Is it vulgar to resource art?
Not long after writing about the cost of feeling free last week, I happened to read that "managing money [is] a big problem for those who prefer to think of themselves above such vulgarities" in the Sydney Morning Herald's review (21 June 2014, Spectrum p. 36) of Justin Heazlewood's Funemployed: Life as an Artist in Australia (2014). A few pages later, the same paper reported on some of the artistic businesses behind this year's Vivid Sydney (Vivid breaks all records, p. 27).
Whatever the artists themselves think, I thought, there seem to be plenty of others who think artists ought to be above such vulgarities, as I've previously commented upon regarding free services supported by data collection, user-centric justification of copyright infringement, free content supported by advertising and Google's scanning of books.
Maybe I'd like to be above such vulgarities myself and, come to think of it, maybe everyone else would too except perhaps for the cynical types that Oscar Wilde described as knowing "the price of everything and the value of nothing". But I know that doing things requires resources and that many useful resources are not infinitely available. As noble as it might seem for my local fruiterer to give away apples to anyone who wanted them, for example, he won't be able to do it for long unless he obtains the resources to keep his orchard in bloom.
I think most people understand this reasonably well when it comes to physical goods like apples. Yet naïve free content advocates seem to at once think artistic goods so important as to have some sort of open access right attached to them, yet think that paying for them (that is, resourcing them) would be crass.
I think few people would doubt that commercial enterprises have contributed plenty of less-than-noble art to the world in pursuit of money. In fact, they've probably contributed plenty of less-than-noble products all of sorts. Yet nor does anyone produce great art without a significant input of time, labour and materials — and these cost money. (Sure, an artist can donate time and labour, but only so much as is left over after providing for his or her needs with some other source of money.)
Probably, both sides need to remind themselves that money is, at heart, a convenient proxy for providing and exchanging resources. Those who pursue it for its own sake (such those less-than-noble commercial enterprises) have been pilloried throughout history as superficial, greedy, and ultimately unsatisfied because money is, in itself, not particularly useful or interesting. On the other hand, those who think they (or someone else) can do without it might need to consider how much they could achieve without any resources.
"Feels free" and the data collection business
Ashlin Lee and Peta Cook contributed another article on surveillance to The Conversation this week, this one highlighting what they see as the inadequacies of the Reset the Net campaign. They say that "while the campaign is laudable in its efforts to raise the issue of surveillance, there are some glaring oversights present", mainly because the campaign neglects the huge amount of data collection undertaken by non-government actors, including some of the campaign's own supporters.
All this drew the usual cluster of comments bemoaning the surveillance society in which we supposedly live. The trouble is, as I saw it, the targeted advertising for which this data collection is essential is what enables all the "free" services that are so popular with Internet users. Consequently, avoiding or eliminating it is not so straightforward as naïve anti-surveillance commenters (and, indeed, Reset the Net) seem to suppose.
George Burns followed up with a suggestion that early "cypherpunks" and academic free-content advocates provided the foundation for the present dominance of corporate advertising by insisting that content be provided free of charge. It's hard to say whether or not cypherpunks and academics in particular were responsible for the preponderance of advertising on the Internet, but the widespread expectation that Internet services be provided free of charge is surely a major contributor to it.
Working in copyright and technology, I occassionally heard someone suggest that music retailers could combat copyright infringement with a business model that "feels free", which I supposed to mean some sort of comes-with-music or ad-supported approach in which buyers don't pay for individual tracks. There may be some merit in such models, and "feeling free" certainly works well for Google even if its success in many other endeavours might be debatable. But "feels free" implies "ignorant of the cost", leaving Google and Facebook users acting surprised and offended whenever the data collection activities of these services are mentioned.
I've previously contemplated re-badging so-called "free content" as "ad-enabled content" to more accurately reflect the mechanism by which it is resourced. A harsher critic might suggest that "surveillance-enabled services" would make the message even balder. Either way, it's hard to see how data collection, corporate messaging and other annoyances can be addressed without confronting the business models by which the services in question are delivered.
Who's greedy?
The Conversation's David Glance recently argued that copyright reform will drive innovation rather than attempts to stop copyright infringement. It's not clear to me why copyright reform and prosecution of copyright infringers should be the mutually exclusive exercise that the article's title implies — after all, why not just get rid of the law altogether if no enforcement of it is necessary? — but my main quibble with the article is its treatment of what Glance calls the "de facto application of copyright law", that is, the rules that people actually apply in practice irrespective what the Copyright Act might say.
Glance claims that "society is behaving collectively to determine what they consider fair and reasonable" in the making of recordings. His examples, however, refer only to the behaviour of copyright users, and it seems to me that he is really describing situations in which "copyright users are behaving collectively..." since the copyright-owning part of society is nowhere to be seen. Said examples include the claim that television viewers don't download infringing copies of television programmes (specifically, Game of Thrones) because they don't want to pay, but in order to circumvent time and place restrictions that they don't like.
Ed Hotan's comment contradicts this, though Hotan himself seems to support the downloaders: Game of Thrones was, in fact, available in Australia at the same time as it was in the US; its viewers just didn't want to pay the fee being asked by Foxtel. For Glance and Hotan, this seems to justify (or at least excuse) a television viewer who makes the unilateral determination that zero is a "fair" price according to some unspecified theory of fairness.
