Today, my video, “The Internet is Unstoppable“, was posted to my program’s official blog by my professor, Kathy Gill. She seemed to like it enough to want to show it to her undergraduate students in another class even. Well, I shared this news on Facebook, where an independent filmmaker friend of mine commented that the idea was great, but that “free” hurts the little guys. I don’t know to what extent piracy endangers content producers on the slim side of the media scale, but I responded with this:
Hey, I don’t condone piracy or content theft of any variety – I’m just discussing what’s already happening. Copyright is a broken concept. You see, as long as the cost of reproducing content is basically zero, then you look pretty foolhardy trying to protect your right to sell an individual media item when it doesn’t cost you anything to create that individual SKU beyond its initial production. And for the little guys who have very limited production costs, they look even more foolish trying to sell digital product for net gain! Why on Earth would you expect people to gullibly contribute to your net profits when they KNOW, right or wrong, how to reproduce it and that it doesn’t cost a dime to do so?
So, by now you’re asking: Well, how do I recapture my production costs, in the least? (more…)
“Free,” the latest book by Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail” and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, illustrates how the 21st century’s digital economy of ones and zeros is increasingly moving towards a pricing model where everything is (or should be), essentially, free (Anderson, 2009). Another way of putting it is thus: whereas the marginal cost of reproducing intangible digital goods made of bits instead of atoms is practically zero, whereas Moore’s law and other concepts dictate that the cost of processors, bandwidth, and storage are marching towards nil, and whereas less typical motives for doing business like gaining reputation and raising social capital are on the rise, the very notion that one should pay for digital goods and services is pretty much dead at the door. Anecdotally, for a US economy that is for all intents and purposes steeped in never-ending debt, built on the foundations of imaginary money no less, the irony is not lost upon myself that we really ought not to be paying for anything anyways! Nonetheless, money is scarce, but the resource of intellectual property is endless. “Free” addresses what to do about this, and how real money can be made by giving everything away.
This is my final project for Kraig Baker’s Digital Media Law & Policy course at the University of Washington Master of Communication in Digital Media program, Spring Quarter 2009.
Final Project Proposal for my Law Class in the MCDM
Topic: Stealing the stolen
Seemingly innumerable amounts of copyrighted materials are published and shared by millions on-line today. Much of these cultural artifacts are distributed by copyright owners through approved channels. However, a great deal of this IP is being distributed illegally, be it through file-sharing, torrents, mashups, remixes, piracy, or other means. Just as ‘return on investment’ is difficult to measure when copyright owners license or otherwise publish their content on-line, it is not unreasonable to assume that the lasting impact of user appropriation or piracy of material published is equally difficult to measure. Nevertheless, measuring this potential impact is critical to copyright owners; the subject itself is rife with problems, and finding solutions to this new world of stealing and appropriating IP is of major importance. The cultural production sector, as Benkler would call it in his seminal work, The Wealth of Networks, is a sector built on social production (2006). IP finds its way on-line, and thereafter is commoditized and commodified by the masses for their own social production. Once IP reaches the web, it is no longer controllable – it is stolen and re-stolen time and time again. This arena of lawlessness is where I wish to center my research.
The core role of the political public sphere is to provide a platform for converting privately developed observations, intuitions, and opinions into public opinions that can be brought to bear in the political system toward determining collective action.
The Internet is increasingly becoming that sphere’s platform. However, policymakers have tended to enact legislation which seeks to repress activity that great numbers of people within this sphere otherwise view as legitimate. This is generally perceived as reactive to these activities’ tendencies – they violate previous policy effected for traditional media. In a recent article published in the Times of London regarding online film piracy (piracy being one such example of a violating activity), Becky Hogge with the Open Rights Group observed:
When you have six million people breaking the law, it’s the law that needs changing, not the people.
How do we change policy to better support new public opinion while still protecting the privileges of those whose past rights are becoming violated, essentially, by new public opinion?
Hi, I'm Matthew Stringer and this is my blog. I'm an online producer, focusing on generating and curating video content. This blog is about (just insert buzz word here) media. Like, digital, social, Web, new, multi-, interactive, mass, convergent, emergent, ad nausea. Plus, occasional musings on old media - film, TV, print, news and pop culture.
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