What do you think? Should the music industry forgive and forget, instead taking this opportunity to try to monetize the immense userbase of Limewire users?  Is it even possible to convert them to paying customers?  Or are Limewire users just going to move on to another service?  Seeing as how it takes years for the music industry to stop a service like Limewire, maybe another can hop in for a bit (maybe dupe a few users) and make a couple million $. Or, perhaps due to the precedence set by this case the next one will fall all that much faster.

It will definitely be interesting from here on out.

What I want to discuss here, however, is from one single paragraph of the book.  It’s found at the bottom of page 102 (of the hardcover) and is part of Chapter Two, “What Will Money Be?” in a section labeled, “Pick Your Poison.”  In it, Lanier says the following:

“It is a common assertion that if you copy a digital music file, you haven’t destroyed the original, so nothing was stolen.  The same thing could be said if you hacked into a bank and just added money to your online account. … The problem in each case is not that you stole from a specific person, but that you undermined the artificial scarcities that allow the economy to function.  In the same way, creative expression on the internet will benefit from a social contract that imposes a modest degree of artificial scarcity of information.”

The reason I’ve deemed this specific quote worthy of its own write-up is this: it’s one of the most eloquent and comprehensible explanations of why everything on the Internet should not be free.

When something is free ad infinitum, whether or not it is free by the decision of the owner or simply by those people who don’t care and take it for free by their own volition, it immediately reduces the item or idea’s value by no longer being scarce.  One of the basic tenets of economic theory, and why things have value, is that scarcity, combined with demand, can cause the value and price of an item to rise.  Therefore, by creating something that individuals want, but by enforcing scarcity (even artificially), one can create something that has value.

In Lanier’s example above, money that is simply added to a bank account through hacking the system does not actually take money from anyone.  Instead, it has added additional money to the pool of already existing money, thereby reducing the value of money in general. If people did this enough, it would cause inflation, causing society as a whole to suffer, and could even lead to economic collapse. Even when the money is transferred digitally between accounts and individuals, it is money that has appeared out of thin air, and no one actually loses this money. It never existed in the first place, and will continue to never exist so long as it continues to exist in an intangible, digital form. What happens instead is money, in general, loses value due to lower scarcity, causing everyone to lose some by making the money they already had worth less than it was worth before.

By trading music or other creative works online, even though a physical copy of the work is not actually taken, from anyone, the value of that work is reduced through every duplication.  Of course, one could choose to allow people to copy and share their works, should the creator have another goal in mind other than monetary gain – such as to spread knowledge or joy, to promote their work with the plans to later charge for it or a related product, or simply to build ego by knowing others are accessing their work (whether or not people actually read or listen to all the free stuff they download online, or if those downloads are just a padding of numbers through potential audience, is another topic altogether). But, in those instances, the creator is still in control of his or her own work and will hopefully be aware of how reduced scarcity will affect the perceived value of their work.

It’s in Lanier’s last sentence above that he speaks the most truth when he says, “creative expression on the internet will benefit from a social contract that imposes a modest degree of artificial scarcity on information.”  This, however, will only happen when people begin to agree once again that creative works and information have value in the first place. It will only happen when people grow to respect that value and the work creators and intellectuals put into making their works and thoughts worthwhile.

The news of this has been all over the web (WSJ has one of the best pieces of coverage), but I think Patrick Ross of the Copyright Alliance has one of the best responses to it on their blog.

I left my thoughts on the Copyright Alliance’s site, but thought it was worth sharing here as well. So, consider this my official response to the news.

“This is one of the best pieces of news I’ve seen reported in a long time. It’s about time this happened. I remember a few years ago, I was talking to some people I knew and found out that they don’t ever buy music – instead they only download from Limewire (or did at the time). The thing is, when I told them that what they were doing was illegal, they had no idea. Their response was “but I bought some pro version and a plan.” It was only after explaining to them that it still was unlicensed and nothing went to any of the artists or creators that they saw just how misled they had been.

Limewire’s entire business plan was built around the theft of copyrighted materials, and as you said, they were just fine with that. It’s good to see that the Judicial System has stepped up and given them the smack they so deserve.”

It’s about time.

