Harry Reid Wants You to Buy Your Music
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants to deputize the nation’s colleges to fight illegal file sharing on campus.
It’s hard to avoid being cynical about this. The Democratic Party gets a lot of love from Hollywood, which is increasingly panicked about the alleged threat to its business model from peer-to-peer networks. Since college networks see a ton of P2P traffic, they’ve recently landed in the crosshairs of MPAA/RIAA’s increasingly aggressive enforcement efforts. Harry Reid looks an awful lot like the industry’s enforcer.
Here’s what I’ve always struggled with on the file sharing issue:
This is a classic case in which the interests of emerging and established artists diverge. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex issue, the artists hurt by illegal file sharing are those in the top 0.01% who sell millions of albums and/or DVDs. Almost everyone else stands to benefit from increased exposure to their work, which helps sell concert tickets and build an audience base.
The trite answer to this problem is to support legal, opt-in networks which only allow sharing of works authorized by their copyright owners. However, the very existence and efficacy of file sharing networks depends on participation (whether voluntary or involuntary) by those few extraordinarily popular artists who can draw a large enough user base to make the P2P concept work. Somewhat counter intuitively, if no one’s looking for Britney Spears or Metallica, no one’s going to find your brilliant but unknown avant garde fusion work. Heck, you don’t even have to be a complete unknown to want your stuff on P2P networks. Band-facilitated sharing of bootlegs was a driving force behind Phish’s growth, and they continued to permit it long after they became an A-list act.
I suppose it might be possible to create specialized networks that permit aficionados of particular artists or genres to share authorized works with other fans. You could even be all Web 2.0ish about it and try for a user-driven-community-wisdom-of-the-crowds model. To make it work, you’d have to build a mechanism for contributors of recordings to gain social capital for the quality and quantity of their contributions. You’d also have to convince the non-artist copyright holders (e.g. record labels) to participate, which might be the hardest part.
Any way you look at it, this issue’s got to be resolved sooner or later. P2P networks aren’t going away. Heavy handed enforcement efforts like Harry Reid’s have been laughably ineffective and have actually spurred the invention of more resilient P2P technologies like bit torrent and enforcement-resistant havens like The Pirate Bay. The biggest question in my mind is how much longer the music and movie industries will persist with their current (crazy, suicidal) strategy of suing their own customers before they get creative and figure out a way to make P2P work to everyone’s advantage.