Freeloading
Ruen comes to this subject matter as a fan of indie rock who downloaded lots of music from file-sharing sites, then came to see the effect of illegal file-sharing on the livelihoods of his favorite artists and saw the error of his ways.
The most valuable part of Freeloading
The arguments that Ruen makes for stopping infringement are mostly moral ones. As his ultimate authority for the value of copyright, he points to Article 27 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document written in 1948, which says: “Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.”
Of the several angles available for analyzing the problem of copyright infringement, the moral angle is a limited one. It boils down to this: if we just educate people about copyright and appeal to their sense of ethics, they will tend to do the right thing. But there’s more to it than that. As Larry Lessig has explained, there are four factors that govern cyberspace: the market (economics), architecture (technology), people’s behaviors (norms), and laws (self-explanatory).
Moral arguments attempt to influence behavioral norms without taking the other three elements into account. Such arguments have had limited effect over the years; they have even been objects of ridicule (such as BPI’s “Home Taping Is Killing Music” campaign in the UK in the 1980s). They are also easily dismissed, by saying that they come from exploitative media companies, rich celebrities, or disgruntled unknowns who probably don’t deserve to make a living because their content isn’t any good.
Ruen’s aggregation of critically respected indie musicians is a decent stab at bridging this credibility gap, but it’s not clear how much good it will do. For one thing, if it gets picked up by the RIAA, a major label, or a rock star, its impact will be blunted. Morover, taken to its logical conclusion, this argument would relegate indie content to the NPR-pledge-drive status of classical music and jazz, where supporting it is a matter of volunteerism and philanthropy rather than capitalism.
It doesn’t look like Ruen has been around long enough to understand that these moral/ethical arguments don’t work. Indie-rock icon David Lowery pursues the same general theme in his blog The Trichordist (“Artists for an Ethical and Sustainable Internet”). Yet he does so in full knowledge of the other factors, because he knows he doesn’t have the wherewithal to pursue changes in the law or launch new business models with major label support. The tactics to limit commercial piracy that he advocates are eminently pragmatic, not theoretical.
Ruen does try to marshal legal arguments, but his shallow understanding of the law — and even shallower understanding of relevant digital technologies — don’t help. In general, this book feels like the equivalent of a show by a college radio DJ who recently worked his way through various indie bands to discover the Velvet Underground, and is eagerly sharing his finding with the fervor of the newly converted. There’s a chance that you might really like it, but if you’ve heard the “revelation” before, maybe not so much. The sentiment and passion in Freeloading are right, but the authority and depth of analysis just aren’t there compared to Lanier or Levine.
Ruen ends the book by offering a manifesto of principles about copyright, which he calls “FairLoading.” These include the right of content creators to distribute their works as they choose, prohibiting anyone from “knowingly exploit[ing] a creator’s unlicensed creative works for pleasure or profit,” and intellectual property trumping free speech rights. They also include 50/50 royalty splits between musicians and record labels, and reducing the term of copyright to 50 years. The force of these recommendations is undermined by the fact that they’re offered in a vacuum, without reference to any laws or conventions that they might replace.
At the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit in Washington last month, Ruen echoed previous comments by Robert Levine that copyright is too long and broad but not enforced. It’s too bad that Ruen did not explore this theme in his book. If we (as a society) want to make real progress against infringement, we have to get serious about enforcement. Even Lanier and Levine stop short of offering specifics about this. That’s not surprising, because it will lead to uncomfortable discussions about technology and freedom online. People like Chris Ruen, if they really want to help, need to both educate themselves about these issues and gather up the courage for such discussions. Appealing to ethics and morals has been proven not to go far enough.
P.S. the publisher of Freeloading, OR Books, features an endorsement on its website by the copyleft ideologue Cory Doctorow. I wonder what he thinks of this book…
Copyright and Technology 
“get serious about enforcement”
I’m not sure about that.
