Tories vs. 'Punk Capitalists'
Why copyright piracy is just the new way of doing business.
'Pirate's Dilemma' author Matt Mason.
- The Pirate's Dilemma
- Free Press (2008)
"With pirates, it's never just for the money, is it?" -- Videodrome (1983), written and directed by David Cronenberg
Today, being pirated is less of a worry than not being pirated. If nobody thinks enough of your album or movie to seed it on BitTorrent so it can be downloaded for free, odds are nobody thinks enough of it to buy it in a store either.
Last year, peer-to-peer file sharing accounted for 74 per cent of all German Internet traffic, according to German network traffic firm Ipoque. One of the hottest technologies right now is rapid replication, desktop factories that one day might make creating a new pair of sneakers as easy as downloading a music track. All of this hints at a future in which anything can be pirated, leaving a lot of people in business wondering what to do: watch your business walk out the door because you didn't do enough, or clamp down on your property and alienate your customers in the process? That's the Pirate's Dilemma.
An example of the latter strategy is Bill C-61, an act to amend the Copyright Act, introduced by Minister of Industry Jim Prentice on Thursday. It's a bill that has little regard for freedom of expression, fair use rights, the public domain, consulting stakeholders or even enforceability, and much regard for keeping U.S. movie companies happy. According to columnist Michael Geist, C-61 could make ripping a DVD you own to your iPod a criminal offense. A librarian could break the law if she scans and sends an article to somebody who keeps it for more than five days. Region-free DVD players could be illegal. People backing up or otherwise format-shifting their movies and music could become pirates.
The business of stealing media
If you want a discussion of the political, ethical or legal aspects of piracy, Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma isn't the book for you. (Try Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture or Darren Wershler-Henry's free as in speech and beer for that.) Mason's book is classified as "business," a guide to the new pirate waters for the people who want to make money.
The Pirate's Dilemma is really about the evolution of pirate media subcultures, their attendant economies and their relationship to the mainstream culture and economy. Mason calls this "punk capitalism," a phrase also used by Bono to describe the Product Red campaign to fight AIDS in Africa. (It can also describe sweatshops and payday loan companies.) Its do-it-yourself attitude plus low barriers to entry: punk rock's three guitar chords and a spiky haircut in the 1970s, hip-hop's two turntables and a microphone in the 1980s, the Internet's web server and free software.
Time and again, Mason tells the tale of pirates who broke all the rules, came out of nowhere and made it big (and rich): the very first radio broadcasters, the nun who unwittingly invented the dance club, the street kids who created the global hip-hop culture, the hackers who invented the personal computer. It's the classic American "little guy with a dream makes good" success story.
Yet, the end result of Mason's examples is hip-yet-superficial brands like VICE magazine and American Apparel, or 70-year-old rock stars creaking through one more reunion tour, or companies like Disney that made movies based on public domain fairy tales, yet ruthlessly control their own intellectual property. A particularly galling example is when Mason compares TAKI183, a legendary graffiti tagger who put his mark on a U.S. secret service car in 1971 at great personal risk and for no material gain, to Marc Ecko's viral video hoax of tagging Air Force One that ultimately did nothing but sell a lot of designer t-shirts.
Peter Pan or Captain Hook?
Likewise, Mason badly misrepresents the history of Microsoft and Apple, portraying the former as oppressive hoarders and the latter as freedom loving pirates who stayed true to the open source hacker culture. Instead, Apple today is deeply hostile towards piracy, doing its best to control every aspect of the user's hardware, software and content. (Microsoft would love to do the same, if it could.)
Time and again, Mason's examples show Peter Pan turning into Captain Hook.
The true descendants of the people who built the first personal computers and freely shared programming code in the 1970s are the ones in the open source movement, working away at ever-improving operating systems and applications and giving it away for free. The open source developers and other examples of non-commercial "pirate" cultures, like the movement to produce cheaper versions of medicines for developing countries, gets only a fraction of the page count devoted to strike-it-rich, yay-free-market stories.
Mason spends a chapter pondering the rise and fall of pirate subcultures, and one suspects that this book was originally about the life cycle of scenes and cliques before it was refocused. Some subcultures go legit and/or sell out to the mainstream, with rock songs about heroin repurposed as jingles for cruise lines and mortgages. Some are stillborn from too little or too much monetization, like the short-lived UK "grime" scene. Some are legislated to death. A few defy assimilation by being too repulsive, like the UK's "happy slap" culture of randomly assaulting people to make YouTube videos. Some attempt uneasy accommodations with the mainstream, trying to attract big-money interest while remaining true to their roots, like hip-hop and open source.
