The lessons of The Pirate Bay for the RIAA
There’s a great way for the Obama administration to save money and help the music industry finally evolve.
Recently a fifth RIAA lawyer was added to the U.S Justice Department despite the objections of public interest groups, trade pacts and library coalitions.
This would be the RIAA celebrating the fact a federal appeals court has barred a live webcast of the ongoing Joel Tenenbaum trial in a victory for repressing information. After all, if you’ve sued 30,000 people without managing to make the slightest dent in society, then you might be a little embarrased by the public seeing your claims in court.
So here’s the money-saving, music industry-saving answer:
Stop hiring lawyers, and instead start hiring prominent P2P users to implement solutions based on common sense rather than legality and protectionism.
Sounds like madness?
Since the four defendants were found guilty in the The Pirate Bay trial, membership of Sweden’s Pirate Party has shot up – including 3000 new members in the first few hours after the decision.
Over 100,000 people have already signed up, pre-launch, for IPredator, the Pirate Bay’s new service to hide IP addresses from authorities, with the Pirate Bay not logging any data to avoid having anything to turn over to authorities.
A new study from Norway has shown illegal file sharers are more likely to buy music from legitimate sources than other web users.
Not only that, but the illegal file sharers buy 10 times more music than other web users, using iTunes and Amazon.
And this echoes a study by the Canadian Record Industry Association in 2006, with three out of four file sharers buying tracks they’d previously downloaded illegally.
Quoting selectively from Umair Haque on his Harvard Business School blog:
‘No business has a right to profit, sell, or even to produce. All are privileges that society grants businesses.’
‘every time the music industry kills an underground distribution channel, a more efficient one arises in its place. Goodbye mixtapes, hello www. Bye www, hello Napster. Bye Napster, hi BitTorrent. Bye BitTorrent, hi anonymous, ciphered, totally decentralized p2p nets.’
‘Why? By limiting the supply of interaction, the music industry is only ensuring that each interaction becomes more and more efficient. The endgame is a distribution system where every song in the world in the world can be zapped invisibly and anonymously from me to you in a nanosecond.
The point? 21st century economics are radically decentralized. Wars against networks are unwinnable — when orthodox organizations are the ones fighting them. Only networks (or markets and communities, if you’re a long-time reader) can fight other networks.
Want a better music/media/etc. “business model”? The understanding that hierarchies are dominated by networks is the key — and the failure to understand it is exactly why the media industry is so deeply in decay.’
We believe
1. Music will always continue, but the parasitical 20th Century music industry is dead.
2. Music does not rely on technology or distribution. It simply requires people. It did not begin with vinyl, the CD, the electric guitar or the synthesizer.
3. If piracy is able to damage your ivory castles, you should seek to understand it and learn from it. Piracy is the most effective distribution.
4. You will never win the war on privacy, because the pirates have a belief, and you are protecting a business.
5. People will only pay for what they want to pay for. Get used to it.
6. Artists and fanatics run the show – if you are in neither camp you’re fucked.
7. DRM’s only function is to limit the spread of music and to irritate the very people you should be pleasing – your audience.
8. I’ve paid for the tape, the vinyl, the CD and the MP3 – if I ever pay again, I’ll pay for the rights to the content in whatever format is appropriate for the rest of my lifetime, not for something limited to one format.
9. Let’s face it..artists can make more money if middle-men are not involved
10. Look – we all know you’re pissed about you’re expense bill no longer being approved but please stop taking it out on the rest of us
11. The people of the world want to share what they love. If you stand in the way there is only one outcome. Rebellion
12. People embrace what they create. We all want to take part. It’s no longer your industry, its ours. Sure that hurts…
13. Just become a concert promoter. Live music will never end. Rip-off, insular and selfish business models already have. Sorry
14. People will pay for what they want to. If you create something of value to people, people will pay for it
15. People will not longer automatically pay for something that YOU think is valuable
16. Resistance is futile. However powerful your connections are, the people of the world will find a way around it
17. Every time you sue, you nail an even heavier nail in your OWN coffin. Think about it…
18. The people of the world love music as much as they always have – not less – its just they have seen behind the curtain now
19. Artists love fans and will get paid by them for products and services the fans adore. Get out the way and let it happen
20. Copyright is a byproduct of the business model for content creation and distribution. It’s not the reason for content creation
21. The case studies of artists making more money from not using your regime will never stop – only increase. Listen up
22. It makes no difference how connected you are to the government. Artists and fans out-number you and always will
23. All the time you spend wining about protecting music you could spend working out ways to help the new world mature
24. If you really wanna get rich, concentrate on facilitating fanatical advocacy. There is no ceiling of value to that
25. People can only truly be of financial benefit to you if they are free. Confined humans have no long-term monetary benefit