The Music Revolution - Pandora & Glee

I recently began listening to Pandora, a website that is able to take your musical tastes and create customized (and free) streaming radio channels with other music that you might be interested in. As it plays music, you indicate whether you like or dislike songs, and the future selections (as well as the ads, no doubt) continue to become more refined and personalized based on these interests. I won't go into detail on the website, as it's better explained by its creator, Tim Westergren, in this Colbert Report interview:

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But, as many know, the internet lays all our secrets bare. It took virtually no time for Pandora to deduce my secret love of 80's rock ballads. Given my range of musical interests (some of which is visible on my Pandora profile), this is hardly surprising, but still, I would like to think that I'm a bit more complex than that. Sadly, it took the algorithm only a few hours of playing to bring up old middle school favorites like Firehouse, Trixter, and White Lion with their rockin' power cords.

In addition, I've always been a fan of showtunes. Sure enough, Pandora regularly brings up songs from the FOX television series Glee, of which I am a big fan. While I enjoy the music on the show, and it has propelled the popularity of the series, the fact is that I'm drawn even more to the great storytelling in the show, including one of the best television scenes ever.

Pandora is intriguing not only because it helps bring me music I enjoy, but because it has the potential to provide yet another means for the recording industry to make money in the digital age. I'm still waiting to see clear signs of better ways for the publishing industry to adapt to the digital age, and in fact science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer recently mused, in a keynote speech at the Canadian Book Summit, "Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?" And this is certainly not because Sawyer is a Luddite! He is savvy in his use of technology for promotional purposes, having run his author website for 15 years (longer than Amazon.com!) which includes free give-aways of his short fiction as promotional material. But the question is whether publishing, as a whole, will find a way to flourish.

These issues of copyright, propriety, and popular culture are complex and difficult, and Glee really lies at their intersection, as adeptly described by technology commentator, free speech advocate, and also science fiction author Cory Doctorow. The fact is that the current copyright laws related to music mean that the sorts of mash-ups regularly shown on Glee are, in fact, illegal were they performed without permission of the original creators (or whoever owns the rights to the music).

For now, of course, you can choose to listen to Glee songs on Pandora, or you can buy the MP3 files, or still the old fashion CDs (still my personal preference, since I like to hold things in my hands). For my part, though, I can't wait for season one to come out on DVD, so I can see the storyline and characters develop from beginning to end.

Glee Music CDs:

Glee: The Music, Volume 1 (MP3)

Glee: The Music, Volume 2 (MP3)

Glee: The Music, Volume 3 Showstoppers (MP3)

Glee: The Music - Journey to Regionals (MP3)

Glee: The Music - The Power of Madonna (MP3)

Glee DVD (coming Sept. 14, 2010):

The Nature of Property - Copyright #2:

Some months ago, I spoke about two books I read on copyright. The book Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin makes the strongly pro-copyright case andRemix by Lawrence Lessig makes the case in favor of loosening copyright laws. I intended to quickly get back to the topic of very different view of intellectual property presented by these two authors, but it took a bit longer than I anticipate. Still, better late than never, and it's given me the further chance to read Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, which adds further dimension to the discussion.

In the Helprin book, he makes a comparison to when he was a teenager and stole an ear of corn from a cornfield, because he was hungry. He was (rightly, as he says) harangued by the farmer for having stolen his ear of corn and the point is made that if everyone came along and took corn, the farmer would have none to sell and would go destitute.

The analogy is that many young people (and some older ones) today consider it perfectly fine to get music, videos, or even books online for free, often in ways that are not legitimately authorized by the creators of the content and from which they do not profit. When they argue that it's only a minor theft, he invokes his analogy with the ear of corn.

However, the fundamental problem with this is that it's a false analogy, and there are logical flaws on both the supply and demand side of the equation when equating it to modern publishing.

First, on the supply side:

The farmer clearly has a finite quantity of corn. The author, however, does not have any limit on how many times he can replicate his written work (especially in the digital age - obviously, logistical limitations exist on how many hardcopies can be printed). So for the analogy to work, we have to modify the situation so that the farmer has worked hard to create a field of corn, but that field now contains an infinite amount of corn. Taking a single ear of corn does not actually diminish the amount of corn remaining in the field to be potentially sold at some later date.

Next, on the demand side:

The farmer in the story invokes a "slippery slope" argument to condemn Helprin for the theft of the corn. If Helprin were the only person to ever take an ear of corn, there'd obviously be no problem. The concern is that other people will pick up on this trend and begin stealing as well, and the farmer will lose all his corn and be destitute.

However, the problem in both Helprin's argument and the farmer's is that they assume that this trend will continue ad nauseum, and in the case of online digital content it's clear that not everyone is going to just take. Some people are going to give back to the content creator, if the opportunity exists.

Put them both together...

Now, if you remove both of the logical flaws, then here' s the new correct analogy:

A farmer works hard to create a field which contains an infinite amount of corn, and he asks people to pay for the corn.

In this case, if someone comes along and takes an ear of corn, it's not nearly as clear that the farmer has lost anything of value, nor is it clear that the theft has left him any closer to bankruptcy than he was earlier. The guy probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway, he just would have kept on walking. You can feel moral outrage that the person didn't pay for the corn, but the farmer's future prospects are exactly the same as they were prior to the person taking the ear of corn.

The other side of the argument:

Obviously, though, if people are stealing his corn, then the farmer can begin implementing strategies to benefit from this theft. He can build a fence and walk the perimeter with a gun, but this might alienate some of the legitimate customers, who don't want a lot of hassle in accessing their corn.