Now, the price being asked by Foxtel was pretty steep if all you wanted was Game of Thrones, since Foxtel's pricing is based on purchasing a whole year's worth of television. But the price being offered by downloaders was also pretty low, and doesn't appear to be justified by anything other than "I want it now". So who's being greedy here?
I've come to sense a certain loss of perspective in these debates, especially since the security of digital media ceased being my day-to-day concern at the conclusion of my last research contract. Hearing the howls of outrage at Australians' alleged inability to watch Game of Thrones at the same time as viewers in the US, one might take the watching of US television to be a human right. But jeez, guys, it's just a television programme, and not much more than an aimless compilation of sex and violence at that. George R. R. Martin himself seems to have lost interest in the original characters and plot by the time he got to Book 4.
If we don't want to pay the producer's price, we do have the choice to do without, just as most of us do without luxury yachts because we don't want to pay the prices being asked for them. So, if the media industry really is composed of greedy pigs not worthy of the fees that they want us to pay, why not really stick it to them by ignoring their output?
Selling digital media: someone else's problem
Some mis-communication of my views on Suelette Dreyfus' recent Conversation article about the effect of the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Internet server providers drew my attention to a false dichotomy that seems to exist in apportioning responsibility for combatting on-line copyright infringement. Dreyfus fears that the Trans-Pacific Partnership might make Internet service providers more or less completely responsible for the enforcement of copyright on-line. The proposed methods being draconian, she suggests that "the motion picture and music publishing industries should pay for and manage their own security." If Dreyfus' characterisation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is correct, I suppose there are at least a few in the media industries who hold the view that the computer industry should pay for and manage the same security. As I discovered, an attempt to explore a middle view is prone being interpreted as a view from one of the poles.
Dreyfus goes on to trot out the hoary old suggestion that media industries "simply trial new models for making money." I suppose that the media industries could point out that monitoring network traffic for commercial material and charging for it is a new model for making money. But whatever merits such a model may or may not have, insisting on a dichotomy shuts down any innovation that requires the participation of both the computer and media insdustries.
I'm reminded of an interview in the film The Corporation (2003) in which the interviewee describes corporations as "externalising machines" that will take any opportunity to transfer the costs of their activity to someone else. (Economists call such costs "externalities"). In the context of on-line copyright enforcement, the computer industry would like to sell the Internet and have the media industries provide the wares that make the Internet desirable, while the media industries would like to distribute their wares across the Internet and have the computer industry pay for upholding the law that makes this financially rewarding. Bill Rosenblatt argues that some of the problems with digital rights management systems stem from the media industry's pursuit of exactly this kind of externalising, leading the computer industry to develop the cheapest protection technology that it can get away with.
Rosenblatt may have a point, but of course funding the development of copyright protection technology is only part of the process. Even if the media industries meet all the costs of developing and managing copyright protection technology, the computer industry controls the environment in which this technology must be deployed. Whoever funds the technology itself, it won't be of any use if the computer industry can't be convinced to deploy it in the appropriate places.
Anti-DRM commentators play to this dichotomy when they claim that they respect content creators' interests, but go on to reject any attempt to protect those interests because it interferes with users' sovereignty over their computers. Extreme proposals from the media industries are the other way around. Yet playing media on a computer necessarily intermingles media and computer, and on what basis could the media become owned by the computer, or the computer owned by the media?
Digital media and the choice of walls
I felt that I ought to have something supportive to say when I read Andrea Carson's article on paywalls for The Conversation a couple of weeks ago. I've tended to think of the word "paywall" as a kind of swear word used by free-content advocates to disparage those with the gumption to charge for their work, but authors like Carson seem to have taken it on-board as the standard technical term for enforcing a paid subscription. For Carson, a paywall is a legitimate business model by which quality journalism might be funded. (I still prefer to just say "subscription" myself, though.)
Free content and open source advocates, on the other hand, insist that the world can and should provide quality content for free. There are, indeed, cases in which such content is made available for free, for various reasons. Michael Brown's comment on Carson's article, however, points to one elephant in the room: significant amounts of free content is funded by the public. It is not ultimately free, but funded from tax revenue.
Carson mentions what seems to be another elephant in the room inhabited by free-content advocates, but I didn't think much about it until I read David Waller's more recent article on advertising. Waller reviews a recent book by Joseph Jaffe and Maarten Albarda claiming that organisations can reduce their advertising budget to zero by using charismatic mouthpieces, customer relationship management and social media. The last one bemused me since social media is itself typically supported by advertising, and I find it hard to get excited about ad-supported advertising. Yet advertising is the main, and maybe only, alternative for private content providers looking to meet their costs without the dreaded paywall. Would open content sound so noble if we re-badged it, truthfully, as "ad-enabled content" or its mechanism as an "adwall"?
In one section of The Happy Economist (2010), Ross Gittins points out that it is tremendously arrogant to insist that one's own interests or activities transcend economics. It sounds noble enough to say that one's work cannot be reduced to monetary terms, but economists know that the real question is not about money but about the distribution and use of resources. (Though many of economists' biggest fans do not seem to be very good at explaining this.) Getting back to paying for content, the real question is not whether or not it should free, but what is the most effective way of resourcing it? Do we resource it by public funding, by subscriptions, by advertising, by charity, or by something else? Or, do we not resource it at all and allow it to wither because we'd actually rather use our resources on something else?
