C&binet, filesharing and why the Thomas Jefferson candle analogy doesn’t work
By Andrew Harrison, Associate Editor of The Word Magazine
Today’s Twitter-frenzy around Lord Mandelson’s appearance at the C&binetforum bigwigs’ retreat – the “Creative Davos”, as we are being urged not to call it – proves that nothing puts virtual bums on digital seats like a proper star turn. I was on C&binet panel about filesharing on Monday night and the hashtags did not fly at anywhere near the same velocity. I got the feeling that the audience was rather disappointed that they didn’t get an entertaining ding-dong between copyright absolutists (representatives of the Featured Artists Coalition, UK Music, Virgin Media, the BBC and Warner Music) and a music journo (me) who would surely call for the end of copyright, the Man to be burnt in effigy and the reign of sweet anarchy.
Unfortunately, we all seemed to agree on the main points – that it’s not unreasonable for artists to decide whether or not their work should be shared, and that three-strikes-and-you’re-choked is about as reasonable a sanction against persistent uploading as can be imagined – leaving the panel a conference organiser’s nightmare: one where nobody got irate and the fur did not fly. Maybe they should have put Nick Griffin on instead.
The nearest we got to sparks came in audience questions, specifically from delegate Anita Ondine Smith of Seize The Media. She questioned the panel’s diversity – and yes, we were all white males, although I think she was getting at the fact that the other panelists represented large media interests and there was no-one from the Pirate Party/Copyleft brigade to be seen (at least I hope she was. I’m not sure that race or gender qualify or disqualify one from taking a position on filesharing). She also raised one of the favourite touchstones of copyright liberationists, that quote about candles from Thomas Jefferson: “He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me.” (I wasn’t taking notes so this is pinched from here).
I hesitate to go against the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence but while this is snappy, easily-assimilated and beautifully-put, it strikes me as almost entirely inapplicable to file-sharing. One of the hurdles that impedes a proper understanding of digital media is a lack of workable metaphors. Is the internet like a pipe? Is it like a cake? Is it like a swarm of bees or a weather system? Er… yes and no. I’ll tell you what, though: infinitely replicable digital media is not like the flame of a candle. If you light your candle from mine, sure, the light of my candle is not diminished and nor is its market value (research and development on fire was completed some years ago). If you copy a song or film or program without payment, however, you make it less scare and therefore microscopically less valuable. Also, you have failed to repay your teeny-tiny share of the investment that made that product possible, therefore making it less likely that the producer will create more, similar products. You have begun to erode the work-leads-to-ownership compact that makes intellectual endeavour worthwhile. And when thousands of people do what you did, those very small infractions build up into a real and present danger to all intellectual property. This does not happen with candle-light, which does not have scarcity and therefore market value as digital media does. Thomas Jefferson isn’t wrong, he’s just being misapplied.
My fellow panelist John Reid from Warner Music had a much more concise rejoinder: “Never mind the light, who made your candle?”
it is deeply depressing that only 7% of the people who downloaded Nine Inch Nails tracks on a pay-if-you-want basis actually chose to do so..if that figure is representative of the predominant societal attitude to rewarding artists for their music, then musicians and, by extension, everyone who loves music, are in deep trouble. I’m not sure how we came to this un-pretty pass, but perhaps in the face of such widespread mean-spiritedness towards musicians, one which perhaps springs from a very real ‘money for nothing and your chicks for free’ bitterness amongst the once and former record-buying public, maybe it is time to either find other entities to pay for the music – music that the public consumes in ever vaster quantities and ways – or find other ways to monetise the fact of being an artist. Which is what this site aims to encourage…good work indeed
gary smith
October 28, 2009 at 11:47 am
To find reasonable analogies for filesharing I think we have to put it in its its historical context – how things were not just before digital, but before records themselves even.
It’s 1924. I invite you round to my parlour. You sat down at my piano, sweep “Down at the Old Bull and Bush” off my pile of sheet-music and get stuck in. You play it a couple of times and done. You’ve learned it. You go back home, play it regularly on your own piano, and teach your family and a couple of friends to play it too.
You’re no longer a potential consumer of the original sheet music, and the copyright holders haven’t seen a penny from you or any of the other people you taught to play since that visit to my parlour.
Are you a criminal?
The instant reply “Of course not” is the one filesharers will give if asked if they feel like criminals. And that’s the real problem. Digital music isn’t perceived by filesharers as a “piece of property”, subject to control and legislation to protect it; it’s seen as a non-material thing – more a concept than a property – that is capable of infinite cost-free replication, just like a tune you’ve taught yourself to play, or a joke someone told you last night, or a trending Twitter hashtag.
The Jefferson quote isn’t actually as flawed as Andrew and John Reid make out. It’s not about the candles – the recording studios, PCs and iPods – but the flame that’s being passed between them. And the record companies are insisting that the bloke who rubbed the two sticks together to make the flame in the first place is entitled to be paid every time that the flame is passed from one candle to another. Yes, there was a cost involved in gathering the tinder and firewood, and the energy expended in the stick-rubbing. But who ever charged anyone for just giving them a light?
Archie Valparaiso
October 28, 2009 at 12:05 pm
You have a valid point, to a certain degree. How good are you at Piano?
