Arguments about internet piracy have, like piracy itself,
ravaged the internet at least since Napster’s wonderful explosion in popularity
followed by its just as glorious collapse.
But recently an article written by college student and NPR intern EmilyWhite has reignited this always contentious debate. On NPR’s All Songs Considered blog, Emily
White details her music buying experience, or, more precisely, a nearly total
lack of it. Through the process of friends
who uploaded songs onto various devices, Kazaa, and ripping albums from her
university’s radio station, Emily estimates that she has only bought perhaps fifteen
albums in her lifetime, but owns around 11,000 songs. Wisely, Emily feels somewhat guilty about
this. She notes that many of the
flippant, poorly thought out solutions to the problem of easy access to free
music, like “sell more t-shirts,” are completely inadequate. But she also doesn’t really offer any
solutions of her own beyond a vague call for a more convenient way to access
music. (Is clicking a mouse really all
that inconvenient?)
Emily’s article garnered a slew of rebuttals, the most
popular being the response of Dave Lowery, singer for the bands Cracker and
Camper Von Beethoven and current professor of music business. Where Emily’s solutions were somewhat vague,
Lowery’s response was far more interested in clear details, and while I
certainly don’t agree with everything he writes, I’m fairly certain it does a
nice job of voicing the larger frustrations felt among the musician
community. The debate expanded from
there with people taking both sides. In
the ensuing discourse there were two go to assumptions that really got under my
skin: 1) generation gap politics and 2) coddling the young. These might seem contradictory at first, but
upon further examination they fit nicely next to one another.
A quick glance at any comment board that dealt with Emily’s
post will garner a slew of arguments about generational norms. The act of stealing tens of thousands of songs,
the argument goes, can be chalked up to those worthless millennials who are
selfish and want everything handed to them, never mind that a generation ago
the means to illegally download this number of songs just didn’t exist. David Lowery’s post, at times, falls back on
this generational finger pointing, and it’s one of his weakest arguments. Travis Morrison, of Dismemberment Plan fame,responded to the assumption that millennials must some how be more morally
bankrupt than past generations by noting that he as well as many of his friends
stole music all the time back in the day.
Of course, he doesn’t really deal with the fact that it used to require
a good amount of effort to steal back in the day where it has become nearly
labor free today.
Regardless, some of this generational resentment comes down
to a vague anxiety plenty of baby boomers have that their place in the world of
popular culture is quickly being replaced.
Couple this with the fact that the decline of the middle class tracks
with the political rise of the baby boomers, and you have an entire generation
worried about their own legacy and willing to lash out at their youngers. Recent years have done damage to the
narrative the boomers have constructed of themselves: principled actors who
protested against the Vietnam War out of moral convictions and helped form a
more open society. Of course, this
narrative is hurt by the fact that Nixon actually won the youth vote in his
election runs, suggesting that plenty of the baby boomers were less concerned
with American imperialism than they were with the fact that now they were being
asked to sacrifice in order to support our overseas adventures. In other words, no one cared about the war
when the poor were dying, but as soon as the middle class were asked to join,
then the youth culture of the late 60s started to pay attention.
This generational resentment finds its way into plenty of
arguments, and my guess is that we will be seeing it for some time. The other obnoxious trend I’ve noticed
surrounding the Emily White article is a protective, sometimes condescending,
tone people take when defending 21-year-old Emily. There are a number of posts that accuse
Lowery of “yelling at a 21 year old,” as if she isn’t old enough to handle a
rebuttal to her public statement. In one
particular defense of Emily’s original post, written confusingly enough by
another person named Emily White, the author begins by telling the first Emily
that she “wrote a great blog post!” (yes,
with an exclamation mark). I know that
if you’re 21, then you’re just barely old enough to drink. But you’re also old enough to handle some
criticism. You’re considered an adult at
18, and we do no service to young adults if we don’t call out their dumb ideas
as dumb ideas. When Emily writes that
what she really wants is some vague notion of convenience, it’s perfectly
acceptable to tell her, “You know, Emily, that’s kind of stupid.”
What is perhaps most frustrating aspect of the internet
piracy argument is the fact that people are constantly speaking past one
another. There are those who are
concerned with making sure that musicians can make a decent living so that they
can make more great music. On the other
end, there are those “free culture” extremists who rightly note that technology
has shifted the old business models, pointing out the benefits of this new
technology, but plug their ears when people start talking about reasonable
compensation for artists. There are two
related but separate issues at stake in this conversation. First, the macro issue of business models and
corralling the buying behavior of large groups of people. Second, the micro issue of individual moral
choice. We might agree that downloading
music without compensating the artist is a bad ethical choice, but that doesn’t
mean that the problem will dissipate any time soon. This means we must come up with a new
business plan to better address this problem and make sure that artists receive
enough compensation to continue to produce great art.
But at the same time (and this should really go without
saying), just because a large number of people are stealing music does not make
it ethical for you as an individual to also engage in this same behavior. This part of the argument reminds me of
Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative” from his treatise, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In this text, Kant attempts to provide the
basis for an understanding of morals that are universal, separate from any
particular time and place. In order to
deal with this problem (and I’ll skip all of the intricate abstraction that he
develops), Kant comes up with the idea of the “categorical imperative,” which
he defines, in its simplest terms, as the maxim that “I ought never to act
except in such a way that I can also will
that my maxim should become a universal law” (70). So in order to adjudge whether or not
illegally downloading music is an ethical choice, we should ask ourselves what
would happen if everyone were to make the same decision. Obviously, if no one paid for music, then the
entire industry would pretty much fall apart, and we would have a lot less
great art in the world. In fact, those
who pirate music have benefited greatly from those of us who have purchased our
music over the years (or mostly purchased our music, as the case may be).
We need to have both a discussion about the micro and macro
aspect of internet piracy. Each of us
should determine what sort of ethical choices we need to make. But at the same time, it is unrealistic to
believe that people will automatically just stop pirating, especially cash
strapped college students who love music.
And as we have this conversation, let’s not confuse the overarching
issue of business models with individual ethical choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment