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Thursday, February 7, 2008
Downloaders Rejoice: I'm leaving You Alone
Through the last couple months of university I have found that one of the staples of college life is downloading. Downloading music, episodes of missed tv shows, porn and movies. I have never been a fan of downloading. While i don't think it should be illegal, I have never thought it should be done to the extreme it seems to be. It just kind of always felt wrong to me. I have never downloaded porn, (though my neighbor does put it on my computer everytime I leave my room) I never downlaod an episode of a tv shows I missed ( though honestly, I have watched the ones my friends did download) Ok, I also download music, though not full albums, just songs. If I like an entire album, I will probably buy it. I like to support artists, (not the Britney's and Nickelbacks who have more money than talent) and enjoy owning cds. Thats not to say im not above burning my friends cds, hey, someone bought it. Actually, as Iwrite this I realize I have no problem with downloading little bits, like the odd song, or odd tv episode. But the one thing I never downloaded and have always been bothered by when other people do, are movies and full seasons of tv shows. The thing is, I couldn't really tell you why. Becuase I DO downoad bits of music, and I DO watch the odd downloaded show. I just don't think movies or series in their entierty should be put on someones computer with the click of a button, or two...i really don't know how its done. But today I had a change of heart. I was reading an article from my Communication and Democracy course pack today by Jonathan Lethem called, "The ecstacy of Influence:a plagerism" (defenitly find it and read it, its really good) and was convinced that I was wrong (and that is not easy for me to say). Movies are made to entertain, they can be peices of art, or peices of crap, but they are meant to be seen. I am sure you have all seen those commercials where they akin downoading to stealing a car. This is ridiculous, I ahve always thoght so. For one good reason I quote this article, "for a car or handbag, once stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the appropriation of an article" or in this case movie, "of 'intellectual property' leaves the original untouched." Downloading takes nothing away from the original, or from the people who made it. That being said, I still would never do it. For one thing, as I said earlier, I wouldn't know how...computers kinda scare me. More than that though, I appreciate too much the work that goes into a movie, or an hour drama. I appreciate how they're made and I want to be able to see every aspect of it. I want to have a clear picture on a big screen with crystal sound. I don't want to see a somewhat pixelized image with Japaneese subtitles on the bottom. But that's just me. I like the details and the technical aspects way to much. I like the experience, and watching a downloaded version hinders that experience for me. Even in the slightest way its just not worth it. But I am an odd individual. I love movies, they give me an escape, they give me inspiration and they just flat out entertain me. If you can do all this through your computer screen, then more power to ya. Doanloading expands an audiance, and as the article that started this all (in my own mind when I was trying to study) says, "the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in first palce: to make the world larger."
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4 comments:
Plagiarism and music stealing isn't new either...think of mix-tapes, vhs, all that stuff. So the digital era just speeds that up and makes the mass-distribution of it possible.
One could argue that it is destructive in the same way that the economy and mass-consumerism is destructive today. It's not an issue of ethics--the ethical problem existed when the management of it was personal, and therefore not worth addressing. In my environment class today, we talked about the ethics of man: are we bloodthirsty? Does our bloodthirstiness affect our treatment of the environment, and do we need to be more compassionate towards nature?
It's not about that. Native Americans, biologically, are just as bloodthirsty as we are. It's manifested in warfare, and hunting. Larger societies take these impulses and translate them to have the most "efficient" effect possible: WMDs, industrial farming, etc.
What are we talking about again? Oh right, its not about the ethics...its about the scale.
This is a great post on a stubborn debate, Kid. It's a moral quandary that affects us all (college life an' all) and not an easily solved one.
There are, as I see it, a few issues to the downloading thing. The first is the "can you really steal something that doesn't exist except as electricity" question; the second is the "would I have bought it if I hadn't downloaded it" question; and the third is the "yeah but what if everybody downloaded everything?" argument. Please indulge me a sec.
