“We’re writing today to ask you to please boycott all Streetlight related items by not purchasing any of our records or merchandise from Victory’s website, any traditional CD stores, online third party retailers or any digital distribution service (iTunes, Amazon etc). Victory has a long-time reputation of pocketing all of the proceeds from a band’s music and merch, with shady accounting and generally bully-ish behavior. If you want to support Streetlight, our music and our ability to tour and continue to release music, please make all SM related purchases from our own webstore, The RISC Store (www.riscstore.com), or come out to a show and buy a shirt or cd from us directly. In regards to getting the music we make, you can buy directly from us, or, alternately, we’re sure you can find a way to get the tunes onto your computer that may not be, ahem, traditional… Speaking a Bit metaphorically, there is a Torrent of methods to accomplish this, and Google is your always loyal friend…”
“Streetlight Manifesto realize that they are fighting a copyright blockade. They’re artists. They want to get paid. But the copyright blockade, the copyright cartel, is making that impossible. So they’re going to go around the blockade. We should support all of these bands and all of these artists to totally destroy the copyright cartel. Copyright law as currently iterated—lifetime plus 70 years—is immoral and it’s completely economically unfeasible.”Max Keiser of The KeiserReport
Frankly, I had never heard of the punk/third-wave ska band
Streetlight Manifesto until just yesterday, when I watched a particularly
relevant-to-copyright episode of RT’s The Keiser Report, a weekly program of
entertainingly over-the-top (though almost always razor-sharp) financial news
analysis and opinion with ex-Wall Streeter Max Keiser and his sidekick,
political analyst Stacy Herbert. SM’s battle with its record company and the
other stories Keiser and Herbert discussed in the episodes’ first half, strike
me as useful examples to focus thinking about the economics of the internet,
particularly as influenced by copyright law, as discussed by James Boyle and CoryDoctorow, to name two. Before I get deeper into the discussion, here is a brief
summary of the other items Keiser and Herbert referenced:
- According to Bloomberg, Hector Xavier “Sabu” Monsegur, alleged leader of the Anonymous hacker group LulzSec who is apparently cooperating with the FBI to break the group, pled guilty in federal court in Lower Manhattan to, among other charges, “breaking into Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer servers in El Segundo, California, where he obtained confidential data on about 100,000 users of its sonypictures.com website and into Sony Music Entertainment’s computer systems in Belgium, the Netherlands and Russia, U.S. authorities said. He later admitted sharing that information with other LulzSec members, court records show.” U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska told Monsegur he faced 122 ½ years in prison for the combined charges.
- Slashgear
reports that “Sony has inadvertently found itself funding FreeAnons, after band
Atari Teenage Riot agreed to one of its tracks being used in a PS Vita commercial
but donated the fee to the Anonymous legal support group. Alex
Empire of Atari Teenage Riot has some history with Sony –
the company used a track of his without permission back in 1999 in a
Handycam commercial – and so couldn’t resist suggesting track Black
Flags when the Japanese company came looking for music for its new
Vita advertising campaign. The song contains multiple references to Anonymous and
has been used in several Occupy Wall Street (OWS) promotional videos.”
- From GoodEReader: “Smashwords, the popular online ebook distribution platform that recently celebrated the uploading of the 100,000th title to its catalog of digital editions, found itself embroiled in some controversy over a request from PayPal that it remove nearly 2,000 titles that the online payment company considered inappropriate or offensive. Failure to do so would result in the deactivation of Smashwords’ PayPal account. At the risk of losing the ability to let customers make their ebook purchases through the internationally recognized payment method, Smashwords was able to forestall the removal of the titles while they continue to negotiate with PayPal.
What strikes me about these stories is that they reflect ongoing
economic and political power conflicts between, shall we say, internet users
and creators on one side and regulators and corporations on the other—between
those who demand or expect the internet to remain free and minimally regulated
and those who view an unregulated internet as a threat to be controlled for the
sake of security (and profit).