Its like saying, if they got serious about enforcing drug laws we wouldn’t have any more people using illegal drugs… A theory long proven incorrect.
And if one holds the same candle to media downloads..
The morel delema, even tho proven to have little effect… As much as it does work, may be as good as it gets…
Currently I cannot really see much more then the “Busking in the street” model as the only real fool proof model. Ie, if you can convince people to give you enough money to life while making your art. That is about the only real model you can take to the bank.
Realistically, its is simply impossible to stop file sharing. If they did go hard on it, the share technology would simply go completely encrypted, and you would have no way to proof what was shared. And I cannot see law enforcement breaking in to see what people are downloading as they “look like” they are downloading illegal content. etc.
The technology can always route around anything law enforcement can come up with.
The more technical competent people I know actually do think the moral imperative is one of the stronger cards.
James
No. It is not like saying “if they got serious about enforcing drug laws we wouldn’t have any more people using illegal drugs.” “They” are already “serious” about enforcing drug laws, way more than “they” are about copyright. Of course people still use illegal drugs, and of course any copyright enforcement mechanism will have workarounds. That is not, was not, and will never be the point.
Rather than debate which methods we know about will have have what effect and how they can be circumvented, we need R&D on enforcement methods. The conversation taking place now is like what a conversation might have been in, say, 2005 about the effects of social networks on privacy: that is, totally theoretical and without any experimentation or real-world experience, and totally worthless once sites like Facebook actually launch.
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Thanks for this review, Bill. Although I have not yet finished reading Ruen’s book, I’m curious whether or not you think there is value in trying to change the dialogue in the general public. I think we’re still at a point when enough people might be made aware of these issues that “moral” arguments, if we think of this as a shorthand term, might still play a role. In other words, might the conversation change from what is morally wrong with file sharing to one about why mitigating it is in fact for the greater good? Like environmentalism, when the discussion changes to one of collective stewardship of a thing worth preserving, the antagonism subsides and solutions emerge.
David,
Thanks for the very interesting comment and question.
Sure, of course I think there’s value in trying to change the dialog. But first I will repeat that it’s been tried, at least ever since they made it the plot of a sitcom episode back in the late 70s,* and has never worked.
The greens analogy came up in a recent article about net activism in The Economist. Here’s why it doesn’t hold up here.
Imagine that there are a few powerful corporate organizations which constantly give out messages like “don’t pollute,” “save the environment,” etc., and have enacted stiff penalties for polluting and other environmental crimes. However, these organizations have gained a longstanding reputation for exploitative, greedy, money-above-everything-else tactics, and thus have lost all of their credibility with the public. As a result, everyone associates those messages with the corporate behemoths and pays them no attention, and even uses their alleged evil-ness to rationalize their polluting, environment-destroying behavior.
Here, those evil organizations are the RIAA and MPAA. End of story.
When artists like David Lowery and yourself (and writers like Chris Ruen) put out the messages that you do, they have credibility only up to the point that they concern indie artists. Look what happened to Metallica, Lily Allen, Don Henley, etc. No credibility. If you’re famous enough not to be an indie artist anymore, then no one’s heart bleeds if your copyrights are infringed, because you’re considered part of the big media machine. You’ve sold out.
It seems to me that what we really want here is for the conversation to be about culture rather than (or at least to a greater degree than) about business. To a big media company, what’s worth protecting is only considered “culture” a small percent of the time. To Google, and I quote Derek Slater of their DC lobbying office, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” meaning that all content on YouTube, including stupid cat videos, is equally important (and therefore none is really important). Neither of these answers is satisfying. It would help if we had some kind of entity or force that trumps that of both major media companies and Google. Other countries besides the US have something that approximates this; it’s called a culture ministry.
*”What’s Happening!!”, Season 2, Episode 38, in which Rerun gets caught making a bootleg tape of a Doobie Brothers concert. The Doobies appear as themselves.
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