So, we have to consider the analogy instead to be a case where the farmer puts up signs that say things like, "If you're going to take some corn, please donate what you can" or "Get free corn if you sign up for my monthly newsletter ALL ABOUT CORN!" Some people will take free corn, but his farm will be incredibly popular, and many of those people would (presumably) pay for the corn ... or he'd end up with a very large database of corn enthusiasts, which he could leverage to the authors of a corn recipe book or something.

The point of all of this is that the fact that the farmer's supply of corn is, once the initial work has been created, now infinite changes the dynamics of the situation. This isn't true of corn, but it is precisely true of written works.

Helprin is right that intellectual property is a form of property, but he is wrong in equating it precisely with physical property, because it doesn't have the same limiting features. He can argue all day about the importance of copyright (which is important), but he should do so with a full awareness that any argument which doesn't recognize the distinction will be dismissed entirely by the other side (rightly) as largely irrelevant to the case at hand.

Two Book Overviews - Copyright #1:

Recently, two books about intellectual property came to my attention. A while ago was Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig's book Remix (first learned about when Lessig appeared on The Colbert Report in January) and later (learned about on NPR) was novelist Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarians.

First, some background on the issue of copyright. Copyright is the legal protection, afforded by the government (and mentioned in the Constitution, though not by the name "copyright") that protects the intellectual property as the property of the creator for a set period of years. Until about 1909 (according to Lessig's book), the law didn't protect against making "copies" of work, but rather only protected against someone else stealing an author's work and claiming it as their own. In 1909, the law was changed to prevent "copying" intellectual property owned by another. Until 1976, you had to register a work with the government for it to be covered by copyright - but since then, the mere act of creating the work has instantly initiated copyright on the work, even if it never gets officially registered with the government. And, finally, in recent years the terms have been expanded - copyright currently extends 75 years after the creator's death for individuals (thus, in principle, earning their heirs royalties), and 95 years after the creator's death if the work is owned by a corporation (such as, say, Disney owns Mickey Mouse, and earning the corporations profits).

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy focuses on the modern issue of how copyright law criminalizes many actions commonly allowed with our modern technology: peer-2-peer file sharing, the ease of editing video & audio together, and so on. Any time a copy of a creative work is made digitally, copyright law is triggered. This is all the time for digital media, because everytime you view something on the computer it is copied between memory locations. This web page, for example, has been copied from the Blogger web server to the memory on your computer, to be interpreted into text by your web browser. If you listen to music on your computer, the MP3 file is copied from the memory location where it's stored into the active memory of Windows Media Player or iTunes. Copies happen all the time digitally, even if you aren't intending to make a distinct copy ... and copyright law doesn't inherently distinguish them.

The first example in the book is a woman who was forced to remove a video of her 18 month-old daughter from YouTube because a Prince song was playing in the background while she made the video, and she didn't have permission from Prince (or the record label) to distribute the song. Other examples include people making "mash-up" songs, which are made from fragments of other songs (owned by other artists) to create something new, or similar "mash-up" videos (which may use copyrighted music as a soundtrack). Our technology allows us to not only "consume" culture, but to take it and rework it, just as (and this is Lessig's example) people used to (prior to phonographs) not just listen to music, but rather to be active participants in music - what he calls Read/Write (RW) culture, instead of Read/Only (RO) culture, taking computer terminology and applying it to culture as a whole.

Lessig's point is that we should modify our existing laws to both support the original creators of music, film, written works, and so on, but also to decriminalize the "remixing" that takes place with our modern technology, and the RW culture that it allows. We should encourage an economy which merges "commercial economy" and the "sharing economy" into a single "hybrid economy," which uses aspects of both. (Think of Amazon.com, where a commercial site benefits greatly from the fact that many people, myself included, share what they think of books to add value to the experience for other users and in turn benefit from that shared experience.)

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto, on the other hand, is written with the specific goal of opposing the artistic culture that Lessig is emphasizing as important. To him, the RW culture is not something to be glorified, but instead a rabble of thieves, who seek to steal intellectual property and remove the role of the artist from society. While I'm supportive of the main thrust of Helprin's argument, he utterly fails to make a convincing argument, in part because he makes blanket statements that are nowhere near the truth. To someone who isn't aware of the actual copyright arguments, this book reads like a gross caricature.

Helprin's book came out of a New York Times op-ed piece where he suggested that the duration of copyright be extended for individual authors (it was extended as recently as 1998). And he got absolutely slammed for it, apparently, becoming the center of a massive firestorm of hate mail (some of which is quoted in his book, with the false impression that the hate mail is representative of the entire community of people who want to weaken copyright law). The book focuses on the idea that all of these people are, ultimately, thieves, pirates, and socialists.

Lessig's blog provides a comprehensive response to and critique of Helprin's book, covering most of the major factual flaws in detail, but I'll be focusing in subsequent articles on a couple of the issues in both books that were most evident to me as I was reading the two books:

1. The Nature of Property - Helprin equates intellectual property to physical property, but doesn't seem to satisfactorily address the idea that there are fundamental differences between the two. Also, back to the original Helprin claim - is there any useful purpose in a content creator caring what people use work for more than 75 years after their death? How does this sort of protection relate to other forms of property?
2. Does Size Matter? - Lessig's examples tend to be very popular forms of intellectual property - Harry Potter, Mickey Mouse, Prince's music, Lost, and so on - which could allow some free use of their intellectual property and still make a sizable profit. What about the "little guy" artist for whom there may legitimately be a cost in this new hybrid economy? Can writers, and other artists, make money in the hybrid economy, or will the professional artist (as Helprin suggests) become a thing of the past?

One final note: Lessig offers several of his earlier books for free through a Creative Commons license. If you're interested in learning more on these topics, I would suggest them as a good place to start.