It's Creativity, Stupid -- Protect It
Hugh Jackman says he is "heartbroken" his new film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was leaked online a month before its official release. ''It's a serious crime and there's no doubt it's very disappointing - I was heartbroken by it,'' Jackman said. ''Obviously people are seeing an unfinished film. It's like a Ferrari without a paint job." And former Beatle Paul McCartney applauds the decision to send the founders of Pirate Bay (an illegal file sharing site) to prison for copyright infringement. McCartney told reporters that "artists deserved to get paid, and he felt fortunate the Beatles made it big before the popularity of file-sharing networks." McCartney says "Anyone who does something good, particularly if you get really lucky and do a great artistic thing and have a mega hit, I think you should get rewarded for that, and he adds, "particularly for young bands and they've got a young family, I don't want to see them destitute after a couple of years when they were mega. They're going to feed the children on that and if they don't get that money, if they don't see that money, I think it's a bit of a pity. So I think it's fair." (The court ordered sentence)
Jackman and McCartney have joined with millions of others who are starting to "get it"-don't steal my lifetime's work or you will go to jail. Simple concept to grasp, right? Not really. Because we have allowed a whole generation to get away with stealing and done nothing major about it except litigate, and worse, we have created a PR nightmare that makes the pirates look cool and the artists look stodgy. The current piracy issue is fraught with partisan bickering. You have the pirates and their supporters declaring "everything should be free..." and you have major studios and labels suing as their business strategy. One of the quotes that struck me as so out-of-touch was Peter Sunde's (one of the Pirate Bay founders) lawyer describing the Pirate Bay verdict as "a battle between the corporate world and a generation of young people who want to take part in new technology..." That's nonsense. Stealing is not "taking part in new technology." This generation's laissez-faire attitude toward copyright that Sunde's lawyer is referring to is our fault. We have fundamentally failed to educate an entire generation and we are working on the second. And the failure starts here in the US. Intellectual property is one of our biggest exports and yet we fail to teach our children not to steal it on the internet. U.S. intellectual property is worth approximately $5-5.5 trillion dollars per year to the economy- obviously entertainment is only a portion of that figure. I would think in a country where manufacturing has taken a huge hit (witness the auto industry) we might want to put a little effort into teaching our population why music, movies, software and games are not free just because you can find them on a website. We now live in a society where you either wash the car or design the car, but you no longer manufacture it in the US. We should start making a better effort at making sure people understand that this is about jobs and the economy. The bulk of the movie and music industry jobs are good solid middle class jobs.
The impact on middle class workers, present and future, gets lost in a sea of rhetoric. The issue has become polarized and the good guys look bad and the bad guys look cool. These guys are the 21st century version of the Sopranos. They appear to be beyond hip and cool, but the bottom line is they are ignorant, selfish criminals who make money off other peoples work. A perfect example of that is the motley crew of Pirate Bay describe themselves as "heroes" and as they say, "as in all good movies the heroes lose in the beginning, but have an epic victory in the end - that's the only thing Hollywood ever taught us..." If that is the only lesson these "bandits" have taken away from Hollywood, then they clearly have not been paying attention to this industry. It is an industry where artists get paid for creating movies people want to see, games people want to play, music people want to listen to and television people want to watch - and yes as part of this system there are giant corporate conglomerates that make much of the business possible, so they get paid as well.
While I would agree that in order to win over Pirate Bay users, content owners need to loosen up their relationship with technology and stop using litigation as a business strategy. Clearly consumers want to get their content, whether it is TV, movies, music, UGC on the internet- Comscore's Video Metrix data shows that U.S. Internet users viewed 13.1 billion online videos during the month of February alone - that is a lot of online viewing! This data proves that there is a legitimate business to be had in distributing content on the internet - the consumer is there, now we need to teach them that Pirate Bay (and sites like it) should not be their number one choice in entertainment shopping.
File sharing won't go away, and frankly, it shouldn't. Consumers want it and demand it and should have it. The entertainment industry needs to address it in a committed fashion. But does the imprisonment of the Pirate Bay owners accomplish anything? Absolutely. Does it decrease piracy, encourage inventors and entrepreneurs not to promote stealing as a business model or does it just increase the partisan sound-bite war? It does a little of both, it educates and reminds everyone it is illegal to steal. And that education ultimately protects jobs in the intellectual property field. I happen to know it has an impact first hand - While I was the VP of Intellectual Property Enforcement at MGM Studios, I found Randy Guthrie illegally selling MGM's prized franchise, boxed sets of James Bond movies online. As a result of my efforts to track him down with law enforcement, Guthrie, an American citizen, spent years in a Chinese prison (that cannot be pleasant) and was extradited to the US to continue a long sentence in a Mississippi prison and pay a huge fine. This story got a tremendous amount of press around the world. And it reminds people that stealing movies is a crime and when you get caught, the penalty is steep. What's the lesson here? It is important to protect creativity - and that just doesn't mean actors and directors. It means struggling writers, make up artists, set designers and assistants. We need to actively pursue these bottom feeders that sell America's creativity for their own benefit while simultaneously educating our young people and challenging them to come up with new business models to match today's technology. That would be heroic.