Mason has a knack for finding interesting historical connections and anecdotes, but he uses them to tell the same "pirates make good" narrative repeatedly. It's as if he wants to reassure his business book readers that they can be cool outlaws and still make pots of money. As a result, his book is readable but not terribly deep, and biased in favor of commercial interests that may be the biggest threat to the creative cultures it describes. The mainstream needs pirate cultures for their creativity and originality, but runs the risk of overfishing the ocean, by suctioning out the culture's money and diluting the brand's message. Mason may have intended this book to help prevent the relationship between the two from becoming exploitative.
Can pirates have a conscience?
The final chapter lays out Mason's thesis as a variation of the prisoner's dilemma: the businesses that unclench and don't try too hard to control how their products are used and distributed, that tolerate and even condone a certain amount of piracy, will collectively benefit. It's a sound idea, and as of mid-2008, it appears that the market is adopting the new philosophy. The major music labels now sell downloads of large portions of their catalogs without anti-piracy measures. Companies sell laptops with open source operating systems. Even the CBC is experimenting with distributing video programming via peer-to-peer file sharing. Hopefully, the motion picture industry will soon figure out what the music industry now understands: that the treatment for piracy, such as Bill C-61, is worse than the disease.
But what Mason's thesis leaves out are the morality and ethics of piracy. The guy working on an open source operating system has a completely different motive and ultimate goal from the guy selling bootleg DVDs on a street corner. Some pirates are motivated by concern for freedom of expression and the public commons. Some just like to give the finger to the powerful and the comfortable. Some want to make a living the only way they can. And some dream of selling out and joining the elite. Piracy is not the opposite of market capitalism; it is the fringe, where you find the greatest generosity and the most craven exploitation.
Pirates can't be easily divided into good and bad, but serious discussion of the ethical dimension is what's missing in Mason's book. The subcultures that Mason studies are also sub-economies (though not necessarily in terms of cash), and they have a potential to resist the market capitalism that's been encroaching on all of society. The open source programmer and the medicine bootlegger are the pirate heroes of the moment, not the rapper with his own brand of flavored water, whom Mason praises as "authentic."
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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23
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allankh
3 years ago
Bad Apple characterization
When you say: "Apple today is deeply hostile towards piracy, doing its best to control every aspect of the user's hardware, software and content."
I think you are misunderstanding and mis-characterizing Apple's position. Steve Jobs' open letter to the community is obviously a marketing ploy, but it is more than just that. Apple has demonstrated a desire to reach a balance between copyright and fair use, and does waaay more than Microsoft ever has or will do towards freeing consumers.
realisticman
3 years ago
That's Right
allankh is right. Watch Apple keynote address last week and see how Apple has opened the SDK to it's next iPhone and how many developers are writing applications for it.
Check Apples's web site, the SDK is there for use:
developer.apple.com/sdk/
There's an amazing 3D medical app. that will give doctors in remote locations access to complicated inner body details. One guy and his team in the UK wrote a very advanced game for next iPhone in a week and went to the launch showing it.
Copyright law in Canada is long overdue for reform due to new technologies and many commercial arts groups have lobbied successive governments, trying to get Canada to catch up to many other developed countries.
The alternative to protection for some creators is to include advertising to earn a living. Some others will not bother to develop elaborate software, video-games, etc., etc., unless there is some protection from rip-off artists.
Any suggestion that the record companies and the film companies are just rich, fat corporation is ridiculous. There are many more small companies and individual creators that deserve to not be ripped-off for the work they put into creating something.
redriverboy
3 years ago
Apple
"Apple today is deeply hostile towards piracy, doing its best to control every aspect of the user's hardware, software and content."
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, and NO. That is not why Apple exists. They "control" every aspect of the user's hardware, software and content to GIVE the user the BEST experience. Period. Apple is not a content provider a la the music companies, movie studios, publishers, etc. They have to deal with piracy in their day-to-day business but the reason they do business, their raison d'etre has absolutely nothing, in any way, shape or form to with any level of piracy.
Geof
3 years ago
C-61 Threatens Innovation and Creativity
Although the World Economic Forum ranks Canada's copyright law ahead of the U.S. and in 4th position among the G8, it is in need of reform. It lacks the fair use provisions of U.S. law necessary to protect legitimate uses such as satire, parody, and education. However, Bill C-61 imitates the worst features of a decade-old U.S. law considered to be a failure even by its architect. The emphasis on preventing downloads is a distraction for, like the U.S. law, it will not succeed.
C-61 implements an outright ban on technology on the basis that it might be used to violate copyright. In practice, those who break the law will continue to do so - just as they have in the United States - but creators and innovators with legitimate uses for the technology will be locked out. The bill creates a new kind of private law. Media conglomerates and manufacturers of digital technology are permitted to dictate in detail how technology can be used even when copyright is not involved. This control overrides Canadians' existing rights, including rights otherwise granted by copyright and property law.
