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+Copy me: Technological change and the consumption of music
+=======================================================================
+
+### Nick White  
+### 2009
+
+> For those who worry about the cultural, economic and political power
+> of the global media companies, the dreamed-of revolution is at hand.
+> The industry may right now be making a joyful noise unto the Lord,
+> but it is we, not they, who are about to enter the promised land.
+> (Moglen 2001)
+
+Introduction
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Technological changes have political implications. Changing the way we
+interact with things encourages a reconsideration of the rules and
+institutions that have governed previous interactions with them.
+
+The current debate about copies of recorded music using the Internet
+is an excellent example of this, and by examining it one may better
+understand the relations between people and recorded music, and
+between listeners and the traditional publishers of music.
+
+While undoubtedly a great deal may be usefully said and examined in
+other technological changes in music recordings, I will here focus
+primarily on filesharing, as it is something I have been somewhat
+involved in myself, and hence I have significantly more knowledge
+'from the inside.'
+
+I will begin by discussing traditional definitions of 'commodity,'
+and then move on to a very brief overview of historical trends in
+copying and music recording. I will also touch upon the printing
+press in order to discuss the creation and rationale behind copyright
+laws, which form a major part the present filesharing debate. I will
+then go into greater depth into the current practises of people who
+share music on filesharing networks, and the response by the recording
+industry, before embarking on an analysis of the meaning and
+significance of some of these new practises and dialogues.
+
+It should be noted that I'm speaking primarily of England and the
+United States of America, and the situation will be somewhat different
+in other parts of the world.
+
+
+The Meaning of 'Commodity'
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The word 'commodity' has been used variously to talk about items of
+exchange. In the capitalist market a 'commodity' is defined as having
+several key features, from which are derived appropriate rules of
+trade.
+
+Commodities are also generally assumed to be rival and exclusive; that
+is in trading an item one loses access to it.
+
+The most important feature of a commodity is that it be comparable to
+another commodity, in order that their relative values may be judged
+so that one may establish an exchange value for the item. Indeed
+Kopytoff (1986) goes so far as to claim that wherever exchange
+technology is introduced which allows a greater range of things to be
+compared (such as for example money in newly colonised regions), more
+objects are commodified.
+
+Two commonly identified means of deciding on the relative value of a
+commodity are use value and exchange value. Use value is based upon
+the utility of the commodity, whereas exchange value is based upon
+the amount of labour that went in to creating it. (Sterne 2006: 830)
+Different systems of exchange weigh the relative merits of utility
+versus production labour to value commodities differently.
+
+Assigning value to works of art is of course a very difficult and
+personal task, revealing a great deal about the valuer as well as
+what is being valued. Several commentators have argued - Adorno and
+Horkheimer (1972) perhaps most strongly - that to assign an artwork
+an agreed-upon value in order to facilitate its exchange undermines
+both the personal and the transcendent nature of art, and inevitably
+devalues and debases it.
+
+
+The History of Recorded Music
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+While such concepts of commodity appear to map quite easily onto most
+physical objects, using such terms to talk about recordings of one
+sort or another is generally less straightforward.
+
+Indeed the technology of the printing press, by dramatically reducing
+the production cost of creating copies of written works, was an early
+example of the difficulty of reconciling ideas of commodity with the
+new properties of exchange enabled. To be more specific, by enabling
+near-perfect copies of a work to be made, the qualities of rivalness
+and exclusivity which were assumed of a commodity were altered. While
+the initial creation costs of a work remained high, the cost of
+subsequent copies dropped dramatically, making it economically
+feasible to make and sell copies of works in a far less centralised
+manner.
+
+In the free market the cost to produce something is the means of
+determining its exchange value, which becomes more problematic when
+means of mechanical reproduction become available. This is as the
+production cost differs very significantly between the item produced
+and its copy. Whereas the first work costs perhaps one year's salary
+for an author, plus the amount for the set up of the book in the
+press, plus the materials needed, plus the working of the press, a
+great many subsequent copies may be made for only the cost of
+additional materials and working the press again. The exchange-value
+of all subsequent copies is extremely low, but does not take into
+account the author's salary.