Since my new book focuses quite a bit on the plight of musicians and songwriters, I thought it would only be fitting to try to help out by giving 20% of all sales of Starving the Artist throughout the month of May to Tennessee Flood Relief. So, not only will $2 of every paperback sold and $1 of every Kindle download sold go toward helping this treasure trove of our heartland, but by reading the book hopefully respect of the value of what this community of songwriters and musicians creates for us will grow as well – helping them to flourish in the aftermath through their hard work and creativity.

Of course, if you’d like to donate directly you can do so as well. Donate to the American Red Cross online here, or text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation.

Again, $2 of every paperback and $1 of every Kindle edition sold throughout the month of May will be donated to the American Red Cross for Tennessee Flood Relief.

Get the Paperback

Download it on Kindle

The full title of the book is Starving the Artist: How the Internet Culture of “Free” Threatens to Exterminate the Creative Class and What Can Be Done to Save It.  It’s not a book about copyright law or an argument that “free is evil” – instead it’s a discussion of our current state of how we value other people’s work and creations, and how it should not be up to us as consumers to decide whether or not we want to pay what the creator is asking (if they are asking for anything at all). In some ways it’s a response to Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price and tangential to Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur.

With the massive amount of creations available to us through the new distribution channel of the Internet, as well as the greatly reduced costs of creation, we are at a point where we can very easily find enough media to fill our time, made available free of charge by their creators.  The fact remains, however, that many creators would like to be compensated for their work – whether monetarily or in other ways.  But above all, creators deserve our respect for what they’ve done. If you want something, but aren’t willing to pay for it (in whatever manner and at whatever price it is offered), then there are plenty of other alternative options instead of that specific product.

The fact that a creator has made something that you want means it has value to you.  Otherwise you wouldn’t want it.  To take something that’s not yours, without permission, however, is stealing – and is a blatant act of self-serving narcissism in which the one taking feels they are entitled to something that they, in fact, are not. If one wants to steal, that is up to that individual – but in my moral framework, stealing is wrong …

Here’s the full description of the book:

For a lot of people, creation is their livelihood. For others, it’s where their livelihood ought to be. As Richard Florida wrote in his 2004 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, “Stimulating and glamorous as it may sometimes be, creativity is in fact work…The creative ethos is built on discipline and focus, sweat and blood.” All music, art, movies, writings and games were brought into being by their creators – and for these creators to have created them, there was some underlying motivation to do so. Without their creators and their motivations, creative works simply would not be.

Why then, in today’s Internet culture, is all creative work expected to be free?
Why is it that some individuals feel it is their right to take things that do not belong to them, without receiving any permission to do so?
Why, in the Internet culture of “free,” are those creations we enjoy and value most the ones that we are most likely to simply take?

This is not a book about copyright, nor is it a book about the evils of free.

This is a book about right and wrong.
This is a book about respect.
This is a book about the value of creative work.

This is a book for the creators. May you keep on creating.

If you’d like to read more on this topic, I’d love it if you picked up a copy of my book or read it on Kindle.

They weren’t.

In most articles you’ll read online, the act of downloading is the focus, like this one over at Gizmodo.  I understand that a lot of people online like to steal music, and that they’re upset that some people got in trouble for it – but the fact is, they’re wrong about what the people got in trouble for.  The people (Tennenbaum and Thomas-Rasset) got in trouble for downloading and distributing music.  They were found to do so willingly, and while knowing that to do so was illegal.

In fact, Tennenbaum continued to download and share music after he was contacted by the RIAA, after his father told him he should stop, and even after the lawsuit was filed.  Regardless of how long he did it though, he was found guilty of knowingly distributing other peoples’ property without a license and without compsensation.

I really don’t have too much more to say on the subject at this point, other than that they were not fined $675,000 (Tennenbaum) and $1.92 million (Thomas-Rassett) for just downloading music.  They were actively engaged in the distribution of copyright-protected materials to potentially millions of other people.

Neither of these was a case of “a fan who just wanted to listen to their favorite music” – they were cases where people took stuff that wasn’t theirs, gave it away to more people, and then ignored opportunities to settle out of court for minute amounts of money, all because they somehow felt it was their right to take things that didn’t belong to them and to make copies for everyone else.