Clevermonkey has briefly left semi-retirement from blogging in order to bring us his thoughts on music sharing. The inspiration for his post was a CBC News package from a few weeks ago:
The segment had a lot of sound-bites from various punters, pundits and lawyers discussing whether or not file-sharers were stealing music and whether or not current Canadian fair-use laws needed to be amended to criminalize file-sharing in Canada. It even had Steven Paige, of Barenaked Ladies fame, smugly suggesting that file-sharing, if left unchecked, would be sure to force him into a job at Tim Horton’s.
Now, the question in my mind is this: why is Steven Paige entitled to be a music star?
The centerpiece of the debate on MP3s and filesharing is the contention that it’s theft. Someone who copies files is, in a slightly abstract sense, stealing. From who? Presumably not the person that they’re copying from, since filesharing is, well, sharing, and hence the source for the files can be assumed to be complicit in the theft.* Rather, the theft is one of intellectual property, requiring us to accept a model for the distribution of music, etc. akin to the licencing of software: An abstract pattern is created. Its creator retains the right to distribute concrete manifestations of this abstract pattern. In the business world, of course — be that the business of music or software — the creator cedes those rights to a corporation which employs them.
So we’re not talking about stealing from the artists, because the artists don’t have control over what is notionally their intellectual property. They have sold those rights to their employers — the record companies. If any stealing is going on, then it’s theft from those companies.
So then, wherefore is Mr. Paige’s lifestyle in danger? Well, part of it is the question of royalties: unlike a software developper, most musicians aren’t salaried employees of their companies. They only make money from units sold… and generally, not so much of that comapratively speaking. The presumption is that the more filesharing that’s going on, the fewer people are going out and buying CDs. I’d like to suggest that this isn’t the case; I know numerous people involved in filesharing activities (hey, it wasn’t that long ago that I was still a university student), and most of them are massive consumers of music, both free
over the ‘Net and bought on CD or DVD. Of course, anecdotes aren’t data, but I don’t think that there’s a particular inverse relationship between filesharing and music buying, and certainly I’ve not seen any arguments for why there should be.
Lurking in the background of the filesharing arguments, one can often find the dreaded Slippery Slope: why should musicians, record companies, etc. be in business at all if people are stealing their property? What if they just stopped? Then you’d all be in trouble, eh?
Well, I don’t believe that it’s possible for a musician to just stop; I suspect that most genuine musicians would create music even if they weren’t being paid for it. So it’s not like the source and font all popular music would dry up if filesharing is left unchecked. And as for the record companies… sorry, I can’t see the problem here. If one believes in capitalism as the ultimate economic panacea — and I’m not saying that I do — then there’s no particular reason that Warner, Altantic, et al intrinsically deserve to exist. If technology renders them obsolete, then why delay the inevitable with legislation?
*: It seems to me that we should make a distinction, though, if the sharer
is doing so unwittingly; taking files that are not freely offered is I think much closer to obviously being theft. You can then go on to debate what freely offered
means in this context, as I believe some of Orrin Hatch’s underlings have done recently…