Sep 09
30
Revolutions In Thinking Needed
Revolutions
What are revolutions and why do they happen?
There are two kinds of revolution – those that involve
technological progress – like the Industrial Revolution and those that involve
political upheaval – like the French Revolution. Both are disruptive to the
social norms of the day.
But it’s the political revolutions in which people get
killed.
Then there is another kind of revolution again. The one that
a wheel does – goes in a circle and comes back to where it started. Amazing
that there can be that level of divergence of meaning for one word, isn’t it?
Normal sane society doesn’t like to see people being killed
for any reason, so the modern day political revolutions that are smiled upon
are those that don’t have any killing associated with them. The Velvet
Revolution and the Orange Revolution heralding in democracy without any human
sacrifice are considered good… And let’s face it, its much better to have
change without violence.
But why does revolution occur?
Technological change, heralded by the invention of new
technology is a good start. When the printing press was introduced suddenly
people who wanted to bring the problems of society into common discussion in
the UK were able to print pamphlets and get their message across to the public.
The intention was obvious. They wanted to cause outrage and to focus public
opinion.
This ability to leverage changes in public opinion to force
change is still with us in the form of the blog. And that is why a lot of
people blog – to generate or propagate memes that carry messages of change.
Because though evolution may be preferable to revolution, sometimes the forces
that have control just want to keep things as they are and they will use all
kinds of means to ensure that the it is they alone that get to remain at the
feeding trough.
Let’s face it. If those who seek change were not highly
active in their pursuit of it, nothing would ever change. Nothing would
progress and we would still be doing the same old things the same old way.
One of the areas that drives people’s passions on both sides
of the fence is how intellectual property is dealt with, by the law, by the
companies that make money from it and by the consumer.
Now I am not going to advocate that anyone should steal
anything. Far from it. But I do think that we need to understand that if the
means to ‘take freely from’ is easier than the means to ‘purchase from at a
fair price’, then people are going to do the former rather than the latter.
And if the owners of the IP criminalize the masses for doing
this, they will find themselves on the pointy end of a revolution.
Think about it:
Big companies make money from content – studios make money
from the old business models of selling it in material form, licensing it to
broadcasters, and now licensing it to third parties to sell via download as
well as selling at an artificially high price to those people who rent it to
consmers.
But the other big businesses that make money from content
that aren’t part of that ecosystem are just as reliant on the consumption of
content. These include the companies that make storage devices, the telcos that
enable digital transfer of content and the computer companies that make the
devices that you use to capture the content from downloads in the event that
you do this, and the software companies that enable you to rip content from a
CD or DVD and put this on the storage device that you use. All these companies
absolutely know that their fortunes come directly from consumers that are in
many cases breaking the law. These companies do not want any kind of levy or
tax on their devices because they would reduce their competitiveness.
Any tax on a storage device that would enable the copyright
owners and creators of the content to be remunerated would be collected locally
and that would mean that people may purchase a similar product from a foreign
source to gain a better price. Not to avoid paying the levy, but to get the
best price possible.
You see I believe that most people do not want to break the law.
In fact they find it reprehensible to do so. But in the research that I have
been doing on and off since writing The Infinite Digital Jukebox in 1998 I have
found that people are also very cynical about how laws are created and in the
event that there are bad laws, they ignore them.
In the 60’s we smoked dope and got high, and we understood
the simple economics, because the alternative press explained it pretty well –
that the profit on something illegal that people were going to do anyway, was
so great that it enabled the promoters to be able to pay off all the people in
the ecosystem that were open to bribes. The economic imperatives are what keeps
drugs illegal, regardless of the fact that drugs like tobacco and alcohol are
legal and controlled and probably more responsible for death in the population
than marijuana. (By the way, I am not for one moment advocating the free sale
of drugs here. I believe that they should be controlled, but I believe that
they should not be prohibited. The profiteering from the sale and the
consequent human suffering is what is criminal).
With respect to content, the players in the ecosystem would
not want to be compared with drug dealers. But the issue is not dissimilar.
While it is illegal to download some content it is not illegal to download all.
While you can download some content in one country you can’t download it in
another. While you can buy a DVD in one country, you can’t buy it in another.
This is ridiculous, clearly. If someone wants to watch a TV show that has been
broadcast in one place but not in another, and they want to badly enough, they
will find a place to do so. And to stop them is in effect a restraint of trade.
The person who really is a fan of an actor or a TV series is going to go out of
his or her way to get that program. If it isn’t available for sale, they will
get it for nothing.
My research indicates that there are a lot of people that
download material for free not in spite of there being a paid for option, but
because there is no paid for option.
But more importantly, as content owners try to put the
squeeze on the marketplace by trying to inhibit downloads through one means or
another, what they do is to create the unintended consequences of revolution.
The rise of the Pirate Party in Europe may be thought of as
humorous to some people, but it is the thin end of the wedge of people who are
passionate about all those things that countries go to war about… like freedom.
These are the things that drove the American Revolution.
To get sanity to prevail in the content industry, the
content owners need to get religion and understand that we all know several
things that are important to remember:
- Ticket
sales at the movies have increased since the advent of downloading - Gross
margins on downloads are much, much bigger than margins on physical goods,
but royalty rates are the same so profit is increased substantially - More
people download content in the workplace than at home, so the companies
that they work for are having their bandwidth used for illegal downloads,
but if they didn’t allow it their employees would perhaps look for work
where the companies were more tolerant - People
are not looking to break the law. Its just that they will if they are
given no other option.
The revolution that needs to take place is in the board
rooms of the companies to recognize that the consumer can not be bludgeoned
into submission by corporates looking for more profit from the old models. By
working with the way that people actually think and act companies will make
more profit and build greater customer loyalty.