Taylor Assignment 03
The copyright landscape has perhaps been the most affected by the rise of digital media over the past two decades. What it means to own a thing or idea has been fundamentally altered by the ease of reproducing and sharing digital content. The film, art, writing and music industries have been dramatically reshaped in response to the losses they are incurring as a result of digitization. But beyond simple losses, artists are confronted by digital media cheerleaders for being on the wrong side of what can increasingly take the tones of a moral argument. The “information wants to be free” mantra of the digerati is difficult to reconcile for artists and industry workers whose whole foundation is built on extracting value for as long a time as possible on a piece of art. Copyright defenders are attacked as authoritarians attempting to defend monolithic entities that want to restrict everyone’s access to creative output. Copyright antagonists are seen as being willing to enable theft.
What is often lost in the debate is that free simply isn’t free. “The basic divide at work here is between those capitalists that make money by selling access to content, and those that make money by controlling the content distribution networks” (Taylor, p. 152). But the battle between content publishers and distributors is age old and has permeated every industry from music to film to comic books to actual books. An uneasy alliance has always existed between distributors and publishers, for example, with some publishers electing to manage their own distribution, but new digital tools have in effect taken control of distribution out of the content provider’s hands and put it somewhere else. The salient question is where? New media enthusiasts often point to the distribution being in the hands of “the people,” when in reality the torrent and P2P networks most content is distributed on do make revenue due to the actions of their user base. Lost in the discussion is the actual content producer, the author or musician or filmmaker who seemingly never had a say where their work ended up anyway as long as it made back more than it cost. In the world of digital piracy, there are no residuals that find their way to the artist beyond the purchase of the original uploader.
Speaking for myself, I have a strange relationship with piracy. As a creator of content, I’ve actively enabled getting my work onto common piracy sites because it was more important to me that people have access to it than it was to make profit, but that pessimism over the possibility of making profit is in part due to an understanding of the contracted market for conventional content releases and a sense that piracy is inevitable. I have certainly enjoyed my fair share of pirated material, but have shifted in recent years to trying to buy things, though I’m not entirely sure why.
