I Believe I Shan’t Pay For Content Anymore

Posted: January 5th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Geeking It Old School | Tags: , , , , , | 7 Comments »

happy_pirate

Recently I watched Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary about the life of Harlan Ellison. Ellison, now 74, is one of the most accomplished living science fiction writers in the English language, and probably in any language.

I once got to see a tape of Ellison being interviewed by my former writing teacher, James Gunn, in the sixties or early seventies. Ellison was resplendant in his indoor sunglasses, musing about why “every chick in L.A. is into astrology right now.” College kids of both genders sit all around him, hanging on his every word, nodding without irony at everything he says. I watched that clip and thought, Wow, that guy was the epitome of cool. Was there ever another person who so clearly understood the nature of his own time, in relation to what came before, and what was coming after?

In Dreams With Sharp Teeth, there is a clip of a more recent Ellison standing before an auditorium of college kids and shouting “If you want your music, pay for it!” And I thought, in spite of myself: The old man just doesn’t get it.

My family was the first on the block to have an Apple II+, and I grew up pirating software left and right. All the kids I knew did it. There was no sense of shame, nor was there any sense that we were doing anything wrong by any standard. Software had come into the world, and it was, by definition, as free as the air around us.

We had no money of our own, so the issue of buying vs. pirating didn’t come into play. Sure, you could always try to talk your parents into buying you a piece of software, but that wasn’t the same because

a) maybe they wouldn’t want you to have it, or

b) they couldn’t afford it either, or

c) they couldn’t get it fast enough.

No matter what the reason, the point is that we, as kids, had not yet been forced to go out into the world and exchange our labor for money, and our money for goods and services. If we wanted something, there were simply degrees of difficulty in receiving it. The scale of desirable things went something like this:

  • Impossible and far away: unicorns, light cycles, Princess Leia
  • Seemingly impossible and far away: driver’s license, physical strength, control over one’s own time
  • Possible but difficult: honor roll, first prize at the science fair, going steady
  • Possible but requiring marginal effort: desert after broccoli, the big gift from santa, candy from the bank teller
  • Available on demand with no expectation of difficulty or effort: breathing, eggs for breakfast, an unlimited supply of computer software

Sure, we were aware that, in the eyes of most adults, pirating software was “wrong,” but that only meant that they didn’t get it. Kids have more moral clarity than adults. Just ask a kid why stealing is wrong. It’s wrong because it takes something away from another person. And even in 1983, any kid interested in computers could tell you that software piracy was not taking anything away from anybody.

The follow-up answer is that piracy takes profit away from software companies (sometimes). But to a kid, that’s so abstract that it doesn’t matter. Which is a clue to the fact that, for most adults, it doesn’t really matter either. It’s just that a lot of adults end up getting paid to increase profit margins, and some of them get paid to lobby congress to help them increase profit margins, and so you get laws purporting to bar 12 year-olds in Kansas from copying Castle Wolfenstein from one floppy to another. It’s a tangled mess of motivation and enforcement, obligation and accountability, fear and morality. Kids may not be able to untangle that mess, but they can see it’s a mess, and they recognize intuitively that there isn’t anything really wrong with what they’re doing.

Calling it piracy was a really dumb move for adults. No doubt, it was meant to sound dramatic, as a sort of wake-up call to people who didn’t really understand computers, to underline the fact that it was a real crime.

But come on. Kids love pirates. They love playing pirate. They love the eyepatches and the arghs and the whole thing. All kids, especially little boys, want to be pirates; I could have listed them up there in the “impossible” category with the unicorns and the light cycles. But conceptually speaking, pirates are even better because:

  • Pirates are adults.
  • Pirates are characters from stories of magic realms like Peter Pan.
  • Pirates are raunchy and bawdy.
  • Pirates do not cowtow to a language that they are expected to learn; they create their own dialect as they speak, and expect others to parse it.
  • Pirates live impossibly exciting lives.
  • Pirates are free.

Basically, pirates are the coolest possible kind of adult, the kind we all want to grow up to be, except that we can’t, because that’s not actually possible.

…except that suddenly, it is, and it’s possible right now, while you’re still a kid.

Man, did I hold my head up high when my twelve year-old self passed adults who were talking about the latest scare in this crazy new age of technology: software piracy. Me, and my eight year-old partner in “crime” who was a much better pirate than I was, and all our friends.

Oracle magnate Larry Ellison, in an interview that’s part of the documentary Triumph Of The Nerds, lets go a rant about the ridiculousness of selling software in a physical package, on a store shelf. “It’s bits!” he exclaims, obviously trying to remain calm, but clearly wishing he could reach through the camera and tear out the throat of anyone watching who might be part of the problem. “You can’t pack up bits in cardboard!”

