Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Run for the Borders: a Modest Proposal for Books and Music in the 21st Century

I like books, and I like music. Books have complex ideas rendered in text that can change the way you think; music has abstract expressions rendered in sound that can change the way you feel. Without stories and songs, life would be a very boring and frustrating place indeed.

I was born in 1974, and grew up in the 80s, and what I remember about books and music from my childhood was this: they were both relatively free. I spent many an hour at both my school and public libraries, poring over everything from reference materials about witchcraft to compilations of old folk song lyrics to The Day It Rained Cats Over Borneo. I spent an equal amount of time listening to the radio (AM radio and shortwave, no less!) grooving to the Axel F theme and Newcleus and UTFO, and lounging to Dreamweaver and Stranger On The Shore.

The reason I think of media and information as being relatively free is because that is quite simply my experience. It's only in modern times that we have begun to curtail media, to put locks and codes into it, to force its seekers to jump through a number of hoops before they can be allowed to have it. And usually, this entails money to a certain degree, but not as much as it entails holding down that mechanism of control, because more than anything power always acts to preserve its own encroached status quo. Put another way: it's not the fact that iTunes charges 99 cents a song that galls me. It's the fact that that system, now firmly entrenched, means that they can charge me whatever they damn well please. The 99 cents is a pittance; it's having to go through Apple to get to what I want that is the insult.

Intellectual property, in my admittedly less than humble view, is the invention of cowards who never had that many good ideas in the first place, and need a government hitman to protect the few ideas they have. No one corporation personifies this more than Disney, whom have actually made a very lucrative career out of rehashing the folk stories and mythologies of centuries past (The Little Mermaid, Hercules, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, etc. etc. -- with more on the horizon, including Rapunzel and John Carter of Mars). Unlike Alan Moore, whose League of Extraordinary Gentlemen reimagines these public domain figures from within its own set of parameters, thus leaving them free for others to use later, Disney hijacks the historical context of these stories in such a manner that no one can ever use Snow White, Tarzan or Peter Pan again without thinking of their "official" version. (To be fair, some are more effective than others; I don't think anyone is thinking of an anthropomorphic fox when they read Robin Hood. I would propose, however, that it happens more often than not.)

It also means that Disney gets to control what parts of their version of the public domain you get to see, and what parts you don't. For a good example, let's take a look at Song of the South, a Disney film based around the old Negro folk tales of Uncle Remus. It's never been released to video in the US, due to 'racially insensitive' material. Keep in mind that this is the same Disney that had no qualms casting Eddie Murphy in Mulan, or reimagining the the history of Native Americans in Pocahontas. In fact, one could make the argument that they refuse to release the film to video because it portrays minorities better than the films they've made since.

Two items in the news have given me the impetus to talk about these ideas. First, this article about a woman who has been charged nearly two million dollars in payments to the RIAA for pirating music. Two million dollars! Let's do some math here: the average number of songs on a CD is about 12. So let's take the 1700 songs this woman shared and divide it by 12.5: that's 136 compact discs. Assuming the average price of a CD to be $12.95, that gives us a whopping total of $1761.20.

So where does the 1.92 million dollar price tag come from? Well, remember that our unfortunate pirate was sharing said music, not just downloading it, which is how the RIAA justifies the losses. But let's do a little more math: $1.92 million divided by $1761.20 leaves us with the result that Thomas-Rasset would have had to share every one of those songs with 1090 people. You should have such good upload speeds!

(The pendantics among you will no doubt point out that since peer-to-peer is a non-linear mode, she could have uploaded them to, for example, only five people, whom then could have uploaded them to 218 people each, and the same effect is had. However, I would counter that she's hardly responsible for what other people decide to share. If someone sells a chef's knife, and the buyer uses it to stab someone to death, the knife salesman isn't going to be charged as an accessory.)

The point the RIAA is making here is that control of the distribution of music media is their firm purview, and infractions will be be met with the severest punishments. This brings me to item number two: apparently, Amazon doesn't even know its own DRM policy for Kindle. I'll admit I don't know much about Kindle, and the reason I don't is because I largely eschew e-books. Not that I haven't used them; I have an Acrobat Reader on my old Palm Tungsten C, and CDReader for comic books on every computer in the house (word to the wise: invest in a pivot monitor).

Still, I find it unnerving that you have to repurchase digital media when your number of licenses runs out. I'm actually borrowing a few books from acquaintances right now; thankfully, I don't see blank pages when I open up the tomes because I haven't been registered with the publisher. Again, this seems to me not to be a matter of the money; after all, if it was, they'd charge for every copy of the book on every device. They don't do that. They give you an arbitrary number of licenses for an arbitrary number of devices (six? I'd love to know what process that number was derived with), which are themselves open to wide interpretation so long as you're willing to jump through the customer service hoops. That's the point: they don't want you to pay more, they want you to jump through hoops.

Well, I don't want to jump through hoops. I am a grown-ass man.

So here's what I'm proposing: start stealing. I don't mean the mamby-pamby pseudo-stealing on the internet that everyone does and everyone has resolved is okay because nobody gets hurt. I mean real-ass stealing: shoplift CDs, and walk right out of the Barnes and Noble with a cookbook. So what if you get caught? Here's the facts: Shoplifting fines vary from state to state, but on the whole items under $300-$500 are considered petty theft. That means: you'll be fined for what you stole (usually only up to about double what you stole) and you may have to do jail time or community service.

That may sound harsh, but go back to that $1.92 million from earlier in the article and compare the two. One goes on your permanent record; the other permanently ruins your life. Which seems like less of a punishment? The industry has tipped its hand: they're far more worried about intellectual property than actual property. And why wouldn't they be? Once the records and books get to the shelves of your local Wal-Mart, they've already got their money; it's someone else's problem. By stealing their records and books, you're actually supporting the artists!

We must therefore cease all this downloading nonsense. The convenience of the the 21st century gadget society is no longer convenient. Let us return to CD players and bookshelves, and loot the stores like a New Orleans Katrina refugee.

2 comments:

Chisa said...

Less than three years later, the title pun no longer makes any sense.

Gueibor said...

Holy shit, I hadn't even seen the original date until I read your own comment...!

Whatt boggles me is why they always go for the sharing kind. What about the actual black marketers? Those people ripping DVDs and selling cheap copies on sidewalks? My own view of them is pretty laissez faire, but shouldn't the RIAA be zeroing in on these guys instead of those who just go and share shit?

I used to live in a mountain town full of hotels. When Guests left, they used to leave their books behind, mostly paperbacks in English. Local maids used to pick up those books and, being largely non-Anglophones, they used to drop them off at the town library.

This way, sometimes I got to read a 2-week old American best seller that I couldn't have even bought locally. For free. From the library. Legally.

I wonder what the RIAA or its bookish equivalent would have thought of that.