The first question--about whether "stealing" music or TV shows has any meaning at all, insofar as "stealing" is usually a zero-sum game (when I steal from you, I get a thing and you lose it) but downloading is, at least on the surface, a positive-sum game (when I download your song, I just make a copy of it and you still have it). In this sense, when compared to the theft of a handbag or a car (like on those dorky ads on DVDs: "YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A BICYCLE...."), downloading is obviously not stealing, and neither is any other IP violation. In a strict sense, it's just the dissemination of information; it isn't stealing for you to email me a copy of the latest Lost than any more than it's stealing for you to just tell me what happened. Anything that says otherwise is just moral scare tactics, building on the prohibitive power of the word "steal" (y'know, thou shalt not an' stuff). So I've never felt that the downloading is stealing argument, by itself, has any weight.
This brings me to the second essential question: would I have bought it anyway? Because if the answer is no, then you haven't harmed anyone. There is no way that either Universal or René Dif would have gotten a penny from me whether I downloaded Aqua's 1997 hit Aquarium or not--'cause I sure as hell wasn't gonna buy it. But it's on my computer now, and sometimes I listen to it because it's hilarious. The way I figure it, that doesn't harm anyone and is a totally (morally) permissible circumvention of IP law. On the other hand, if it turned out I had loved it and listened to it all the time, I would have (assuming I was moral and had more money) gone out and bought a copy. I do this all the time, because there is a certain pleasure in owning a CD and supporting an artist. So that's fine.
This obviously isn't the end of the story, though. Like any other IP, the copyright on music or TV or movies exists because without it, the people responsible for its creation--the artist, the manager, the producer, the record label, the sound guy, the janitor at the studio, and let's not even consider the HMV manger who bought X copies hoping to sell them--wouldn't have any guarantee that people would buy their work from them instead of someone else. Since that "someone else" has no production costs, he can obviously undersell the artist--or just give it away on Limewire out of the goodness of his heart. The result? Without copyright protection, there's no profit in the music (or TV or movie) business; without profit in the business, there's no business. (For an interesting application of IP and profitability to AIDS drugs, check out How Not to Win the Fight Against AIDS at american.com.) So that's a big deal. It's one thing for me to download albums I'll never listen to because René Dif is hysterical, but it's another thing altogether to download your favourite band's new album instead of buying it because you'd rather spend the money on cheeseburgers. If everyone did that--and if you believe the music industry, too many people do already--you'd have no reason to make money. (Kant was pretty big on this kind of ethical philosophy--what if everyone did what I'm about to do?) The same question applies to littering or something. Sure this one album isn't going to bring down a multibillion-dollar industry... but all of them will. In other words, shaky, it IS about the ethics, because ethics can't be divorced from scale.
Also: Nickelback is mad talented.
Also: how do you think artists and the businessmen who handle them feel about their obligation to "make the world larger"? Seems to me everybody should get to have their own "primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in first place," irrespective of what Mr Lethem (who, incidentally, is the author of Esquire magazine's book of the year for 1999) thinks it should have been. And if that's dolla dolla billz, then who are we to judge?
Back home, I had dial-up until I was about 16 or 17. Downloading a song took hours, sometimes days. Downloading a song was a commitment to the music, to the artist. I only ever did it when I thought I wanted to give the artist a little more thought before I shelled out my shekels for their cd.
This meant, to me, that downloading a song often led to the purchase of music.
Not even fathoming the downloading of entire movies, albums, or tv shows - let alone discographies and seasons 1-4 -, I couldn't understand the music industry's opposition to downloading.
Check out this blog.
It outlines a study released by the CRIA, summed up nicely by CBC's Marketplace:
* Downloading makes up for less than one-third of the music on downloaders' computers.'
* Downloaders often test run songs on P2P services before buying.
* The largest downloading demographic is also the largest music buying demographic.
* Dips in music sales have little to do with the availability of music on P2P services.
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