mwotw

Napster

I wrote this in 2000, right at the height of the madness.

Are any of you really surprised by the RIAA’s false assertions?

While Napster’s overwhelming popularity has certainly sent a transformative message to both consumers and businesses, the meaning and scope of that message have been distorted by the ensuing legal argument.

The Recording Industry Association of America has lied and exaggerated in its endictment of Napster. Napster and defenders have discovered the impotence of rhetorical arguments (even excellent ones) against claims of material harm (even fabricated and exaggerated ones).

Before embarking on a further condemnation of the RIAA’s recent actions, I think I should acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the RIAA, and to every person and company who has ever sought to make a buck from our desire to bop our heads and snap our fingers. But for the commercial avarice of Edison, and his every successor, we would still be crowding into our living rooms to hear cousins and amateurs pound the keys of the family Baldwin. It is both myopic and naive to “misunderstand” the recording industry’s profit motivation in this current debate.

In the Napster example we have an opportunity to glimpse once again what happens when technology blindsides the sleeping giant. The RIAA is perfectly ready to play dirty, even if it means lying, cheating and being generally uncool. The web may have been born of high ideals, but it was commerce that gave it effect. Presently, the public is very excited for all these cool new ways to get what we want, faster than ever before. The convenience imperative is pressuring some very powerful and entrenched companies to deliver or to step aside. Though today some of these “big players” have what seems like too much power, we cannot expect that they will give it up just to avoid being unpopular. The history of commerce is full of bully monopolies and ethically questionable corporate behavior. Any idea that we can extricate this tendency from business, while preserving its salutary economic effects, is, again, naive. Companies will do everything they can to compete and succeed. At times, those efforts will run counter to market sentiment.

As consumers, we are easily blinded by an approximate gratification. Our support of Napster has harmed Napster. This is an occasion of the consumer “vote” being overturned by the judicial bench. It is anti-competitive because it reverses what the market decided — or is trying to decide. Let me explain.

The RIAA’s rhetoric would have law-makers believe that consumers are getting for free exactly what they would otherwise have to pay for. And for some consumers, this is true. In many cases, the downloaded MP3’s do become burned CDs, which do displace (in our changers and Walkmen) commercially produced records. But, reckoned as a percentage of all “consumed” music, this is a tiny percentage. The threat is not yet real, but the industry has been panicked by the prospect that these numbers will grow. That is a philosophical subtlety (well beyond the resolution of law) so delicate that the recording industry has been left with no recourse but hyperbole. After all, the threat of future financial damages is not so persuasive as the claim of current damages. Yes, it’s a lie. Like many we have heard before, and like many we will hear again. But the moral analysis of the Napster issue (and likely resolution) requires not only that we place this “lie” in a historical context, but also that we assess its impact beyond the present.

The focus of the discussion should have been the evolution of the HOW to distribute music, not the change in HOW MUCH the established distributors are going to make. The RIAA have seized upon the “fair payment for goods received” as ideological anchor of their legal argument. This shifts the debate to tangible terms, makes a free download a bypass of payment and therefore a theft, makes petty thieves of Napster users and grand thieves of Napster’s executives.

However compelling to the bench, this was a bad move for the RIAA from a PR standpoint, since it alienates a segment of its market. But, it is an understandable tradeoff, since this segment — mp3 downloaders — is still quite small. By characterizing Napster users as unscrupulous, it becomes possible to characterize Napster itself as a technology which facilitates unscrupulous (and financially damaging) behavior. But the true motivation for most Napster users is one of convenience. And this is where counsel for the defense dropped the ball.

Sure, “free” is nice, but it is the instant gratification which Napster enables that accounts for its popularity. One important omission from the argument has been the failure to expand the meaning of “free” beyond the economic. It is important to also consider such things as the time and effort (downloading, burning, etc.) required to create a CD using Napster. Though this payment in “sweat” means nothing to the record companies, it speaks very convincingly to the existence of a “Barrier of Convenience” and to the fact that there is some amount of effort which consumers will tally as greater than going to Tower Records and plunking down their fifteen bucks. The ultimate solution to this problem will strike a very delicate balance between how much you pay and what you have to do to turn what you’ve purchased into listenable music.

Napster’s popularity means some consumers are ready and excited by the idea of getting their music via the Web. Make no mistake, sellers of intellectual property (whether music, text, images or video) are as excited to turn the Web into a distribution mechanism too. But they are not yet ready. The needed technology, a technology which will adequately protect the seller’s rights while preserving the consumer benefit of instant gratification, has not yet been fully developed. Napster is not that technology. Napster is just a step in the right direction, which has inflamed passions on all sides of the industry and awakened the dialogue we’ll need to define a better solution. While much less costly than 20 years ago, the manufacturing, packaging and distribution of recorded music in digital formats is still very expensive. Record companies will happily stop spending the money to create and distribute recorded music to brick-and-mortar stores, only when there is a way to get their product to consumers and collect payment for it.

The 100 year-old technological history of the recorded music industry contains countless excellent management decisions. The collective effect of those decisions has made personal listening electronics one of the most successful veins in all consumer technology, in ALL technology. With scarcely any missed steps along the way, these companies have given us what we want and undeniably increased our enjoyment of music. Only porn has a better track-record of customer satisfaction.

Commercial interests and a zeal for profit have fueled the journey. I would say that the profit motive, second only to the vision and genius of the men and women working in the industry, is responsible for where we are today. So, I cannot now, in good conscience, decry the RIAA’s financial argument as mere greed, then enjoy the benefits of what that greed has wrought.

With the advent of the Web came the prospect of truly democratized access to all information. The new ubiquity of digital networks and the near universality of their reach have made potential publishers of us all. That is a vital new power we have scarcely explored, and one whose exercise will certainly transform human communication at a basic level. But just as I am sure you would be reluctant to give up your CNN.coms and WSJ.coms as your news sources, in exchange for my occasional rant on Planet Mardack, I’m sure you can see that we are not quite ready to give up all the middlemen who bring us recorded music. I can easily imagine a musical utopia where I pay my money directly to the artists whose music I want to own. Something of the sort is coming, all agree. But that day is not yet here. Today, Napster has permitted us an extremely educational fore-glimpse of that future. Napster’s important contribution to the evolution of an industry will not be lost, even if Napster itself is sacrificed. Others will follow who will do it better.

internet | intellectual property | drm | digital rights management | napster | riaa | mp3

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 11th, 2005 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Essays, etc., Business, 2000. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.