Stealing Culture
At EuroOSCON, Cory Doctorow talked about plans for a European Broadcast Flag—a ‘rights management’ system which is to be built into future digiboxes. He talked about the implications of Digital Rights Management for the consumer (there are no good implications). What he didn’t discuss were its implications for media makers.
Although Cory was talking about Television and video, I’m going to talk about music because there are the same pressures there and music’s what I do.
The internet has changed the game here. Tools like Bittorrent and the P2P networks are extremely effective ways of getting music out there. The rise of podcasting makes it possible for any artist to have a global reach and, as Ewan Spence has pointed out:
If you assume a group of three people need to shift around £45,000 net income to get a basic wage of £15K each (UK numbers, I’ve an idea what you need for a basic living wage) then that’s 4,500 CD’s at £10 each. How easy is that to manage in the online world? Well you really just need 2,000 hardcore fans, and an album of music every six months and you’ve got your income. Throw in some tours and gigs every other weekend, and any band should ask themselves why they would need a record company deal for a single territory?
Numbers like that (especially if larger artists start to take note of their implications) are why the record companies are behaving like cornered rats. DRM is a last, desperate, throw of the dice. If they can mandate a fully protected chain of distribution, and force the use of ‘trusted’ playback devices that won’t play unprotected content (because unencrypted content is stolen content, obviously), then they get to stay in place as gatekeepers holding the encryption keys to the market.
They’re almost certainly doomed to fail, but they can do a lot of damage while they thrash around.
I’m a folk singer. Music isn’t something to buy, it’s something to make and share with friends in your home or your local. There are still stars - performers who can reliably fill folk clubs and sell enough CDs to make a living at it - but the majority of folkies simply don’t have that hunger, or aren’t that good.
Even in folk circles, the taste for unaccompanied male singers is, ah, unusual. I don’t look for bookings because I wouldn’t get them. But I can fill a floor spot and I like the idea of being heard by a wider audience. So I make recordings available on this site. One great thing about traditional music is that it’s free (as in beer and freedom). I don’t have to contact the publisher to get permission to release a recording without charging for it, I can just do it. I’d love to record The Old Songs and put it up here, but I’d need clearance from the estates of Bob Copper and Peter Bellamy. I’m sure I’d get it, but I don’t want the hassle. Not when there’s so much unencumbered material out there.
Now imagine a world in which the DRM wet dream has true. How do I distribute my recordings then? How does my audience hear them? How does any podcaster manage it? Where do we go to buy our Artistic Licenses?
What about live performance? With the recent changes in the English licensing laws, there are already small folk clubs that have had to shut down or move because the licensing authorities required the venue to have bouncers on the door on music nights. A club with maybe 30 regular attendees doesn’t buy enough beer for the venue to soak up that cost. That means there are fewer places I can go and singing with friends. Pub sessions are suffering too. Our government seems to see public music making as something to be left to the professionals. Never mind that karaoke is still popular, never mind that the Prime Minister served his time in a pub band, never mind that David Blunkett is a stalwart of his local pub’s carol singers. There is a discontinuity there—their expressed intent is to make it easier, but the consequence of their actions is that clubs are closing down and people have fewer places to make music. Nice one.
The worst hasn’t happened yet. The sky has not fallen. They haven’t stolen our culture yet. But we need to keep a tight grip on it.