+
+Publishers chose to create a business model in which the initial
+production costs of a work could be compensated by subsequent
+printings, which would be priced a little over the exchange value
+which the free market would assign. However such a model was
+undermined if a competitor took a work which had already been
+paid-for and produced their own copies at a price closer to its
+exchange value. In order for publishers to ensure the feasibility of
+their business-model concepts of copyright were enshrined into law,
+removing the right of anybody but the author (or more typically a
+publisher designated by them) to print a given work.
+
+In so doing publishers legally repressed the new economic qualities
+printing presses bestowed on the written word - less exclusivity -
+and instead artificially mirrored the model of scarcity under which
+which the majority of the market operated.
+
+This way of business worked reasonably well, and when it became
+feasible to produce of mechanical reproductions of music, publishers
+adopted essentially the same model, using copyright laws to ensure a
+monopoly sufficient to pay back the initial creation costs.
+
+However this model was threatened somewhat by the introduction of new
+technologies which dramatically decreased the expense, size and
+difficulty of copying music to the point that many private individuals
+could do so themselves. Whereas previously making unauthorised copies
+had been limited to large operations, new technology now enabled a
+much larger group of people to copy and share recorded music,
+independent of any external organisation. While such home-copied music
+was generally of noticeably poorer quality than an officially
+sanctioned copy, widespread use made clear that for many the virtue of
+sharing music was worth some degradation in quality.
+
+Publishers were unsurprisingly hostile towards home copying of the
+work which they had released, invoking the fact that such activity was
+technically breaking copyright laws (though these laws had been
+drafted with rival businesses in mind), and arguing that home copying
+was causing a reduction in their sales of music which would result in
+a smaller number of musicians able to be supported by them.
+(Commentators such as Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) argue that a
+smaller pool of musicians would make no real difference to the quality
+of output from the publishers, as by their nature they homogenise and
+will only support acts which propound their world-view. See below.)
+Over time however the publishers found that there was no realistic way
+to stop home-copying, and resigned themselves to a position of quiet
+grumbling. People evidently still bought copies of music produced by
+publishers, due to factors such as increased sound quality and
+included cover artwork, and the belief that by doing so one was
+ensuring the continuance and success of the musician.
+
+With the new technologies of music compression, filesharing software
+and cheap internet access came a far more significant threat to the
+business model of music publishers.
+
+Computers on an electronically are primarily copying machines of
+anything digitisable - almost any task performed on a computer
+requires the copying of digital information across various parts of
+the computer. The measure of how quickly information can be copied
+between different parts is a significant measure of how fast a
+computer is said to be. And so it is when networking computers
+together, and as such a primary focus of network engineering is
+ensuring copying between computers is as fast and efficient as
+possible. Computer networks at their core are no more than
+geographically insensitive copying systems.
+
+By allowing anybody with an internet connection to share music with
+anyone else with an internet connection with no more effort than
+setting up a filesharing program, a global network of available music
+was created. Now anybody with internet access had free access to
+almost any piece of recorded music at near- or identical quality to
+the products of the publishers' copies. Moreover the process of
+acquiring music copies using internet filesharing was faster and more
+convenient than the traditional vehicles offered by publishers.
+
+The structure of the computer networks which make up the internet are
+by design decentralised and fault-tolerant, and as such top-down
+control or restriction of internet activities is very difficult. This
+is further compounded by its transnational nature, which renders
+national legislation on acceptable uses largely ineffective, as one
+may simply access the desired material on a computer in a country
+which has no such legal restrictions. Thus we get the well-known quote
+by John Gilmore: "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes
+around it." While early filesharing networks such as Napster were
+centralised and hence could be easily shut down by stopping a few
+computers, most are now designed to take advantage of the
+decentralised nature of the internet, and thus remain active
+regardless of the status of any particular computer in the network.
+
+
+Filesharing: Individuals
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The first point to note regarding the practises of individuals is the
+enormous popularity of filesharing as a means of acquiring recordings
+of music. Despite appeals and threats from music publishers the usage
+of filesharing networks is commonplace among those comfortable with
+technology. Included among these are many artists signed to record
+labels, though many others reject filesharing citing reliance on a
+business model which would be undermined by their doing so.
