Month: February 2007

This may sound a little strange but… the simplest, most telling fact about the piracy issue is this: there is no reason why content providers have to issue their “valuable” content on CDs or DVDs. They have always been absolutely free to issue their content on any proprietary media that would prevent their valuable content from being copied.

A proprietary format would simply require a patented algorithm to implement encryption and a hardware device to unencrypt it and play the media.  Simple solution.  It is remarkably easily technically feasible.

But they didn’t. Why not? Because they knew the consumer would never buy it in large enough numbers to guarantee big, fat profits. And they knew that smaller, independent record labels and unsigned artists would be more than happy to issue their stuff on CDs and DVDs and they wouldn’t be able to skim off their customary share of the profits.

[2011-07: this is a profoundly important fact that cannot be underestimated: the media companies have always been free to issue their products on any format they wish to, including formats that have built in protections against copying and piracy. They are under no obligation to issue their products on DVD’s or CD’s. None at all! If they do not like the physical characteristics of these mediums, they should go elsewhere.]

Instead, what they are trying to do, is hijack the mediums.

If you were a smart person and you worked at the highest levels of a corporation in the music or film industry and you understood something about what was coming down the pipe in terms of the internet and user empowerment, and you cared deeply about preserving your own profitability… and you were somewhat ruthless… you would do what the industry has done.

For you would have realized that there was an enormous, gaping hole in the system, and that it had to be plugged quickly before it became transparent to everyone what was happening.

The hole is not in the system of copyright protections. It is in the system that gives you a cooperative monopoly (with the other big 4 music companies) over musical entertainment in the entire world. You have an incestuous relationship with TV and radio to ensure that the artists you have chosen to promote receive wide exposure, and that their music is played on the radio. (Sony recently paid out over $100 million to settle an action by New York State on this issue.) The system ensures that only artists you control will receive the kind of exposure that creates a “superstar”. Only the artists you control will appear on Letterman and Leno and Oprah and in movies and on radio play-lists.

As long as it cost tens of thousands of dollars, this system worked in favor of the big players, because very few people could afford to make a professional recording and print vinyl records.

But with new technologies, this control has dissipated, and suddenly almost anybody can make a good digital recording and make their music available on CD’s or through down-loading. This means a talented artist might be able to simply ignore the establishment, if he or she doesn’t like the unfair conditions imposed upon artists by industry contracts.

To sustain their control over the market, the music industry has to close this gap.

You must first create the illusion that your concern is about copyright, and about preserving your rights over the valuable original content your company insists it “created”. You must above all else perpetuate the illusion that your artists and your movies and your content are the best there is to offer and the only stuff that people really want. You validate a person’s entertainment choices. You give yourself awards, schedule your performers on Letterman and Leno, get your stars on the cover of magazines. You lobby foreign governments demanding that they empower their populations to see “Ishtar” and “Gigli”.

You must try– in the face of the unremitting ridiculousness of your position– to insist that your really do want to make sure that artists get paid for their work. In spite of the fact that almost none of your current artists under contract will stand up and say he or she believes you.

But you know, deep in your musty little heart, that most of this is an illusion you have created to convince people that your artists are important and talented, and to assure the average consumer that he or she can’t be like your artists.

And you know that if the marketplace was actually free to choose it’s own “successes” from the thousands and thousands of artists our there, that yours might not be among the best or most desired or most original or interesting.  Even worse, geographical areas might develop a base of fans for local artists who can survive on their earnings from this base, instead of having to depend on multi-national media corporations.  Imagine a Duluth radio station playing, primarily, artists from the Duluth region, or Minnesota, instead of artists from New York or Los Angeles?

So you must find a way to ensure that these other artists do not slip through your filters, your stranglehold on media, into a position wherein they could make money performing music without you being able to skim off the largest chunk of their incomes.

You must prevent them from being able to sell their music directly to the public, without you.

And you discovered, to your horror, that, given a choice between your own copy-protected, restricted, controlled, homogenized product, and unprotected, unrestricted, un-homogenized works by new, independent artists, the public is drawn to the free and the original. You realize that if the industry issued it’s product on media that prevented individuals from copying, that everyone would simply migrate to media that did allow copying. Because there are lots of artists who are willing to make that trade-off and you don’t own them all.

And so you realized that you had to prevent such media from existing, by persuading the government to violate the essence of capitalism and free enterprise by imposing a design upon the manufacturers of the hardware used to create and play back video and audio.

If you continue to issue your product on protected disks while other artists are free to issue their own work on non-protected disks– your days of lavish hotels and extravagant junkets are over.

So you must– you absolutely MUST– force the media outlets, now including Windows itself, and all hardware to incorporate a system of DRM — “digital rights management”–, which has the function of allowing you to hijack the media. In essence, you are taking over the media itself, the disk itself, the player itself, the computer itself… controlling them, without even having to pay a penny for it, other than the cost of lobbying.

This is like requiring every car to be able to use ethanol. This is a program that would be of great interest to corn growers. All they need to do is lobby the right politicians. After a few years, no one will wonder if ethanol is actually any good or not. It won’t matter. And if someone builds a better car that will run on hydrogen– it doesn’t matter: it will also have to be able to use ethanol.

You have pulled off one of the biggest cases of fraud in the history of corporate malfeasance. Congratulations. Nobody even seems to know yet, what you have done.