Take a Napster

This is an issue that troubles me greatly, mostly because I'm not sure which side I'm on.

On the one hand, as an actor and writer, I firmly believe that I am entitled to protection of my creations, and to receive payment in exchange for their use.

On the other hand, as a netizen of many many years, I also understand the collaborative effort and spirit of the Net. In fact, I've given many of my writings away for free (including all my columns for Purr) simply because a) I feel they're important and have important things to say or b) I'm a pompous, fatuous idiot who likes to see his name in print.

You decide.

So the anarchist in me wants to see Napster survive in some form, and to tear down the copyright laws. But the merchant in me wants to ensure that someone else doesn't get credit for my work (and if you don't think that's a problem, believe me when I tell you that, at least once a month, I get e-mails about how my column of such-and-such month was lifted almost entirely and reprinted under someone else's name. Again, since I don't get paid for these, I'm not sure I care. I don't do a lot of work for them, and if someone else gets hammered with a lawsuit because I couldn't be bothered to check my facts, well, that's their problem!)

Copyright is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. Intellectual property as a concept didn't exist until, I think, the 19th Century. The fact that Shakespeare wrote all his plays without it is a testament to the fact that it really isn't necessary, if you can figure out a way to stop the copying. See, Shakespeare sold his plays to the theatre-owner/producer, who then kept tabs on the individual scripts. No one had any one of them long enough to make an unauthorized copy, presumably.

Now of course, Xerox machines and the descendants thereof make copying ridiculously easy. In truth, some of the safe guards in place for Xeroxing textbooks and other printed matter have some validity in cyberspace copyright laws as well.

See, I think the problem becomes one more of jurisdiction than of whether it is right or wrong to copy a song for "private sharing". Studies consistently show that CD sales go up in the presence of services like Napster, yet this doesn't address the problems that a band struggling to make a couple of bucks to support an album encounter.

Put it to you this way: when was the last time you paid for a shareware program?

Now, drug companies and big software companies charge obscene amounts for the medicines they create, because they have to cover their R&D costs. If they charged on a free market basis, the first pill (CD-ROM) would contain each and every dime of development costs, and every subsequent pill (CD-ROM) would need to only cover the direct cost of producing that one item.

In the case of the software company, that would actually be zero. The point being that, while that would be the free market pricing strategy, in practical terms the development costs must be spread out over several production runs. No one in their right mind would ever buy that first CD-ROM or pill.

Likewise, if you think about the struggling recording artist in these terms, he or she has to live a life in order to make the music we enjoy. Truthfully, we should be honor-bound to make some sort of "enjoyment payment" to them, but since this is sort of the shareware problem, it simply isn't going to happen in enough cases to circumvent the commercials distribution of songs. Which means signing rights to a big distributor, which is going to recoup their rights payment, which means Napster is toast (no pun intended).

In fact, the actors unions, SAG and AFTRA are striking commercial producers over specifically this issue: how to allow the licensing of our images and talents without bankrupting the client? Different issue, different column, tho.

So if CD sales are going up under Napsterization, yet emerging artists are still struggling, what is going on?

It seems as tho the most popular downloads from these music sharing services are from established artists, those who least need that marginal dollar from consumers. As with the Dead, who allowed bootleg tapes of their concerts to be circulated, apparently this generates a demand for hard copy product that is reliably from the artist's repetoire. Meaning people are downloading songs, listening to them, and then deciding they like the artist well enough to buy more of their stuff.

And in the meantime, they might browse a couple of emerging artists, recommended to them by a friend.

So...here's a possible solution: what if, for every Sting CD sale that is generated out of a download of "Desert Rose", a buck was set aside in a pool for artists who are clearly losing money from pirate copies of their music being passed around by the Napsterites? This helps the artists who are struggling keep on creating and adding their voices to the collective, but doesn't punish the artists who are established and can throw their legal weight around on this issue.

Just a thought...

Carl Salonen