The Case for Copyright Reform (10 page)

Second
, we are seeing
emotional reactions that are identical to that of the Catholic Church when the
printing press arrived. Since copyright is religious to these people, there is
no middle ground and will never be a middle ground – the concept is as
unrealistic as a middle ground between the Quran and the Bible. Again, it
should be emphasized that it is not a religion per se, but that the people are
reacting as though they were defending their religion. They are deeply, deeply
uncomfortable by things being questioned that cannot and must not be
questioned, and are reacting by emotional distress and full-on attack.

Third
, and most interesting:
once this has been identified, we can follow the script for how the Catholic
Church was defeated by knowledge 500 years ago, and win again against the
religion of these modern no-knowledge-proliferation treaties. One needs to
remember that the Catholic Church had instituted excommunication (exile) as
penalty for unauthorized reading. They had persuaded France to enact the death
penalty for using a printer to produce books. They were really tenacious about
preventing the spread of knowledge. In the end, that was also what undid their
stranglehold on the populace: that everybody learned how to read, and could
question their word for themselves.

So the fight 500 years ago was one against knowledge, and it was won by
spreading knowledge.

That’s exactly how we need to win today.

We need to
teach the whole world
how to share culture
. Everybody needs to experience what the copyright
industry is trying to kill. We need to connect Aunt Marge’s television set to a
oneterabyte USB drive of hi-def movies with a media player, just like
Protestants won by teaching people to read. Just like you can’t unexperience
what it’s like to read, you can’t unexperience what it’s like to have the
world’s culture and knowledge at your fingertips. We need to help everybody
around us understand that sharing is caring, and that copyright is the
opposite.

We need to
document the
transgressions
of the copyright industry. Much sympathy was gained for the
Protestant causes as the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition and Bloody Mary
were exposed to the public. There is certainly no shortage of horrendous acts
on behalf of the copyright industry. We need to explain them in laymen’s terms.

We need to
explain that there is a better way
to both politicians,
artists, and citizens in general. Copyright is just a piece of legislation,
written by humans, that has developed into something that is out of sync with
reality. It is not a holy stone tablet handed down to us directly by God, and
it is not an eternal principle that holds our society together. It is just a
piece of legislation that happens to be broken, and can be fixed. But it needs
to be fixed quite urgently, or we risk creating a kind of society that we do
not want.

To conclude:

File sharing is not just a private matter.
It’s a matter of global economic dominance, and always has been. Let’s keep
sharing and move that power from the monopolists to the people. Teach everybody
to share culture, and the people will win against the constrainers of
liberties, just as happened at the start of this series, when people learned to
read for themselves and toppled the Catholic Churh.

How Will The Artists Get Paid?

“But how will the artists get paid?”
is the single most frequent question we Pirates get
when arguing for copyright reform to legalize file sharing.

Ten years ago, this was a very difficult question to answer, and few
would have been confident that they knew if and how the cultural sector would
survive financially in the new era. But today, we have more than a decade’s
experience of a world where anybody who wants can download whatever they want
for free, and where a large portion of the population routinely does.

We now know from experience that
the
cultural sector is financially sustainable despite rampant p2p file sharing
.
What may have appeared to be an insoluble problem a decade ago, has turned out
not to be a problem at all, but in fact a huge opportunity for artists and
creators, and a boon for sustainable cultural diversity.

Admittedly, it can feel a bit frustrating to get the question of how the
artists will get paid after you have just explained how copyright enforcement
is threatening fundamental rights. Should the question of whether we want to
keep the right to private communication, due process, and proportionality in
punishments really depend on whether it is profitable for artists or not?

But apart from that, it is a relevant question. We all want a society
where culture flourishes, and we all want authors, musicians,

60 and other creative people to have a chance to make a living from
their art. If it had been the case that there actually was a conflict between
this and preserving fundamental rights, it would have been a problem that
needed to be addressed, even if abolishing fundamental rights would not have
been the proper answer.

As it happens, we can see that during the decade when file sharing grew
exponentially, revenues have increased year by year for the both the cultural
sector as a whole, and for each individual segment such as film, music, or
computer games.

The biggest change has been within the music industry. For the past ten
years, sales of recorded music have declined steeply, and the rise in digital
music-sales have been scant compensation. But the music business has never been
healthier.