Our children should understand the relationship between technology and entertainment-they have always been intertwined - (what industry first embraced technology, motion pictures, it is called the camera) and cannot live without each other. While the relationship has been tense at times: the player piano, the television, the VCR - all predicted to "end the business..." and none did, what they did do was create new revenue streams and grow the business like never before. And then along came Napster - and unfortunately the music business' reaction was to ignore and then once the technology was firmly in place, sue the consumer and the creators of the technology. And we all know how that has worked out.
History shows that major innovations create major opportunities. The visionaries benefit, the fearful resist and languish. The key has always been seeing the change and adapting. Something that music has failed to do, and something that the studios need to hasten. There are so many legitimate video and music sites that compensate artists and the studios and labels that support them, using the very same technology that the pirate's use - our job is to make sure the population knows the difference.
Evolve and educate.
Laura Tunberg is a Digital Content Strategist at We Get It Consulting and Former VP of Intellectual Property Enforcement, MGM Studios.
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nice post...and very correct.
Piracy harms the artist, harms creativity. It makes the movies people want to see, the music they want to listen to, and the games they want to play, less and less likely to be produced in the future.
Pirates are cutting off the branch they're sitting on, so to speak. They want, and want, and want everything for FREE without realising that the works of creativity they crave can't and won't be produced for free. Great movies cost money to make, albums and songs cost money to record, games take a lot of cash to be created. And again, stealing them only makes it less likely that they will continue to be funded.
And the excuse of the pirates, and those who apologize and legitimize them, that the entertainment industries business models are outdated just does not hold water. What's outdated about producing a product and offering it for sale? That's just an excuse for stealing.
Not when those companies overcharge for the products and force me to pay for it every time they change format.
I do care about the artist, not about the greedy, abusive business
Try stealing your next pair of Nike running shoes using that logic. "I care about Third World factory workers, thats why Im not paying for these shoes". Yeah right. You belong to the 90% of people who, given enough incentive could justify anything, and I mean anything.
The idea that you are somehow going to "educate" people into simply not taking advantage of *what they know in their hearts* to be simple viewership - the same thing you experience on the subway, walking past a radio station, in your car, blasting out of storefronts, plastered on outdoor video screens everywhere - that is delusional. The old model relied on scarcity, that was enforced by practicality and physical constraints. There are no more physical constraints on media products. At all. So naturally younger folks rebel when you deign to place digital locks on what are naturally "free" data streams. This revolution has been going on for 30 years and NOW you decide that maybe the digital video/audio disks the industry pumped out by the billion were a bad idea? Little late for that.
Understand the argument. Scarcity no longer exists for media. Come up with a business model that works within the new reality, or be obsoleted. I wouldn't have placed a levy on horseshoes to keep carriages in business when the car came along, and am little inclined to cooperate with media dinosaurs who think they can legislate (or "educate) their way to profits comparable to yesteryear. Personally I suspect that there is still money to me made on music/movie sales, but perhaps not *quite* as much as in years gone by. That that answer doesn't tend to sit well with creators (well, publishers actually - individual creators tend to get it) is of no concern to
So... where does the compensation for artists come from in your opinion?
Sadly, I can tell full well from your article that you used to work as "Former VP of Intellectual Property Enforcement, MGM Studios".
Here's the thing, Laura. You use the words "stealing" and "theft". File copying is not either. This goes to the heart of the entire software piracy discussion. And it is not splitting hairs; "theft" has an actual definition. To steal is to deprive someone else of their physical property - what was once in the owner's possession is now (illegally) in someone else's. File sharing is distinctly different, and there's the rub.
Young people who grew up with computers (and even thirtysomethings like myself) understand what a digital file is: a perfectly flexible, perfectly malleable container for information. To share or "pirate" a file is NOT to steal it. You have cloned it, made a perfect copy. More copies exist than before, no one has been deprived of anything. Scarcity does not exist in the digital realm.
Now, you can argue that a user *may or may not* pay for something after having the opportunity to experience a piece of digital media for free, and that is a worthy discussion. Obviously almost anyone will watch or listen to almost anything if it is (or seems to be) free. And, further to the point, only the biggest a**holes will insist that creators should *NOT* be paid for their work. Practically everyone agrees on that, on both sides of the aisle.
