Jun 092009

The Rights Stuff

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Here’s an interesting Euro-election fact (first pointed out by Ben Goldacre on Twitter yesterday): While the BNP took 6.2% of the UK vote, the Pirate Party took 7.0% in Sweden.

Earlier this year the four founders of Pirate Bay (a file-sharing website) were fined £3m and jailed for a year by the Swedish courts. It became a cause celebre, once again bringing the issue of copyright and open access into the public spotlight.

pirate-party

The Pirate Party has obviously benefited from a backlash against the verdict. On its platform to ” fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected,” it  mobilized the youth vote of Sweden, and will now take its first seat in the European Parliament.

At first pass this looks like a single issue, flash-in-the-pan, of-no-consequence moment-of-madness from a nation that has 200 ways of serving herring. But there’s more to it than that. Watch his Channel 4 report, and listen to musician / producer Alexander Bard:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1184614595?bctid=25698199001

BROUGHT TO BOOK

In his excellent article in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago, Ian Jack proposed that as the publishing world goes into meltdown, we are seeing the return of the gifted amateur. The economics of the £500,000 advance just doesn’t work any more (if it ever did), and it’s time to remind ourselves that Trollope was a postmaster, Eliot was a banker and Angus Wilson worked in the British Museum.

The total access to a distribution mechanism for both writer-and-reader / musician-and-listener has changed the dynamic completely. And with it the economics.

Hardly an earth-shattering insight – the sort of thing that was being predicted by futurists like Paul Saffo and Kevin Kelly in the early 90s.  However, while we’ve become used to the technology, I don’t think our mental models of the world have caught up. As Bard points out, there’s a fantastic contradiction between  the perceived ‘right’ to download and the dream of having a recording contract.

Even Kelly starts is current homepage telling us that he’s writing a book.

FEEL FREE

This comes in a week when Channel 4 has announced that it will make its entire back catalogue available on the web for free. (So much for artists living off repeat fees.)

kindleAnd at the end of a month when the Great British Public has risen as one to condemn our MPs for expenses ‘fraud’, while at the same time we’ve been downloading MP3, torrent streams and other file-sharing workarounds. Which under current law, is theft.

These episodes have made me realise that  great content on its own doesn’t make money;  there must be control of the means of distribution. If I can limit access to something you want, I can charge you for it. That’s why Amazon has developed the Kindle – which will change the game again for book publishers,  newspapers and booksellers.

I have no idea how this will play out: I doubt anyone does. The only certainty I can see is that while I write the Great English comic novel, I’m not giving up the day job. Before, during  – or after.

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Posted by Paul Rutherford at 07:24 Tagged with:
  • Coda:

    Listening to David Simon (creator of TV's "The Wire") is like putting your ear to a conch shell and hearing the distant sound of invisible America..

    He was a guest of R4's "Start the Week" to talk about his books. 'Homicide' and 'The Corner'- both the results of year-long observations of the drugs market in his homw town, Baltimore.

    His thesis is simple: the underclass in post-industrial America is no longer needed. The jobs that they were educated to do - by a failing school system - no longer exist. In Baltimore alone, the unemployment rate for male African-Americans is 50%. Their response has been to to create an alternative economy - capitalism taken to the nth degree - which keeps thousands employed.

    (If you know 'The Wire', that's best exemplified by Stringer Bell's business course and his obsession with distribution and 'product'.)

    How is this related to the above blog posting? Simon spent 20 years as a journalist on The Baltimore Sun. He makes the point that he wouldn't have spent a year in a homicide unit, learning the dynamics, building relationships, calling people at home, meeting them for a beer, going out on patrol, if he hadn't been working for an employer who provided pay and benefits.

    "There's a lot of fluff and commentary on the internet" he says. "Some of the commentary is very good; most of it is juvenile. But you can't do real journalism as a hobby."

    Here again, Simon's home turf is a microcosm of the impact the Web is having on traditional publishing models. When he had his 'beat', the Baltimore Sun had 500 staff, produced two editions a day, and was one of three city papers. Today it employs 160, and is the only game in town.

    Which presents another internet paradox. While the Pirate Party campaigns for total access and the negation of copyright, it may be helping to create a less well-informed population that has little idea of what to do with the freedoms it gains.

    Are we in a tailspin with no end? Despite his background and subject matter, Simon is not all doom-and-gloom.

    "The (Washington) Post and the (New York) Times provides 60% of the 'real news' output in America. If they both decide to charge for access, that would re-write the rules."

    The FT and the Wall Street Journal already charge - but as their information is directly connected to money, their readers' perceived value is very clear. Now that the general news horse has left the stable, we'll have to see if the major news providers can corral it back in.
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