Letters

Much ado about copying: Readers respond to Scott Matthews' "Copying Isn't Cool" and other recent Salon stories on file sharing.

Sep 17, 2003 | [Read "Copying Isn't Cool."]

I just don't understand who's threatened here.

The solution, for music, is simple as one, two, three.

One, put everything ever recorded on a gigantic server farm. Charge for this music, about 99 cents a track. This is fundamentally the best way to distribute music ever invented. Type in "Louis Armstrong" and then select from everything he ever did. Google for music. That was what was so wonderful about Napster.

Two, allow the sharing of all songs, but demand that ISPs monitor the actual files downloaded, and determine the most popular, etc., and forward that data to the appropriate monitoring body. Charge the ISPs a per-subscriber fee for their use of copyrighted material. This, of course, would be recovered in the ISP's monthly charge.

Three, remember, you're still selling CDs and their successors. Better sample rates. Cover art. People love their CD collections.

Since the average family spends less than $100 a year in music, if you get a piece of every Internet account in America, you've got a big chunk of change, and a more accurate "hit parade" than ever before. Who's out of luck? Blockbuster? KISS-FM and the rest of the manipulative marketing machine? Maybe. Certainly not the artists or the labels.

Oh, I know who'd lose out: the moral and technological dunces who don't want the best machines in world history for the sharing of information to be used to do that.

-- Jim Hassinger

I have presented this idea in a number of forums and so I will do the same here. This is not an attempt at sweeping reform of copyright laws nor is it a new means of distributing wealth to content creators. Rather, this is a level-headed compromise between those who consume music and those who produce or represent those who produce music: Legalize low bit-rate music trading. In the spirit of old-school radio recordings and mix-tape swapping, both sides of this quagmire should de-criminalize the sharing of files encoded below a reasonable threshold -- say 96 Kb. Audio files of that quality are amply suitable for low-fidelity enjoyment -- trying out new artists, exposing new music to others -- while at the same time still providing an incentive to "upgrade" to higher-quality recordings of music that one would want to include in one's library. The industry could chose to police the P2P networks in search of higher bit-rate file sharers, but ultimately, both sides would benefit from this arrangement. Consumers would be free to experiment with radio-quality versions of music, provide free word-of-mouth advertising, and still leave something resembling a business model for those who wish to produce content for the next hundred years.

-- Sasha Gelbart

When will the RIAA understand that people are buying fewer CDs not because they can get songs for free, but because they're tired of paying for music they don't want? Buying a $15 or $18 CD gets you the two or three songs that will be played on the radio, plus ten tracks of crap. Even with a scarcity of marquee performers and limits on what you can do with the music, the various competing online music companies are reporting very strong sales. This should be seen as an indication of the willingness of Americans to pay for what they want, as long as somebody is willing to offer it. CD sales are down because people now realize that there are ways to get music beyond purchasing a whole CD. As soon as the RIAA's member companies wake up to that fact, online music sharing will drop off the mainstream, and become just another dark backwater of the Internet.

-- Kevin Quinn

The free-speech section of Matthews' article is so confused that it's hard to figure out where to start poking holes in it.

The key problem is that he equates a proposed system of compulsory licensing with something like the NEA grants process. Sure, the government has a track record of not volunteering money to fund offensive art, but the money in question here is not "public funding"; it's money collected through licensing of specific copyrighted works. I defy Matthews to find examples of politicians trying to keep Alice Cooper from getting his 8 cents per song when someone covers his material.

He also says that "there's no reason to believe the First Amendment would apply here," which is perhaps true but mysterious. If the government wanted to discourage pornography by denying it copyright protection, it could do that now; if the First Amendment does leave room to exclude some works from copyright (I have no idea -- not a constitutional scholar) there's no need to change what the benefits of copyright are before deciding that porn can't have them.

These confusions, together with his use of the "seven dirty words" myth and his conflation of CD Baby with download vendors like EMusic and Apple's iTunes Music Store, make Matthews sound like he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Couldn't you find anyone better to take a contrary position?

