What’s so different about Music and Film
February 4th, 2003Patrick Murphy recalls some lessons in economics:
Classic public goods display two characteristics:
1) Inexhaustible – Non-rival in consumption; i.e. my consumption doesn’t reduce others’ consumption.
2) Non-excludable – Difficult (costly) or impossible to exclude non-payers from consuming.
This definition has not been applicable to intellectual property — until recently.
He offers “Light from a Lighthouse” as an analog to the difficulty that copyright holders have in controlling the use of their works.
Light from a lighthouse, though, is received passively. It does not require an act of “taking”. Downloading files requires action on the part of the recipient. It requires intent. Once the lighthouse is turned off, you can’t go home and light up your back yard with it at your own leisure.
It’s not as though the copyright owner wants you not to have her work. It’s on the radio for all to hear. It’s played in concert. It’s in a movie. She released it for the express purpose of having as many people as possible hear it as often as possible.
Not all publishing industries are facing the same challenges – or at least their reactions are different.
Why is it that art and photography, while just as copyable and distributable as music, doesn’t have the same problems? Why is there not a print publishing industry wooing and pressuring congress to outlaw high speed quality laser and inkjet printers and to require printers to report our social security numbers back to them before printing each page? Why is the industry association not urging universities to storm dorm rooms looking on hard drives for scanned pages of textbooks? Why is nobody trying to fill the “personal darkroom” analog hole and call for a levy on all paper and ink to compensate authors for the piracy of their works?
Let’s all analyse this deeper and try to understand what it is about the music and film industries that makes them different.
Is it that the other media are harder or more expensive to replicate faithfully but that technology has evolved to Music and Film’s detriment? What’s next on the technology timeline? When holographic concerts become widely available, live performance won’t even be exclusive. What can we look back at that was once easy to control but now is so freely usable without permission that the industries surrounding it have crumbled?
No answers today, just more questions.
Actually, suits from media corps have forced copy shops to be a lot finickier about evidence that the copier has a right to stuff they want to copy, if it looks like something they didn’t create. There aren’t many pushes to mess with printers and scanners on the individual level mostly because they’re grossly inefficient – slow, noisy, the whole deal. But folks like Kinko’s and Lazerquick get all kinds of hassles.
It’s not as though the copyright owner wants you not to have her work. It’s on the radio for all to hear. It’s played in concert. It’s in a movie. She released it for the express purpose of having as many people as possible hear it as often as possible.