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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