+
+The importance within filesharing networks of making newly downloaded
+music available for at least a few days is very frequently emphasised,
+though technically it's very rarely enforced (not least because it's
+very difficult technically to do - as the networks have been
+engineered from the ground-up to facilitate the free copying of data).
+The process of only keeping a downloaded file available until one's
+own download is complete and then immediately removing access to
+others is strongly frowned upon, and referred to as 'leeching'.
+
+Some commentators have suggested that such emphases can lead one to
+fruitfully consider treating filesharing as a gift economy (Barbrook
+1998), but as Zerva (2008: 16) points out, the typically very diffuse,
+vague and anonymous social connections between exchange partners
+renders such a frame of analysis inappropriate. 
+
+That copyright law is being broken is very widely known by
+participants, but evidently is not regarded as a valid reason to
+change their habits. Indeed many who are more deeply involved in the
+filesharing community have vocally opposed (with varying degrees of
+sophistication) current copyright regimes as inappropriate and
+inapplicable in the era of the internet.
+
+Probably the largest and best organised of such opposition groups call
+themselves the 'free culture' movement. Inspired heavily by the 'free
+software' movement before them, at the centre of their beliefs are
+that it is an ethical imperative to allow the sharing of digital work,
+and in many cases also explicitly allow others to use one's work in
+their own creations. This is accomplished through a series of
+copyright licences (this again is an innovation first used in the free
+software movement, by which one allows redistribution of a work
+providing certain conditions are met.), the most popular of which are
+produced by the Creative Commons foundation, and allow several choices
+as to how one's work may be used. Some of these licenses, referred to
+as 'share-alike' licenses by creative commons, and more broadly as
+'copyleft' licenses, actively encourage the sharing of a work, by
+allowing one to modify or incorporate the work into their own work
+however they choose, providing that the resultant work is also
+released under the same sharable license. This effectively turns
+copyright law on its head, and has hence been described as "a form of
+intellectual jujitsu." (Williams 2002)
+
+
+Filesharing: The Publishing Industry
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The response from the music publishers was unsurprisingly less
+enthusiastic. After cutting the head off Napster only to find a
+hundred new networks spring up, the publishers started an aggressive
+campaign to sell the idea that music recordings ought to be treated as
+any physical commodity, and moreover that copying a recording was no
+different to stealing from a shop. Indeed the rhetoric of 'stealing'
+and 'theft' was employed a great deal by the industry, in an attempt
+to ensure that any discussion of filesharing would be framed in terms
+implying that recordings were no different from physical items.
+
+When it became clear that a significant number of people were not
+swayed by their advertisements, and filesharing networks were
+technically nigh-impossible to dismantle, the Recording Industry
+Association of America (RIAA), soon followed by the British
+Phonographic Industry (BPI), started the highly controversial practise
+of suing individuals who made their copies available on filesharing
+networks for copyright infringement. With estimates of numbers of
+people sharing copyrighted material reaching the millions it was clear
+that the lawsuits were not intended to directly target each individual
+offender, but rather scare enough people into stopping to make the
+filesharing networks less attractive and useful. Indeed it appears
+that industry hoped that by targeting prolific 'seeders' (that is
+people who share a large amount of content) they would change the
+economic situation to one in which the best path for the individual
+(according to classical game-theory) would be to only download what
+they needed and share as little as possible, hence initiating the
+conditions for a tragedy of the commons type scenario. Thus far
+however such tactics have primarily served to provoke resentment
+towards the industry, thus for many adding the motivation of fighting
+a system seen as destructive.
+
+Industry groups have also lobbied for and won significantly more
+stringent copyright laws, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
+(DMCA) in the USA and the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) in
+the European Union. One of the major features of such laws is to make
+the breaking of copy-protection measures on digital copies illegal.
+Copy-protection is as mentioned above a very difficult thing to
+institute on computers, whose basic design is to copy data. As such
+the recording industry found that any copy protection scheme they
+added to their copies was quickly dismantled, so they turned instead
+to the courts in an attempt to dissuade people from breaking the
+protection measures. These too appear to have done little to stop the
+breaking of copy-protection, but have further incensed and solidified
+many against the recording industry and their lobbyists.