-- Aaron Mandel

The first thing I thought when I read about the so-called "horror(!) stories of the copyright wars" is that maybe now that there is money to be lost, people will pay more attention to where their kids are on the Internet and what they are doing there. It may have unintended benefits. I think it is insane how little supervision parents have over their kids' surfing, for the children's safety. I wouldn't be so unreasonable as to say it serves them right, but a parent is liable for a child's actions, and I think that is as it should be. File sharing in its present form is at the very least ethically provocative, and for that reason alone children and adults should be discouraged from doing it by their peers until the courts sort it out. In the meantime, adults should keep an eye on where the kids surf.

-- C. Lincoln

The problem with the current copyright debate is those publishing comments have a huge and unremovable interest in convincing us all that copyright infringement equals theft and only by providing a virtual never-ending copyright can artists be encouraged sufficiently to produce anything. Of course, all of that is just nonsense and most of us realize it.

I have spent the last two years writing a cookbook. I will hold a copyright on that book for my lifetime plus 50 years. If I had spent the last two years developing a lovely little pill that cured cancer, I would hold a patent for about 20 years. Schering-Plough, major drug company, is having all sorts of financial trouble because its patent on Claritin has expired. Which involves more work and is of greater benefit to society? Why, then, is the incentive to create a new cookbook, song, magazine article, etc., so great and to create a new drug or other invention so small?

I own a copy of VisiCalc. It is only some 20 years old and there is not a single computer on the market today that will run it. I might be able to find a functioning used system, but by the time the copyright expires some 100 years from now, even that is unlikely. Thus, the point of providing copyright, to add to human knowledge and to provide new tools, will be gone. No one will ever be able to use VisiCalc or any other piece of copyright-protected software once it falls into the public domain. Society will never get the benefit it is supposed to derive from the generous protections it granted the holders.

If we were to reduce the copyright to five years, I doubt one single recording artist, writer, or other creative person would stop producing, but we would create a vast library of material available to the public for free. That was the idea, to reward artists but to also have much material available for free. I don't think Walt Disney, being dead and all, has been given great new incentive to create something as nice as Mickey Mouse, but the public has sure been robbed of its rightful use to that material.

The easiest, fairest and simplest solution to limit piracy is to create a better alternative, that vast, free library. We can do that by shortening the length of copyright to five years. Let's see how much the media supports that idea.

-- Stephen R. Stapleton

The EFF has greatly aggravated me. Their argument for legalizing file sharing is mostly rhetoric, based on sympathy for the "victims" of the RIAA. Believe me, I sympathize with them, I'm livid over the way they're being treated, and I think that something should be done about it, but how exactly can one call this the "big picture"? That's the smallest possible picture, it's short-term and immediate, it's a red herring. And the reason it upsets me is that, being a file-sharing advocate, they're supposedly on "my side"; I will be tarred with the same brush as them. And they do deserve a good tarring.

My own take on things follows a tack that both the EFF and Mr. Matthews explicitly stood against. It's a concept that our culture automatically dismisses before the thought is even completed, but ultimately, I think that we will have to learn to abandon consumer privacy. Matthews himself realized that this would allow a fair system of micropayment compensation, but he becomes guilty of bad debate when he invokes fear of the Big Bad Government knowing everything we do.

First, everyone would have access to the same information, not just the government, so it couldn't be treated as "dirty little secrets" and used for leverage. Second, before such a scheme was adopted, the government would naturally have to be playing by the same rules. The truest sense of public security comes when all the doors are opened, not when they're all closed.

This would of course have to be a voluntary system, but with the right infrastructure it could be made so attractive in terms of convenience and financial benefit that effectively everyone would sign on, including (in fact, especially!) government and big business.

We'd also have to lose our cultural embarrassment over downloading porn. Hmm... well, I guess we'll see the first implementations in Europe instead of here.

-- Lief Clennon

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