likely that instances of infringement that aren’t really costing copyright owners significant revenue will go unpunished. This is a good thing.

I would note that one of several reasons to resist the effort to analogize copyright infringement to piracy is that it completely collapses this fact. The socially optimal level of robberies undertaken with violence and the threat of violence is zero. There are practical questions about the feasibility of perfectly enforcing laws against robbery, and also questions about enforcement costs. But in principle, the less robbery the better. This is not the case with copyright infringement. Some instances of infringement represent genuine losses to copyright owners and there’s a debate to be had about the extent to which such transactions are socially harmful. But over and above those instances, there are many instances of infringement such that non-infringement would represent deadweight loss rather than a benefit to the copyright owner.

The Pirate Party

It should probably be noted that the German edition of the Pirate Party scored a pretty respectable two percent of the vote in their debut election. That would have been good enough for a Bundestag seat or two were it not for the rule that you need five percent of the vote to get counted in Germany’s proportional system. Many countries operate with a lower threshold. The Swedish version of the Pirate Party snagged a seat in the most recent European Parliament elections. The Pirates’ main issue—intellectual property—is probably best addressed at the European level and people are more inclined to vote for minor parties in European elections anyway, so you could imagine them building on this to elect some MEP’s from Germany in the future.

The Pirates strike me as more of an American-style “third party” than a European-style minor party. The difference, in my mind, is that rather than becoming stable junior partners in coalitions, what successful third parties do in the United States is get coopted by someone bigger who poaches their issue and their supporters.

At any rate, the case for substantial reform of intellectual property policy is quite strong on the merits, the issue is in fact crucially important as we move more and more into the digital economy, and yet no mainstream party anywhere in the world wants to touch it. So a little outside agitation seems to me to be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Reason and Persuasion

John Holbo emails about his new book:

It’s out in paper – and what a great read it is: plus cartoons! – and I also negotiated to secure the e-rights and have used those to release it for free online. You can view the whole thing in a nice flash interface. And download it as a PDF (although that takes a simple sign in – still: free is good.) I know you’ve blogged before about textbook stupidities and about how more stuff should be available online. Well: put your money where your mouth is. Or your mouth where your mouth is, rather: gimme a link for having done this noble thing that more academics should be doing, and more publishers letting them do.

All true. Here it is on Amazon if you’re into paper books. But it’s definitely true that more academics should be doing this sort of thing—it makes sense for people who are paid to add to the stock of human knowledge to be doing as much as possible to disseminate said knowledge. The book itself “provides a new look at old issues through the lens of three classic dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno and Republic, Book I” and represents a collaboration between Holbo, a philosopher, and his classicist wife Belle Waring; two excellent people and excellent bloggers and I’m looking forward to their book.

Copyright Forever?

Nate Anderson has an excellent review of Mark Helprin’s recent book-length brief for unlimited and very strong copyright, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto. I just wanted to amplify one point:

Also, a “million geeks in airless basements” would “rewrite Doctor Zhivago to make it more like ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’”

In case you’re not quite getting the point, Helprin doesn’t want the unwashed masses anywhere near these absolutely exquisite (and copyrighted) insults he’s hurling onto the page. Removing the barrier of copyright would suddenly dissolve the individual voice in the acid of community; remixes, mashups, copying, cutting, pasting—where would it end except in the destruction of individual identity within “an indistinguishable and instantly malleable mass”?

Which is, of course, an issue that has already confronted every single work ever to slip out of copyright, yet somehow we still know who wrote Middlemarch and have managed to preserve the text whole and undefiled.

The related issue is that while re-writing Doctor Zhivago to resemble Dungeons & Dragons may sound dumb, the general habit of remixing and repurposing older storylines has positive value. You never hear anyone saying “it’s too bad Shakespeare’s heirs weren’t able to stop them from making West Side Story” or lamenting the lack of legal wrangling around Ulysses’s relation to The Odyssey:

To me, and I think to most people, it’s a good thing that the authors of West Side Story were able to put their work together without constantly looking over their shoulder at whether or not things were getting too close to Romeo & Juliet or needing to somehow deny that that’s what they were doing. The fact that the work is more-or-less explicitly a retelling of an already classic cultural landmark gives it a kind of additional resonance. Trying harder to make it different in order to stay on the right side of the law would likely have actually made the thing seem more trite and derivative; if you simply rely on lazy clichés you’re not infringing on anyone in particular.

And of course that’s to say nothing of the fact that Shakespeare himself was often re-doing other works that prevailed in his time. The convention is to think of stronger intellectual property law as law that’s favorable to creators. And in some ways it is. But it’s important to note that the main users of copyrighted material are also creators. The output of this blog is copyrighted, but lots of the inputs—from quotations to photos to YouTube clips—are also copyrighted.

Why Would Information Blockades Increase Newspaper Revenue?

I 100 percent sympathize with Ian Shapira for being upset about being under-credited for some work he did. That said, I think it’s way off-base of him to spin this tale into a larger saga about how the internet is undermining the economics of news-gathering. For one thing, as Spencer Ackerman says unfortunately this happens to everyone who works in journalism, and newspapers arguably do it even more egregiously than websites. Indeed, it’s not just that MSM outlets rip-off blogs without adequate credit, but MSM outlets are actually really vicious about failing to credit each other. This is bad manners, bad ethics, and I think ultimately not very sensible business practic and everyone ought to cut it off.

That said, no matter how many times someone expresses the view that newspapers’ financial problems are caused by the fact that they’re not allowed to copyright the factual content of the stories their reporters unveil, it’s still not true. The fact of the matter is that the MSM organizations that do the most news-gathering get a staggering volume of web traffic. One could imagine an alternate universe in which the New York Times and BBC were creating all this great content, putting it online, and then aggregation-oriented blogs were re-writing it all and people were only reading the aggregators at NYTimes.com and bbc.co.uk languish. But we don’t actually live in that universe. Rather, we live in a universe in which NYTimes.com and bbb.co.uk are hugely popular websites.

True, the NYT doesn’t charge those who read its website. But subscription costs don’t cover the cost of paper and delivery. When you sell newspapers, you lose money. You earn money from selling ads. But advertisers don’t wan to pay big-time money for web advertisements. This is a big problem for newspapers. But of course it’s an even bigger problem for for-profit web-only enterprises. And altering copyright law doesn’t make the problem go away. But newspaper writers and editors should consider that altering copyright law in an anti-aggregator way would in fact create enormous headaches for working reporters who are naturally going to want to be able to write stories that are informed by accurate factual information that was first reported elsewhere.