The United States and its copyright industries lobbied and threatened for this bill. Despite great concern, the vast majority of Canadian citizens and affected interests were not consulted. American media and technology companies (and their Canadian subsidiaries) are the bill's chief beneficiaries. The losers are smaller businesses, individual creators, artists, innovators, and consumers. That is why Canadian artists, musicians, documentary filmmakers, librarians, educators and citizens are opposed. Dr Laura Murray at Queen's University describes it as a lie to consumers, creators, teachers, students, librarians, and taxpayers. The Appropriation Art coalition of artists calls it censorship. Bill C-61 has been sold as a measure to benefit creativity and innovation, when in fact it is a mechanism that protects old industries and businesses against innovation and change.
Moat
3 years ago
Apple
redriverboy wrote:
Apple is a multinational corporation that is publicly traded. They are mostly concerned about their brand image and ultimately, their stock price.
Initiatives such as the One Laptop Per Child and open source educational software such as Moodle threaten both Microsoft and Apple. Schools have been places where Apple has flourished in overcharging for their services and hardware over the past two decades.
Apple is soma for the western world hipster, and a security blanket for those wanting a "positive" purchasing experience reinforced by advertising.
shmendrick
3 years ago
apple?
Wow, apple fanboys are everywhere.
The apple brand is all about charging way too much for hardware. I remember when a 'superdrive' was $400 or something but you could buy the standard pioneer drive (almost exact same model) for $100. I remember discovering my $3000 desktop did not even have an audio input (had to buy more hardware), and recently the 'superdrive' for my old powerbook could be found for around $300 but I could buy a better, standard notebook drive for $45. Or the fan replacement at $300 that should have been closer to $50, or the hard drive that was $280 at the apple store, same make model $100 at any other computer store.
If the iPhone is gettng open, that might have something to do with the screaming that happened when apple threatened to 'brick' on update any iPhones that had been hacked to run open software...
iPods don't run without iTunes (unless you (can find and) use non-apple software)... and, DRM DRM DRM!!!??? Dled song only play on the iPod?
There are plenty of things apple could do to improve my experience by actually opening up. I'm done with overpriced apple junk personally. Soma indeed.
If folks think good software can't be developed without 'protection' have a look into the free software movement. Some incredibly good software has been developed within that framework. A lot of it is better than commercial offerings from a usability standpoint. Not to mention that it is free in more ways than one.
Anyway the reviewer is bang on about pirate culture... as soon as somebody finds a way to make money off it, it's toast.
good review.
DBarclay
3 years ago
Apple
Apple products restore a sense of childlike wonder to all of our lives. Steve Jobs doesn't care about money -- he is driven to create beautiful and useful objects. All else is secondary.
shabbaranks
3 years ago
Offesnive?
Can I suggest that the comment above is offensive? If it's not sarcasm, it's pretty offensive.
When did "childlike wonder" begin to cost so much. Wonder comes from non-commodified goods and actions, like blossoms on trees, a blue sky in Vancouver, or a happy family enjoying a picnic in a park. When a well designed package of plastic and silicon inspires wonder in me, its time to check out.
DBarclay
3 years ago
Apple
Yes, sorry shabbaranks, my comment was sarcasm. I thought everybody read The Secret Diar of Steve Jobs.
As for this (redriverboy):
Take a look at this story: Priate Flag at Apple.
realisticman
3 years ago
shabbaranks
The designs must just go over some people's heads. Looking around it's easy to see that good design is not an aesthetic appreciated enough. Must be the old hewers of wood etc., history. Their caves must be grim.
Where would computers be if Apple hadn't pushed the GUI interface? Who is the designer Jonathan Ive?
G West
3 years ago
junk
Good design has to mean something more than flash and cash.
Apple is eye candy - nothing more. The piles of obsolete ipods - each iteration replaced by a slightly more glitzy version every 10 months or so is all the proof one needs.
Child like fascination for childish minds.
Dump 'em all in the ocean and smell the breezes.
Listen to the birds.
Talk to your friends. Design should serve people - not the other way round.
Bobb999
3 years ago
Does this law actually have
Does this law actually have any hope in hell of passing?
We know the Tories are a minority gov't, so it can only pass with the approval of one or more of the major opposition parties, and then the Senate must pass it.
Somehow, I doubt the opposition will allow
such a controversial bill through, unless Harper defines it as a "confidence" bill that will trigger an election if not passed.
I doubt the Tories will want to trigger an election over a copyright law.
So, why are they bothering with it?
If they truly wanted to revamp copyright law now, presumably they'd have cooperated with the other parties to work out in committee a new bill all could agree on. Instead they cook up sneaky legislation on their own which has little chance of acceptance by Parliament.
