sxswi: What Not to Copy
Techdirt's Mike Masnick on the Dresden Dolls and the future of IP
By Richard Whittaker, 5:43PM, Mon. Mar. 14, 2011
Reports of copyright's demise may be exaggerated, but it's definitely not healthy. With many industries feeling the music industry's piracy pains, Techdirt's Mike Masnick told us what they did wrong, and what SXSW veterans like Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls have done right.
Austin Chronicle: For a lot of technical reasons, the music industry was the first sector to get really hit by download technology. What did they do right, and what did they do wrong?
Mike Masnick: They did a lot of things wrong, and they're still doing a lot of things wrong. I think the biggest thing to learn is that the absolute wrong response is to try and fight what consumers want. One of the key lessons here is that the amount of power that your consumers have is growing stronger, and realistically the response of the music business to date remains, 'Well, let's enforce copyright law even stronger to fight the will of consumers even more.' Well, we have 15 years or so of data on that, and it hasn't worked. Every bit of evidence suggests that it makes it worse, and all it's really done is, as the laws fight more and more what people want to do, people respect the laws less and less.
AC: Amanda Palmer was at SX two years ago discussing ways for artists can survive the death of big money copyright. She pointed out that musicians can always fall back the troubadour model of passing the hat around. Similarly, independent film makers are using fund raising sites like Kickstarter to pay for production, then self-leaking to pirate sites to build buzz.
MM I talk to a lot of musicians and I know Amanda really well, and she's doing a lot of really interesting things lately. She released a new album about a month ago, and she had all these additional offerings that people could pay for, and people were buying some really interesting things, like hand painted ukuleles. She just did this thing where she's on tour in Australia, and you can have her perform at your house for $5,000. A bunch of her fans got together and they all chipped in. They had a barbecue and Amanda played at the barbecue. She said it was fantastic and a ton of fun. She was a little nervous at first, because she was like, 'Does that seem weird, now that there's money involved? I'm coming to someone's house and I'm playing their barbecue. Is there an awkwardness?" And she said she realized afterwards that it wasn't. It was a really fun situation and the people who paid were perfectly happy. It was the very definition of a capitalistic transaction. Both sides are happy with the deal. Amanda got to go and play and she made some money, and the fans got to hang out with her in their back yard. It was fun.
There seems to be a lot of evidence that artists don't really need copyright today, but I don't really know if we should scrap the system. What I would like is that these discussions, in terms of 'how do you fix the system?' are actually based on real evidence. Historically, things are not. They're based on record labels and movie studios saying, 'We need this, and if we don't, 50,000 jobs will be lost.' Based on what? Who knows. It's that lack of evidence that's hugely problematic.
AC: The US Chamber of Commerce said it wants those same intellectual property laws tightening.
MM: There have been a couple of different books recently that have looked at the whole question of historical piracy, going way back beyond what's happened in the last decade or two decades. The one thing that you see is that piracy, in the form of content piracy, is almost always an indicator of more efficient technologies that let you do some really unique things that consumers find valuable. They break down old business models and they change the way business might be done, but one thing they've never actually done is shrink a market. They've grown a market for those that actually embrace it. It may destroy the business model for someone who was very focused on the old way of doing things, but those new efficiencies tend to open up the market.
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SXSW 2011, SXSW, Amanda Palmer, Techdirt, Mike Masnick, Michael Masnick, Copyright