There is a clear distinction between the consumption of art and the participating in it, and in this example the recording of a performance and of performing yourself. You’re lumping master rights and publishing in together, and they’re not the same. If you were to perform on the piano in front of a paying audience then the composers would be compensated via various collection societies. To say it’s the same to play a song as it is to listen to a recording may imply that you’re not really giving credit to the artistry involved in the composition of and the performance of music.
To be fair, I can neither play piano (well at least) or create fire without matches or a lighter.
Mat
Culture Karma
culturekarma
October 28, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Musicians deserve to be paid for their work, yes, but only if people are willing to pay for it, and apparently they aren’t any more. If musicians have to find some other way of paying their bills – by doing from more live work, securing sponsorship deals and commissions, wooing barking-mad princes or waiting for a sinister masked visitor to emerge from the fog – then so what?
We accept intellectual property as a given, when it’s actually riddled with contradictions that merit some urgent back-to-square-one rethinking. Every time someone buys a copy of Close to the Edge, Bill Bruford, aged 60, gets some cash for having played the drums on for it when he was 23. Yet Roger Dean, who designed the Yes logo that painstakingly – and no doubt illegally – was traced onto fifty thousand satchels, and Eddie Offord, who produced the album, will have had to make do with the single-fee cheques they received at the time. It didn’t matter whether the album was headed to be double platinum or a dying dog, Dean and Offord’s fees were almost certainly fixed. So why is the drummer entitled to continue to coin it indefinitely if other “creatives” who put in exactly the same few weeks’ work haven’t seen a penny from the project since 1972?
Musicians can’t have it both ways. They’re either “workers who deserve to be paid”, in which case they should be paid by the hour like everyone else, or they are “artists”, in which case they should join all the painters, sculptors, filmmakers, puppeteers, haiku poets, Morris dancers and what-not in the queue to drop their CVs off at the local Starbucks.
Archie Valparaiso
October 28, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Archie’s got some good points but on the whole people are more than willing to pay for music – both recorded and live. There are, incredibly, record labels whose sales are rising. Illegal filesharing is eroding sales but an absolutist stance which holds that “everyone” has now decided that music is not worth paying for just doesn’t stand up.
Surely the point of intellectual property law, like most other laws, is that you shouldn’t change them retrospectively? Don’t let someone build a life, or a business that employs thousands, on the foundation of an intellectual copyright and then years later, by design or neglect, allow that foundation to crumble. (By the way this also applies to artificially extending copyright too, but that’s another tin of virtual worms).
I promise you, we do not want to live in a world where musicians are just hobbyists. Even the most self-possessed auteurs in music keep the interests of the audience at the back of their minds, and that means commercial considerations. Given the choice I’d have even the old cliche “we make music for ourselves but if other people like it, that’s a bonus” rather than “we make music for ourselves, full stop, no matter how bad it is and no matter if nobody likes it.”
Andrew Harrison
October 30, 2009 at 10:07 am
Arrant nonsense. You’re essentially saying that it makes no difference who performed the song, how it was produced etc. All that matters is the tune.
In which case, I assume you listen to those old “Top of the Pops” albums from the 70s with the ersatz versions instead of the originals by Bolan, Bowie, Abba et al?
german bight
October 28, 2009 at 2:25 pm
If I’d wanted to say that, essentially or otherwise, I’d have said it. My point, which Mat seems to have understood without difficulty, was that what we consider to be intellectual property – a tune, a performance or whatever – is not an absolute concept; it’s arbitrary and mutable. And I still think filesharing is far more like teaching someone to play a tune you’ve cribbed the chords for or telling them a joke you heard at the pub than it’s akin to stealing a car or a handbag.
Archie Valparaiso
October 28, 2009 at 5:11 pm
now that the french Commission has ratified a 3 strikes policy with a fast-track judicial mechanism, it’ll be interesting to see what effect it has and how the seemingly highly inflexible and arbitrary law is applied. As it stands, anyone agreeing to split their wi-fi signal in order to join the FON network could get skewered for another’s misdemeanour
gary smith
October 28, 2009 at 6:26 pm
ooops http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?email&NewsID=27537
gary smith
October 28, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Now watch France sign up en masse for a €5-a-month VPN service so their IP shows up as one in Spain, where not-for-profit filesharing is – for the time being at least- quite legal.
Archie Valparaiso
October 28, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Again, an interesting point. However, my suspicion is that it’ll be a statistically insignificant proportion of the population, less than 1%.
We will actually know soon.
Mat Culture Karma
culturekarma
October 28, 2009 at 7:40 pm
*signs up*
gary smith
October 28, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Make music exclusive, limited and special by only releasing something in small quantites – this is what is happening in some parts of the dance music world. There is fuck all money in it of course but the music remains special and loved.
Music is just too disposable in the mp3 format
Jolyon
October 28, 2009 at 8:05 pm
The central flaw in this argument is that there is a work leads to ownership compact. Everyone employed throughout the world would love to beleive that they own the results of their effort, but property is not a creating of the mind or effort. Diminishing scarcity is called progress, not crime, or we would criminalize science, resource exploration as well as the creation of new art and music. Jeffersons analogy trips up the industry because it is appropriate. Candles are property, neither ideas, art, music nor light are.
dhlii
November 17, 2009 at 3:15 am