I say it's window dressing, a gesture to help obtain brownie points and praise for the Tories from the US gov't, and the US, Cdn., and global recording industry, all of whom have been lobbying strongly for tougher Cdn. copyright laws.
One message of this may be, "it may not pass this time, but here's what you can expect from Tories if we get a majority next time."
---And millions of downloading Canadians, like me, will have yet another good reason to vote against Harper's Tories next election!
redriverboy
3 years ago
apple again
If Apple isn't about the best user experience, who is? No one is, that's who. Apple have that space all locked up. Anyway, I thought this discussion was about piracy. Jobs has very clearly stated that he wants to drop all DRM from itunes and the ipod. He is in favour of cheap and widely available intellectual property, look it up.
redriverboy
3 years ago
fanboy
First time I've ever been accused of being a fan boy. I take that as a compliment. When something as good as Apple comes along there is no shame in supporting it. Just ask their shareholders... One day the world will be rid of the scourge that is Windows, one day... I say that as a daily Windows/Apple user. Windows makes my life miserable. After putting out piece of sh*t after piece of sh*t product I can not wait until they finally lose all their users and close down. Maybe not in my lifetime, but my grandchildren might enjoy and windows-free world. Die Microsoft Die. Ahhhhhhhhh, that felt good.
realisticman
3 years ago
Not Jumk Mr. West - Evolution
The first iPod had 5GB memory.
As of September 2007, the iPod had sold more than 150 million units worldwide making it the best-selling digital audio player series in history.
June 2008
With up to 160GB of storage, iPod classic lets you carry everything in your collection — up to 40,000 songs or up to 200 hours of video — everywhere you go.
Technological developments are coming faster and that's what's making old units redundant. Apple uses the best technology available and as we go into the future memory and storage power will become bigger and faster.
Nursery rhymes on an iPod might be considered childish but one can store any digital data one chooses on an iPod; Chekhov if you like.
realisticman
3 years ago
bobb999
Many creation groups in Canada have been carefully examining and asking for updates to copyright law in Canada. Years before the Harper Conservatives came to power.
eg.
http://www.pubcouncil.ca/databases0198.html
This update has been many years in the making.
You would still be able to download music.
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/crp-prda.nsf/en/rp01160e.html
Frank
3 years ago
redriverboy
Any relation to our much-missed old friend "redrivergirl"?
Frank
3 years ago
Apple and Microsoft : greedy and greedier
While I understand the hatred of Microsoft, Apple gets by on the romantic origin story and being the underdog.
I loved my Apple II although I longed for a III or a Lisa. But even the black and white Mac was too expensive at the time. Like many others trying to avoid the "dark side" of IBM and Microsoft but unable to afford the Apple brand anymore we moved to the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. The Amiga was a fabulous machine for a great price and the company deserved a better fate yet it was Apple charging several times more while giving you less that survived.
Its 26 years since I learned assembly coding on my Apple II but now I see Microsoft and Apple in the same light. And now I love Ubuntu and Vector.
Its amazing what the open source people have been able to do without the big budgets. Even when I have to fire up Windows the experience on that platform is improved by using free open-source software.
Moat
3 years ago
Fanaticism
redriverboy wrote:
Wow.... Apple users sure have a lot of passion. I would take you to task, but Vista looks like a hassle.
Still, easy now, we are just talking about operating systems.
realisticman
3 years ago
Glad they're Happy
Maybe they don't sell Macs at Wal-Mart.
Maybe good design will prevail.
And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd...
Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.
The Mac? I don't have any equivalent data via Evans Data. But the Mac OS has rocketed by 380 percent as a targeted development platform, Evans Data told Computerworld.
Apple also just overtook Wal-Mart and became the largest seller of music in the US.
billposer
3 years ago
open source is not piracy
Both open source and piracy may irritate big business, but there is otherwise no relationship between them. Pirates, whether or not we sympathize with them, are people who infringe on copyright. Free software developers ("open source" is a misnomer), of whom I am one, do not infringe on anyone's copyright. In fact, those who release their software under the GNU General Public License, rely on copyright law. Please do not equate free software with piracy - this false equation only perpetuates the FUD spread by companies like Microsoft.
realisticman
3 years ago
Important Distiction
Well said Bill. Piracy is theft and those that assume open source software is free are parasites.
One I use is NeoOffice and I frequently send them money. It seems obvious that they should be compensated for the work they do. Isn't this what a sense of community should be all about?
Reading complaints about the proposed Bill makes me wonder about why so many seem to want something for nothing and anything and everything should be free. What sort of community is that?
Frank
3 years ago
realisticman
Open source software is free. But as they often point out, they don't mean "free as in beer", they mean "free as in speech".
That said, they do offer free downloading. Doing so is not piracy.