The LulzSec case, on its face, seems not exactly relevant to
the others. Some might call “Sabu” and his cohort abusers and destroyers. But I
think Keiser makes a good (if scattershot) point when he compares the penalties
the LulzSec crew now face to those faced by, for example, Rupert Murdoch and
his News Corporation in the ongoing phone-hacking scandals in the UK (and
possibly elsewhere), or the US and European banks that allegedly manipulated (“hacked,”
as Keiser puts it) the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) to reap easy
profits. “The double standard here,” Keiser says,
“is because the Hollywood industry, the MPAA,
the RIAA, they have hundreds of millions of dollars at work for lobbyists in Washington.
The consumer protection bureau … that protect[s] people from predatory bankers,
doesn’t have any money at work in Washington.
So you see really clearly how the laws are written by the lobbyists. These
people who are for the copyright cartel, they [want to] put this guy [Monsegur] in prison for 122 years. The people who hack
into LIBOR, Goldman Sachs hacking into Greece,
MF Global being hacked into by JP Morgan, they write those laws for themselves…and
everything is hunky-dory.”
Keiser’s cynical point harmonizes (if somewhat discordantly)
with Boyle’s account of how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was written and
who it was designed to protect and benefit. Boyle doesn’t come right out and say
“Follow the money,” but in his chapter on “The Internet Threat,” he focuses on
the historic tension, as the cost of copying has approached zero, between the
interests pushing for more control over copyright (and its potential for
profit) and those wanting to protect and expand the idea of fair use. On Boyle’s
account, in a White Paper making the case for the DMCA, “[t]he attitude toward
fair use was particularly revealing” of the ideology that went into the writing
of the law.
At one point … it was hinted that
fair use might be a relic of the inconveniences of the analog age, to be
discarded now that we could have automated fractional payments for even the
most insignificant use.
(It was noted, however, that some
disagreed with this conclusion.) At another point, fair use was described as a
“tax” on rights holders and a “subsidy” to those who benefited from it, such as
educational institutions.
The
thrust of the proposed legislation was to “correct” this perceived imbalance in
the relationship between copyright holder and “fair user.” Ironically, one of
the technologies that influenced the DMCA’s more hardcore view of copyright was
Sony’s Betamax video tape recorder, which made it easy for consumers to copy
movies and other content from television to watch at will. Now Sony is more
often on the same side as the Motion Picture Association of America members
who, without the benefit of knowing they would ultimately earn up to half their
profits from creating content for the new devices, viewed the VTR/VCR,
not altogether unrealistically, as a serious threat to the movie-going habits
of the public. But in the 1970s, it was Sony’s device (and the company’s
victory in front of the Supreme Court) that thwarted the industry’s designs to
dictate more restrictive copyright law, until the more ethically challenging
Napster and Grokster cases came along to make the Internet all scary for the
content creators again.
Doctorow
is on the same side of the liberty vs. control dilemma as Keiser and Boyle (and
me), but he puts the blame for the prevalence of the control point of view, not
on the influence of money or economic self-interest on the political system
but, rather, on the failure of legislators to appreciate the general-purpose
nature of computers and the internet. Doctorow thinks the “copyright wars” are
just a taste of more contentious power struggles to come. “The copyright wars
are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation,” he says.
In a
way, the final story in the Keiser Report’s list of items above is emblematic
of Doctorow’s warning. PayPal was not threatened by the ability of people to
get certain classes of erotic fiction over the Internet; it was threatened by people
paying for them through PayPal. Why? The company has not made that clear.
According to the Chicago Tribune, it originally tried to claim it was only
following the policies of the banks and credit card companies it deals with, a
claim at least one company denied. The good news—for now—is that PayPal has
come to an agreement with Smashwords. “PayPal's new policy will focus only on
e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited
to just text, spokesman Anuj Nayar said on Tuesday. The service will still
refuse, however, to process payments for text-only e-books containing child
pornography themes.”
But Jane Vertin, executive director of the National
Coalition Against Censorship, pointed out, “Verbal descriptions of child
pornography are not illegal. That's why we can read Lolita.”
Update: Edited to correct misspellings of names.
Update: Edited to correct misspellings of names.
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