In an in-depth article published in October 2010, business magazine
The Economist
wrote
:

A surprising number of things are making
money for artists and music firms, and others show great promise. The music
business is not dying. But it is changing profoundly.

The longest, loudest boom is in live music.
Between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales in America tripled in value, from
$1.5 billion to $4.6 billion. [...]

Rising income from live performance,
merchandising, sponsorship, publishing, online streaming and emerging markets
has come to counterbalance losses from declining CD sales. As a result, some
musicians are singing a different tune. Last year a new group, the Featured
Artists Coalition, objected to government plans to punish file-sharers by
suspending their broadband connections. Its leaders, including established
artists such as Billy Bragg and Annie Lennox, argue that file-sharing is a
useful form of promotion.

When we look at the statistics, we see that the cultural sector is
making as much money now as it did ten years ago (or slightly more, due to the
general increase in standard of living). People are spending as much money as
ever on culture, regardless of the fact that they can download just about
anything for free, and frequently do.

If they no longer spend the money on one thing, they spend it on
something else. Music fans are spending just as much money as they used to on
music, but since they are spending less on plastic discs, they are spending
more on going to live concerts. This is bad news for the record companies, but
it is great news for the artists, who get a bigger piece of the pie.

More money than ever before goes into the cultural sector, but sometimes
through a different route.

It is quite natural that this should be the case, if we think about our
own every-day experience of how an ordinary private economy works. When you get
a salary every month, you first spend most of it on rent, food, bills, and
other boring things. Then, if you’re lucky, you have a little bit left that you
can spend on entertainment, i.e.: culture.

If you no longer spend that money on buying plastic discs, you can
afford to go and listen to some live music instead. You’re going to spend the
money one way or another, so someone in the cultural sector will get it.

It is still very difficult to make a living as an artist, it always has
been, and it always will be. But at least it has become a little bit easier
than it was before the Internet and p2p file sharing. In the music business,
total revenues have increased slightly, while the big record companies are
getting a smaller piece of the pie. This has left more money for the creative
people who actually make the music (rather than just distribute it).

File sharing is not a problem that needs to be solved. It is something
that is positive for both artists, consumers, and society as a whole. All we
need to do now is to get copyright legislation in line with this new and
positive reality.

By reforming copyright to legalize p2p file sharing that is done without
direct commercial intent, we can put an end to the criminalization of an entire
generation, while at the same time improving conditions for a vibrant cultural
sector in Europe.

Studies On The Cultural Sector In The File
Sharing Era

There is quite a lot of academic research on how the cultural sector,
including the music business, has fared in the file sharing era. These studies
make very interesting reading, and should be obligatory reading for all
politicians involved in copyright policy making.

First, three studies
on the music business in various member states:

•
UK 2004 – 2008 :
Record
companies lose, artists gain from file sharing

• Sweden 2000 – 2008:
More Charts
The Record Labels Don’t Want You To See: Swedish Musicians Making More Money

• Norway 1999 – 2009:
Artists Make
More Money in File-Sharing Age Than Before It

All three studies conclude that although record sales are down, revenues
from live performances have increased dramatically, in a way that more than
compensates for the drop in sales of recorded music.

The Dutch study
Ups and downs
– Economic and cultural effects of file sharing on music, film and games
(2009) takes a combined look at different cultural genres. It shows that
between 1999 and 2007, revenues have increased for all of them, except music
recordings. For the music industry, this study only looks at recorded music,
and does not examine income for artists from other sources, such as concerts.
This means that the study only confirms the negative trend for recorded music
in line with the Swedish, Norwegian, and UK studies above, but leaves the part
of the music sector that has made up for this outside the scope of the study.

A Harvard study
from 2009 takes a look at the wider implications of file sharing for
society, and finds that since the advent of file sharing, both the number of
music albums and films released per year have increased. Canadian law professor
Michael Geist summarizes the study under the heading
Harvard Study
Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society
.

The Hargreaves report
was commissioned by the UK government, and published
in May 2011. It makes a strong call for evidence-based policy making in
copyright matters, as opposed to having policy determined by the weight of
lobbying.

Although the report is by no means a “Pirate Manifesto”, it makes
several concrete proposals for policy changes that would at least go in the
right direction.

The studies that have been mentioned here are summarized in a little
more detail in the following sections.

UK 2004 - 2008: Record Companies Lose,
Artists Gain From File Sharing