+
+In their public statements recording industry bodies have repeatedly
+appealed to the need to buy copies only from publishers, as otherwise
+musicians can not be paid. Leaving aside debates about the percentage
+of profits which major record publishers pass on to their musicians,
+in repeatedly justifying their position as enabling musicians to be
+paid they strongly implied that no other business model was possible.
+Therefore, the argument went, if one wanted a society with full-time
+musicians there was no choice but to treat recorded music as a
+commodity and reject filesharing.
+
+Such lack of imagination from the record publishers is not very
+surprising, as conservatism towards new technologies is entirely
+natural, and of course they have a great vested interest in the system
+as it existed before (Mokyr 2002: 220). However a large variety of
+alternative business models have been suggested by others which
+attempt to work with the new features of recorded music on the
+computer network, rather than against them, and as such become more
+profitable the more music is shared (at zero cost). Suggestions
+include various donation / microdonation schemes, embedded
+advertising, and using recordings as a loss-leader for live
+performances and merchandise.
+
+
+Analysis
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) argued that the 'culture industry'
+represented a major homogenising and pacifying force to culture, thus
+for the first time in history neutralising the power of art to
+"protest against the petrified relations under which people lived"
+(Adorno 1991: 2) and thus ensuring the continuance of the existing
+system of inequality. Moreover, they claimed, the power of the
+industry was inescapable, as it tended to subsume and pacify elements
+of protest and define the frame of cultural discussion, as well as by
+more direct means such as wielding massive top-down power over the
+processes of production and distribution.
+
+The argument follows that the primary role of the culture industry is
+to keep all members of society accepting of the political and economic
+systems of inequality - or at least too apathetic to do anything about
+them. Its role then was largely to facilitate the smooth running of
+other major areas of repression, with which its leaders are intimately
+connected (Adorno & Horkheimer 1972: 4).
+
+However if this were the case one would have expected the 'culture
+industry' to respond very positively to the phenomenon of filesharing,
+as it allowed for the far wider and easier dissemination of the
+normative ideologies embedded within their recordings. After all,
+while such technology makes it easy for any copy of music to be widely
+distributed regardless of source, in practise a significant majority
+of copies available were originally produced by the 'culture
+industry.' (Sterne 2006: 831)
+
+One must therefore conclude that while the wellbeing of the wider
+systems of power may well be an agenda of the culture industry, of
+higher priority is its own profitability.
+
+A point that should be emphasised is the political power which the
+music industry still wields. In being the source for the majority of
+music in a culture, with its inevitable ideological payload, the
+influence the industry has on the minds of listeners is still
+enormously significant, regardless of whether they continue to enjoy a
+monopoly over distribution.
+
+Kopytoff (1986) defines commodity in opposition to the singular.
+Copies of music on a filesharing network could then be considered
+perfect commodities. However using the calculation of exchange value
+based upon the level of sacrifice necessary to acquire a copy one sees
+the exchange value drop to zero, (Zerva 2008: 14) in which case copies
+could be considered to fall well outside of the realm of commodities,
+which at their core are tradeable.
+
+What such definitional confusion flags up is the inappropriateness of
+trying to fit music copying into categories of commodity, which were
+created for items with quite different economic properties. In
+particular, the meaning of exchange - of voluntarily losing access to
+one thing in order to gain access to another - is changed, as in the
+world of the computer network one need not lose access to anything in
+order to gain access to another.
+
+So if exchange value drops to zero for recorded music in the age of
+filesharing, how may one determine relative value? An easy answer is
+to turn instead to use value, that is the value derived by each
+individual of actually listening to the music recording. Obviously
+then values will differ for each listener, which is no problem as
+value-judgements are no longer necessary for successful exchange.
+
+One could then argue, as Sterne suggests (2006: 831), that music
+before recording technologies were available was valued according to
+the effect on an individual upon listening, that is to say on use
+value. As recorded music became easily available, tied up in physical
+items tied to the wider market, music was valued more in terms of
+exchange. And now as filesharing once more removes music from the
+realm of the market by virtue of changing the rules of its exchange,
+focus again is on use value. A somewhat analogous process is claimed
+by proponents of free software, where the process of decommoditisation
+is seen as "more about clearing away a temporary confusion, than it is
+about some strange and amazing departure that's suddenly occurred."
