In a time when the latest album or movie is available, for free, to anyone, from your desktop, where is the incentive to hand over money for the identical item? Is it a moral imperative? And what is the moral issue?
The line that we’re constantly being fed by the copyright folks is simple: piracy is theft. We can add the rest of the syllogism on for ourselves: theft is bad, therefore…
But is piracy actually theft? And, more controversially, is theft (always) bad?
Before I delve into this discussion further, here’s a handy experiment. Do this:
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Ok, now do this:
Now, in both scenarios, there are a few more steps to getting the music. At Musica, you’ll need to punch in your credit card details and then go through the exercise of downloading the tracks. On the second scenario, you’ll need to install a (free) Bittorrent program, and then download the files. For free.
In the second scenario, however, you will have committed a crime. The crime of theft, apparently.
What is common between this scenarios, however?
The difference? Obviously, in case 1 someone gets paid. In case 2, someone also gets paid – but only once, the first time the album was copied. Never again.
I’m not going to debate the current legalities here, because no doubt I will lose that argument and discover that downloading music in this way is, in fact, theft. And therefore I am not advocating it or endorsing it.
However I am asking the question: isn’t this the thinnest definition of theft ever conceived? A definition in which all that is lost is the possible income that might have been earned if I’d decided to pay R129.99 for something that I otherwise could have gotten for nothing?
Pirate music has an appealingly transient character (I’ve heard). Because it costs nothing, I feel nothing to listen to it and I trash it if I hate it. I feel nothing to pass it around to friends and share it either, because I don’t feel like they’re leeching off me. And because it opens such a wide field of possibilities, I will tend to get a lot of it. I may discover hundreds of new groups in a month.
The reality is at R129.99 an album, I can only afford to buy maybe a tenth of the albums I’d otherwise have the time, energy and bandwidth to download. Toughies, the music industry might say. If you can’t afford to eat at Pigalle, then best you’d be satisfied with Steers.
The problem, however, is that I’m being asked to walk past a free Pigalle buffet table, one that (by the way) is not depleted no matter how much I eat from it, and one that it is almost impossible to be caught stealing from, purely out of the goodness of my heart.
Usually, this goodness takes the form of “the poor musician argument”. “The poor musicians”, goes the story, “you’re taking their means to make a living from them. You’re taking all their hard work for nothing, and leaving them to thrash away at their guitars with no source of income.”
How stupid, exactly, are we meant to be? The money in the music business, and the entertainment business more broadly, is not concentrated with the stars, but with the studios, labels and retailers who channel the music from the thrashing guitars to us. Sure, the artists earn their living from this stuff too, but their cut is the smallest part of the deal. So, if I am screwing someone here, the person I’m screwing least is the poor musician.
The musician, as it turns out, has other ways to make money. Live performances and sponsorship being two of them. Groove Armada, for example, recently signed with Biccardi. Why? Because it allows them to diversify their way of earning revenue from their music. And, in the process, to decouple their reliance on album sales.
Apart from all that, I borrow an argument I once read in a much more vicious blog post on this subject by an old acquaintance. He said the day when he sees these big musicians look and behave like they’re stuck for cash, his heart will start to feel sore for them. While they’re crusing around in limos, drinking Dom and snorting cocaine off the double-D cups of a different stripper every night, it’s a little difficult to get all teary-eyed.
I guess I feel that there is some kind of transgression here. Someone has done something of value and they have a right to get rewarded for it. And we should be willing to pay them, them mind, for that work. Now that we have a distribution channel that effectively renders the labels, publishers and retailers irrelevant, why can’t we pay the artist his or her small cut of the action directly, get the music, and everyone’s happy?
Or, alternatively, why not fire up a workable subscription model that allows me to pay in bulk for access to music, and then pay the artists royalties as I listen to it (I am aware that there are services in the US that have this or a similar model)?
What seems obvious though is two things: first, the degree of the moral transgression is far smaller than the big businesses who are being most hurt here would like us to believe. And second, where a choice like the one I’ve described here is given to the average person, it takes someone with more than the average moral or ethical standards to not pick the free one. Let’s not kid: just about anyone would take something for nothing if they were almost sure they could get away with it, and if there wasn’t even a physical item at stake.
I’m not adding a lot of new material to this debate, I realise. But when I look at things like Musica and Pick ‘n’ Play, or even iTunes, I can’t help but seeing them immediately fading into history. The way we consume music and entertainment has fundamentally changed. And these guys, all of them, need to wake up.
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