The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [73]
The raiders of the Internet seem pretty sure of the power of their cause. Among the cognoscenti surveyed in December 2008 by the Pew Project on the Internet and American Life, fewer than one in three thought creators and their lawyers would find a legal way to reclaim control over their creations anytime soon. “Copying data is the natural state of computers,” said Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for civil liberties on the Internet. Giulio Prisco, a former scientist at CERN who founded Metafuturing Second Life, an Internet services company, added: “You cannot stop a tide with a spoon.”
Perhaps not. The media companies that rose in the twentieth century might be irrevocably doomed. Record labels might disappear. But I doubt that free information will ever be the natural state of affairs in a capitalist economy. In fact, I would wager that whatever the information economy looks like ten years from now, information in it will not be free.
The last battle over free might serve as an illustrative precedent. Music piracy didn’t exist until the late eighteenth century because property rights didn’t cover music compositions. Agents from opera companies would attend the opening nights of their rivals to “steal” the best melodies and reuse them in their own dramas. Only in the nineteenth century, when Romanticism propagated the idea of author as genius, did composers complain. Hector Berlioz called bootleggers thieves and assassins.
Technology changed the game. The popularity of the player piano in late-nineteenth-century Britain spawned the first recorded music industry for the masses, sheet music. By 1900 Britain had one piano for every ten Britons. Music publishers were minting money, selling sheets—known as dots—at one shilling and four pence apiece. Puccini and Handel were written for player piano, as well as more popular acts. Inevitably, the pirates came, using the new technique of photolithography to copy tunes flawlessly and sell them for only two pence.
Then, like now, much of public opinion sided with the pirates. The British Parliament passed the Musical Copyright Act of 1902, which allowed for the summary seizure of pirated music. Still, music publishers floundered, confiscating hundreds of thousands of pirate sheets only to see more appear on the market. But in December of that year the police caught the “king of the pirates,” James Frederick Willetts, who ran the People’s Musical Publishing Company.
Willetts made a strong defense of piracy in court. He argued that artists should not be given a free hold over their works because their talent was a God-given gift that should be used for the public benefit. He argued that piracy allowed the fruits of this talent to reach consumers who couldn’t afford the extortionate prices charged by the labels. But Willetts lost and was jailed. And the bootleggers were cowed out of existence. Information became expensive again.
Ultimately, information cannot be free. It only looks that way sometimes. The quote by Stewart Brand that became the slogan of online freedom fighters has a prelude that acknowledges that information also “wants to be expensive” because of its enormous value to recipients. This is a reasonable proposition. Still, it leaves no space for the producer of information. Information can’t exist without her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Price of Culture
DEMOCRACY SEEMS TO have taken over the world. By one account, at the end of the twentieth century 63 percent of the world’s population lived in democratic regimes, up from 12 percent at the end of the