And yet, nobody seems to want to pay if they don't have to, and most media businesses have seen their profits dip into the red accordingly. Once the model of use/viewing has become 'it's free', nobody can get a fee out of the user or the service provider.
At the turn of the 20th Century, artists who recorded music and spoken word content saw the shellac disks that were copied from their work and sold to the public as promotional items which might swell their audience numbers when next they performed 'live' wherever the disks had sold well. But by mid-century, recording artists derived enough income from sales of disks that the tours they made were mostly to improve disk sales, so the situation had reversed. Now thanks to digital technology, online music has become for most musicians a promotional item that hopefully will improve ticket sales at their 'live' performances. That's progress for you.
This is where companies and artists have failed. They have the opportunity to add value to the things they offer for sale. They could have added to the artwork or things that come with music disks.
Or they could push to derive the bulk of their sales from t-shirts, posters, pins, etc.
I also see the opportunity for companies to get their product placed in movies or ads, further driving sales of their music or other lifestyle products.
So... "Identity Theft" isn't really theft until they take your body.
Say rather that "identity theft" is also a misnomer.
"To steal is to deprive someone else of their physical property - what was once in the owner's possession is now (illegally) in someone else's."
Almost. You can steal money by illegally transferring a balance from one account to another, with no physical property involved. The definition you give is for larceny, which is restricted to physical property; theft is a broader category, that includes intangible property.
The key point is that the former owner no longer has it. When you copy something, the original remains in the possession of the owner. (It affects their ability to make money off the original, but that's not stealing any more than Edison stole from candle-makers by developing a usable electric light.)
Thank you for the clarification, you are of course correct.
Laura,
"We have fundamentally failed to educate an entire generation"
No generation has ever "educated" a previous generation. Society progresses through each new generation challenging the old, finding new ways of doing things and furthering humanity as a whole. When realising the technological marvel that is the Internet you must at the same time realise that such a disruptive innovation in human communication by necessity must come with other disruptive changes as well.
One of those disruptive changes seem to be that companies specialising in physical distribution of media, creating a monopoly on "air time" and performances, won't survive.
That is not a problem for creators. On the contrary, thanks to the Internet and the endless possibilities for distribution that it brings artists are in a never before seen position to make their works available for a global world - and to find innovative ways to make money. Many such innovations have already been made, the complaints you're hearing are from those who want things to stay as they are.
Things won't stay as they are. It has never happened before, and it will not happen now.
[book recommendation: Lawrence Lessig, "The Future of Ideas". I promise, it's worth your time]
who said anything about wanting things to stay as they are? the entertainment industry would love to embrace digital distribution. digital distribution is WONDERFUL. The industry would like to give fans the movies, music and games they enjoy in as many different formats as they'd like.
I guess the only thing one would hope wouldn't change is that people pay for the things they'd like to consume...
and i think paying for what one consumes will never be outdated. nothing is FREE...eve
"and i think paying for what one consumes will never be outdated. nothing is FREE...eve
Demonstrably false, look at open source software. Not everyone is always looking to turn a profit.
Oh you're right. The existing companies that had a purpose when physical distribution was hard and you had to compete for air time would of course like to continue on with their existing revenue model - with everything being digital and thus easier (less costly) for them :)
Artists, and consumers, are correct in pointing out that these companies - that business model - is no longer needed (thanks to the technological marvel that is the Internet).
The artists who have understood this are making money, today, from the "stealing" generation. You see, these "thieves" have no problem spending money - you just have to realise that disruptive changes affect business models as well - and evolve.
What do you call freeware then?
(It might be obvious, but it should of course be - "No generation has ever 'educated' a subsequent generation" in my post above)
your parents or providers didn't raise you then? you were just left to fend for yourself after plopping out of the womb? taught yourself how to read and write and talk did you?
"That is not a problem for creators", you say, but it is, despite your declaration. Especially for creators of music who do not perform 'live', and who, previously, could make a living, even occasionally a very good living (see Steely Dan) from sales of recordings alone. The "endless possibilities for distribution" are not endless possibilities for income.
We are presently alive in a period of history wherein the frame is far more valued than the painting, in light of which I very much hope "things won't stay as they are."
For a very long time, musicians who didn't perform "live" did not make money ;) Today, you can record a song in your basement, distribute it via social networks and allow people to pay you if they want - all still without leaving that same basement! Never before has it been easier for artists to create, distribute and monetize upon their own work.
So, as I said. The technological wonder that is the Internet, putting mass-distribution and mass-production of digital goods into everyone's hands, is not a problem for creators.
It's a tool.
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