Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying The Culture Business, And How The Culture Business Can Fight Back by Robert Levine
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I really tried. I really tried to give this book a fair shake, to read it with an open mind and to try to understand the author's perspective. I read the whole thing in order to be able to review it completely and not just form an opinion on the first two or three chapters.
This book is beyond awful. The writing is terrible. It might as well be a summary (maybe concatenation) of file sharing, media technology, and copyright writing from 1999 - 2010, annotated with snarky (and unsubstantiated) comments about how duplicitous and self serving American technology companies are. The author also trips one of my personal writing pet peeves in his prodigious use of decimated to mean "reduced by a large percentage" as opposed to "reduced by 10%". I am aware that the dictionary agrees with him, but I am still going to mock him for saying that a particular newspaper reduced its staff from 190 to 170 and then several pages later saying that that same newspaper would have better luck competing with the rest of the internet because it "hasn't been decimated by layoffs, as so many others have been. (33% in according to my kindle)"
Frankly this book isn't even about piracy. It's about tech companies whose product is the internet, or things on the internet, or devices which access the internet and who want these things to be available as cheaply as possible (to maximize their profits). And it's about the media companies who want to sell things as expensively as possible (to maximize their profits). That sounds less like "how digital parasites are destroying the culture business" and more like.....basic economics.
The problem is that it's kind of hard to make an argument in favor of the companies that are trying to charge the consumer more. And it's even harder to make this argument when you're forced to admit, every time you quote a statistic on how bad piracy is, that that statistic was probably exaggerated and that really no one has any idea what the economic cost is of piracy (or cheap kindle books, or boxes that have audacity to try to connect your TV to the internet).
Let's look at a specific example.
According to the author, newspapers are dying because tech companies (those evil, evil tech companies) pressured newspapers to put all of their content online, and then news aggregators run by the tech companies (t.e.e.t.c's) stole all the web traffic. Well, maybe. Or maybe newspapers are dying because people would rather get their news from a talking head on the t.v. Maybe newspapers are dying because people get their classified ads for free on craigslist. Maybe because those evil tech companies can report sports scores more conveniently than a daily paper. Maybe because last time I checked there were 1.142857 good syndicated cartoons (Pearls Before Swine and Foxtrot on Sundays) and quite a few truly outstanding webcomics available, sorry Robert Levine, for free online using alternative business models. So yeah, I'll concede the point that the internet is killing some previously healthy businesses. But I don't think we have enough data to conclude that it's because of piracy (or even has anything to do with copyrights*...)
There are about 8 stories like this, one or two for each industry: music, movies, books, television, newspapers. Each has some adorable nuances. For example, this is the first time I've ever heard someone argue that the DMCA was a reasonable let alone overly permissive piece of legislation! And even as I read these stories, (the source articles for which I had mostly already read, such is the value of the internet!) I was genuinely curious about the second half of the subtitle.
So how *can* the culture businesses can fight back? Well, Levine offers two suggestions:
1) Blanket licensing for content. Ok, I actually think this is very reasonable assuming it's reasonably priced and provides the same conveniences that file sharing does (i.e. unlimited downloads, playability across devices, etc.) Of course, his only example where this has been successfully done is an Irish ISP who created some sort of hybrid between Spotify and emusic (back when emusic was cool...) Somehow I don't think that's going to help.
and, wait for it,
2) Do nothing. Now that so many people are paying for broadband, it's in the ISPs best interest to stop people from donwloading so much and so those companies will naturally start to try to curb piracy.
I don't buy any of it**. Jonathon Coulton had a wonderful post-Megaupload, post-SOPA-protest*** blog post about stuff like this: you can read the whole thing here,
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/, but here's what I took away from it.
People have been making music for a lot longer than people have been making money for making music, and if the record labels all fold because of piracy, or because of bad PR (more likely in my opinion) people are still going to make music.
Maybe the author is right and the internet will kill the culture business, but it's certainly not going to kill culture****.
And maybe all it will mean is that culture will get cheaper. In all of his hand wringing about the fate of the music, movie, newspaper, and television industries, the author doesn't even acknowledge that by making culture cheaper, people who maybe couldn't afford it otherwise will be enriched by it. I am inclined to believe this will have a more profound effect on the future of "the culture business" than the bottom line for the mega-corporations and media conglomerates.
* This book would have been infinitely better, maybe even good, if it had taken the Freakonomics approach of gathering data, testing some hypotheses and then presenting the results of the analysis. Of course, since there's no data to support the assertion that piracy is bad, it also would have been infinitely shorter... (See Tim O'Reilly's (in my opinion excellent) posts on the subject. https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/BEDukdz2B1r and https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/5Xd3VjFR8gx. Hey look! I can regurgitate opinions as fact and provide citations, too! I should write a book!)
** I shudder to think what this book would have been like if it had been written post-SOPA blackout.
*** I also didn't buy this book. I didn't pirate it either, although that would have been funny. I checked a digital copy out of my local library and read it on my kindle. The author conveniently neglects to note that people have been getting free media from libraries for hundreds of years.
**** In one interview, someone claims that the protection of copyrights is a national security issue because of how effective movies and music are at spreading and promoting American culture and values. Um, wait a minute, if that's the case then shouldn't we encourage foreign piracy in order to influence more people?
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