Morality, Intellectual Property and the Smiths
by Paul McGoldrick
This information age of ours is a scary place sometimes. How we sort ourselves out in the next few years will undoubtedly lead to future generations giving us a moniker that we don't yet know. Maybe they will call our period, "The Age of the Internet," or, "The Age That Lost Its Morality," or perhaps even, "The Era of the End of Personal Choice?"
You will normally hear me saying nothing good about the entertainment industry - it has bogged itself down so far in caring about the systems of distribution for its products that it has lost touch with the reality of the value that it has: Content. If Hollywood had focused on that we would not have had a Napster, and we wouldn't have the mess that exists today in both audio and video distribution. It is not my point here to go into criticism of the studios doing things like adding digital noise to CDs to prevent copying - and thereby preventing their play in automotive equipment, etc. Companies like Philips will sort those things out by pulling the CD logo from such products. I am more concerned here about the morality of the consumer.
When the Napster thing was hot the blame was put on the studios because the users said that Hollywood was gouging. Though not untrue, it has been a very simple step for such people's morality to justify any available downloading as an honest activity; something about the industry's legal crackdown on Napster seems to have spurned challenges and the activity is now prolific around the world. Not only is there a complete range of MP3 files available for downloading from tens-of-thousands of sites, there are also complete books and, of course, DVDs.
One has to wonder about the kind of person who has the time to scan a complete novel into a site to make it available for downloading, but on the optical side the technology is now so much in favor of the pirate. Only a few years ago it required an hour to make an illicit VHS tape, now it is possible to copy a DVD in seconds. Pirate copies of the first Harry Potter movie were available on the streets of Hong Kong a week before the release of the DVD in the United States - complete with Chinese subtitles. Obviously that original copy was extracted by an employee somewhere in the manufacturing or distribution chain, presumably for money.
On line copies of the DVD version of movies like Harry Potter are available literally simultaneously with the retail release, while the first digital copies of the film version were available on line even before the theater release. An Internet monitoring company, NetPD, estimates that 165,000 copies of the "Lord of the Rings" were being downloaded each month. Hollywood legal action against sites like Musiccity.com, Grokster.com, and Kazaa.com have spawned, inevitably, dozens of other mirror sites that the industry will simply be unable to keep up with in the courts - if they can even reach them in whatever country they are really based.
In a study for the Observer newspaper in the UK, NetPD estimated that the top downloaded movie was "Black Hawk Down" with 169,000 copies (in one month!) and the top downloaded CD was "Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory" with 5,300,000 copies.
What has resulted from all this activity - which can only get worse from the studio point of view as more and more people get access to higher speed Internet connections - is that we as consumers are the recipients of an even more inflated price than before. It is estimated that about one-third of the cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) for a DVD is in the provision of anti-piracy defense systems and encryption (the latter has been a joke anyway for a couple of years.) It is now quite clear that a number of recent DVD releases have not had the full slate of anti-piracy systems added. But, whether they do or not, the downloaders who began by accusing studios and record labels of "gouging" have become their own worst enemies, providing a reason to hike the cost of legitimate media higher still.
Presumably the studios want that additional money to fight the Internet
in general - a losing battle, since a dozen pirate sites spring up, Hydra-style,
for every one that is shut down. There is a bright side, however. At least
the not-so-immoral consumer is no longer the villain. Hollywood seems to
have admitted at last that - especially when compared with piracy of intellectual
property on a worldwide scale - it's really not so bad for Mr. and Mrs.
Smith to make a VHS copy of a movie to watch in their bedroom, or for Smith
Jr. to burn a CD of favorites to listen to on the daily commute. But that
revelation may have come too late for the entertainment industry, whose
message is now more lost than ever, in a pointless fight against a medium
that simply isn't going to go away. Use it, Hollywood…or lose it.