VOX - The Student Journal of Politics, Economics and Philosophy
Future Culture: The Emancipation of Creative Content By Luke Smalley “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.” -- Thomas Jefferson
M
usic, videos, and books, infinitely available to all
at no cost, websites that provide such a service (Limewire, and the recently slaughtered Napster) are the prime targets of the entertainment industry, using all technological and legal means to prevail against them. The goal: to implement widespread copy prevention of digital files, so that people can view or listen to content on their computer but can’t copy or distribute it. But underneath this headline-grabbing war lie some fundamental questions about culture, technology and freedom of speech. Whilst this article will show that the attempts by the recording industry to prevent the free distribution of creative content are futile, it will also raise more important questions; if creative content is to be free in the future, then how will authors and publishers be compensated, but furthermore, is the
liberation of creative content a good thing, or just piracy? Doomed to Fail Why is creative content (music, videos, books) becoming a free public good? Modern day creative content differs significantly from its predecessors in that it is ‘non-rival’; I can copy any software for a miniscule price without any hindrance to the original owner. This is a result of the digitization of media. Converting all content into streams of zeros and ones entails making it infinitely copyable without any loss of quality, the very essence of what economists define as ‘non-rival goods’ (1). Creative content is becoming non-excludable too. Goods are ‘non-excludable’ when it becomes impractical to stop everyone from making use of the item once one person is able to. It is not possible to stop people from view-
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ing terrestrial television (non-excludable), while it is very easy to stop additional people from entering a cinema (excludable). Economists call non-rival, non-excludable items ‘pure public goods’ (2). The entertainment industry has created a variety of ways to make digital content uncopyable, such as encrypting content so that it can only be viewed through an authorized player, unremovable watermarks (e.g. Adobe), or some form of activation registration (e.g. Microsoft Office). However, as Bruce Schneier points out, such attempts are futile. Three kinds of people inhabit the Internet: average users, hackers, and professional ‘pirates’. Any security measure will work against the average users, who are at the mercy of their software. Hackers are more difficult to deter. Schneier writes; “Fifteen
years of software copy protection has taught us that, with enough motivation, any copy protection ... can be broken”. The professional pirate is even harder to deter; “if he can make a profit selling the hacked software or stolen music, he will defeat the copy protection. “ (3). By keeping the average user and most hackers at bay, the entertainment industry could protect 98% of media from being copied, a level which is satisfactory in the same way that supermarkets calculate a presumed level of stolen goods in their inventories. That works for supermarkets because their goods are ‘rival’, so that even if a few shoplifters get their items for free, everyone else still has to pay. However, the non-rival nature of creative content means it only takes one hack for media to be distributed everywhere;
VOX - The Student Journal of Politics, Economics and Philosophy
“one smart hacker to defeat the copy protection schemes for everyone” (4). Then, even the most hardcore technophobe can access the media in an easy to use format. Beyond Wages; New Methods of Payment If the future of creative content is one where it is liberated from the price tag, then what are the options for our future authors, musicians and publishers? Dan Kohn suggests four ways in which future content creators could be compensated. Firstly, government support. Whilst the idea of politicians choosing which artists receive money seems tyrannical, Kohn proposes measures based solely on popularity; so, for example, “a new government program could offer grants to the authors of the top 1,000 most popular Web sites, MP3s, movies, and so on, encouraging innovation not just in the creation of new content but also in its successful promotion.” (5). Micropatronage is a second method by which artists could be paid; a system in which the public directly supports the work of artists by making donations through the Internet (6). Whilst micropatronage means artists are open to influence from their patrons, the advantage of this method is that with the near-zero cost of information distribution, finding patrons becomes simpler, as does having one artist supported by numerous patrons. For example, a successful author would find it quite easy
to find 5,000 individuals to contribute £100 each towards her next book. Corporate Philanthropy is the third method Kohn suggests. Today, public goods such as medical research are funded through non-profit organizations such as Cancer Research UK. This method involves raising a larger amount of money for a larger cause, and then distributing the money, via funding schemes, to those who are deemed most worthy (7). This approach, according to Kohn, could be how content is funded in the future; “imagine a National Country & Western Foundation, or an American Society for Horror Flicks. That is, some potential micropatrons (especially companies) may wish to fund a genre as a whole, and have the experts employed by non-profits decide which established and up-and-coming artists are most deserving of their funds” (8). The final method Kohn suggests is ‘selling atoms associated with certain bits’. Whilst the ‘bits’ (the digital media) will be impossible to charge for, it would be possible to sell rival goods (the atoms) associated with the media, such as concert t-shirts, or to make money out of excludable media, such as the concerts themselves, which fans will continue to pay money for. These four methods provide a glimpse into the future of how people could be compensated for the creative content they produce. But even if this is the inevitable future of content, it still begs
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the question: Is this a good thing? Emancipation of the Press New technology forces people to rethink how they live their lives, and even to question what is moral. Martin Luther’s Protestant Revolution would not have had the incredible impact it did without the broad availability and consequential wide literacy enabled by Gutenberg’s Bible. Gutenberg’s printing press drastically reduced the cost of reproducing information and can be seen to catalyse the entire Enlightenment, as well as the intellectual offshoots of that period, liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Historically, the distribution of information has been controlled by a smallbut-powerful elite. The Roman Catholic Church held an essential monopoly on manuscripts, which were produced by scribes scattered about the monasteries of Europe. On the advent of printing, Pope Alexander VI deemed it necessary to issue a bull against the “menace” of the printed word, and as a result censorship laws were strung up around Europe throughout the 1500s (9). The situation today is no different; the majority of media distribution channels are still controlled by a small elite of publishers and broadcasters. An oligopoly of five powerful companies has nearly exclusive control in deciding what media people are exposed to. The digital media available over the internet is different from all preceding
information technology revolutions. This is because anyone with basic literacy skills can use the internet to reach an enormous and growing audience at almost no cost. A.J. Liebling said that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one”; that the price of distributing media has been reduced to the £1 an hour charged by Internet cafes may mean that ‘freedom of the press’ can truly be realised. A world in which media distribution is free is one in which everyone’s voice has a chance to be heard. Bibliography: 1: Kohn, Dan. ‘Why Encryption Doesn’t Help’ 2002a 2: Kohn, Dan. ‘Content is a Pure Public Good’ 2002b 3: Schneier, Bruce. ‘The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention’ 2001 4: Kohn, 2002b 5: Kohn, Dan. ‘How to Finance Content Creation’ 2002c 6: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropatronage 7: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/ 8: Kohn 2002c 9: de Sola Pool, Ithiel. ‘Technologies of Freedom’ pg 11-23. _____________________________ Luke Smalley is a third year undergraduate reading PPE at the University of York.