+(Moglen 2007)
+
+One should take care not to overstate the ephemeral nature of digital
+copies of recorded music. Sterne points to the continuance of
+collecting and stockpiling more music than one is able to listen to as
+evidence of a sense of ownership and possession of one's music files,
+in the same was that one does in the case of physical objects.
+(2006: 831-832)
+
+Determining the extent to which the new technology associated with
+filesharing is a factor behind new political ideas is of course
+impossible, but one may usefully discuss the political tendencies
+embedded in the technologies.
+
+Earlier distribution technologies had quite different qualities. For
+example the limited bandwidth available to over-the-air transmissions
+(e.g. radio and television) made the establishment of a governing body
+to decide who could broadcast on which frequency (if at all) quite
+necessary and natural. Decisions about how to make such choices often
+involved money, and as such large entrenched interests had another
+advantage over smaller organisations in doing business and spreading
+their particular viewpoints over the airwaves. The decentralisation
+and allowance for modular growth offered by the internet has
+significantly reduced the need for such a governing body. Of course
+many argue that stronger governance of the internet is important, the
+difference being that it is not necessary to the successful
+functioning of the network as a whole. Recent discussion of laws
+regarding 'network neutrality' however illustrate the limits of such a
+view, as most people connect to the internet via an internet service
+provider, who *could* artificially alter the operation of parts of the
+network to their customers.
+
+Central to general computing, compression technology and computer
+networking has long been the striving for faster copying of anything
+digital, utterly regardless of concepts such as property rights over
+certain digital data. As Sterne puts it "The primary, illegal uses of
+the mp3 are not aberrant uses or an error in the technology; they are
+its highest moral calling ... These are the instructions encoded into
+the very form of the mp3." (2006: 839) However one needs to be careful
+with such statements, as they tend to carry an air of technological
+determinism which denies individuals agency and ignores instances of
+difference.
+
+When disembodied from their physical forms and instead made to take
+digital forms, ideas of copyright and commodity have often been
+questioned. The first industry to be exposed to the power of computer
+networks as a distribution and indeed creation channel was computer
+programming, which was the sphere in which the radical take of
+copyright 'copyleft' (see above) was envisioned. The place of software
+was reconsidered and concluded not to lie in the commodity realm, but
+somewhere quite different: "The technological information about the
+terms on which we and the 'digital brains' exist: that's not a
+product. That's a culture." (Moglen 2007)
+
+In many quarters the same is now being said about music, and the place
+of the record publishing industry is being recast by those engaged in
+file-sharing, from the purveyors of culture to an entity which seeks
+to profit by restricting access to a shared culture.
+
+
+Works Cited
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+- Adorno, T (1991) 'Culture Industry Reconsidered' The Culture
+  Industry: selected essays on mass culture (Adorno, T), London: Routledge
+- Adorno, T & Horkheimer, M (1972) 'The Culture Industry:
+  enlightenment as mass deception' Dialectic of Enlightenment (ed.
+  Adorno, T & Horkheimer, M), New York: Continuum
+- Benjamin, W (1936) 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
+  Reproduction' Illuminations (Benjamin, W) London: Pimlico
+- Barbrook, R (1998) [The Hi-Tech Gift Economy](http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/631/552),
+  First Monday 3: 12
+- Kopytoff, I (1986) 'The Cultural Biography of Things:
+  Commoditization as Process' The Social Life of Things
+  (ed. Appadurai, A), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
+- Moglen, E (2001) [Liberation Musicology](http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010312/moglen),
+  The Nation: March 12
+- Moglen, E (2007) [How I discovered Free Software and met RMS](http://www.linux.com/feature/114303),
+  Linux.com interview
+- Mokyr, J (2002) The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the
+  Knowledge Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press
+- Sterne, J (2006) The mp3 as cultural artifact, New Media & Society,
+  California: Sage
+- Williams, S (2002) Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for
+  Free Software, California: O'Reilly Media
+- Zerva, K (2008) File-Sharing versus Gift-Giving: a Theoretical
+  Approach, Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Internet
+  and Web Applications and Services