Ellison was not endorsing software piracy (I don’t think), but his sentiment doesn’t apply just to software. Any piece of media – that is, any commodity that is, at its core, a piece of communication that  can be easily duplicated and retains its effectiveness despite being stored in different containers – can be distributed without depleting the supply. Which is to say, now that we have the Internet, it (whatever it is) can be copied and propagated easily and cheaply.

It is very hard to convince people that commodities in that category are not, by their basic nature, free. Until very recently, there was no precedent suggesting otherwise. Music has been free, in many instances, for a very long time. Sure, you pay for admittance to a concert, and you pay for a record. But listening to the radio was always free. The content was paid for by advertisers, not subscribers, just like most of the Web. Making tapes off the radio for personal use was never considered a crime, and in terms of the listener’s relationship to the music, was not much different from downloading the music from the net. The only real difference is that now, it’s much easier to make the tapes, the quality is higher, and the distribution can be tracked in some cases. It’s understandable that, because of these changes, suppliers are taking action to increase profitability where possible. But that doesn’t make it “wrong” for users to circumvent those actions. The moral implications to music piracy – and software piracy too – seem tacked on as an afterthought. And a great many people know in their hearts that this is true, which is why they continue to pirate music and software, despite being generally law-abiding citizens otherwise.

The more I work in online social media, the more I think of content as something that should by definition be free. And I can’t help but extend these thoughts to movies, TV shows, and novels.  I want the content creators to get paid, but must I really pay directly? Me, personally? Is my consumption of one random copy of the content really worth that much?

There are sound answers to those questions that are reassuring for egalitarian traditionalists. I must indeed pay directly, the argument goes. It’s not about the insignificance of my personal consumption, it’s about me as a functioning unit of a greater system in which everyone must do their part. What if nobody paid their taxes?

But I just don’t accept those arguments anymore. I’ve seen so much free media fly around every which way – novels, movies, articles, songs – that the traditional model seems counter-intuitive to me. I’m convinced that everyone who actually creates the content – authors, directors, musicians – can still get paid. More than they were getting before, most likely.

But the model will have to change first. And that will be painful.

And content creators will get paid. And someone will pay for it.

But the end user, by and large, will get the content for free. No matter what the medium.

cartoon by xkcd

pirate image by Leonid Mamchenkov

  • http://www.ddmcd.com Dennis McDonald

    You seem to be saying that “it will be free as long as someone else pays for it.” This approach tends to break down, though, when end users are also content creators.

  • miconian

    Well… not “someone else” as in people, but “someone else” as in sponsors. And not even sponsors of the content, but perhaps of the device, or the wi-fi signal, or whatever.

    As for users creating content, they usually don’t charge for the content they create, although they do sometimes monetize it, which is not the same thing. Right?

  • http://www.ddmcd.com Dennis McDonald

    Whether you call it monetization, payment, or subsidization, at the end of the day money has to change hands. Content is not created by people who have died of starvation.

    Are you arguing for treating information as a type of public property whose creation and distribution should be subsidized (via taxes?) as a public good?

  • miconian

    I totally agree that money has to change hands. But that doesn’t mean that the money necessarily flows directly from the content consumer to the content creator. It doesn’t even mean that the money flows *indirectly* along that path.

    I work with a lot of online media properties that are fully supported by advertising. The people creating the content are indeed getting paid to do it, but the payments are coming mainly from large corporations. The people consuming the content are paying nothing (unless you count their time, attention, and willingness to look at ads as payment).

    Then there are situations like Metafilter, where advertising revenue is constantly coming in, but the creators of the content are also its consumers, and they’re all doing it for free. In fact, many of them have paid for the privilege of being able to do it. The money is going to the guy who created the platform, and the people he pays to maintain it.

    In my work in social media, I see many such examples. I’m not saying that this model should be codified into law, only that this is organically where we’re headed, more and more. And I think it will eventually inform consumers’ expectations enough that they won’t feel it makes sense to pay for any media.

  • http://www.ddmcd.com Dennis McDonald

    I agree – subsidized media will always exist.

    But not everyone will always be satisfied in every situation with what they can get “for free” that is being paid for by someone else.

    Some users will be willing to pay for what they value very highly — high quality performances as opposed to amateur, expert medical opinion instead of non-name first year residents, novels by best selling writers as opposed to fanfiction. Willingness to pay will be dependent on circumstances and need.

  • miconian

    I totally agree, Dennis. But as time moves on, that payment will be based a lot less on need (because there are so many ways to get the same or similar for free), and a lot more on willingness.

    It’s true that, as you say, not everyone will always be satisfied in every situation with what they can get “for free” that is being paid for by someone else.

    But nevertheless, what they can get “for free” is increasing in variety and quality all the time. So the number of people who have to pay before they’re satisfied is decreasing, and I think it will continue to decrease for the foreseeable future.

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