Misstropolis

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Some of the Kids are Alright Online

by Wally Holland

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”...if there’s free music or movies out there, I’m going to take it.” - NYU sophomore Jessica Bhargava.

“The overwhelming, if not sole, use of these applications is to illegally download and distribute copyrighted works.” --Cary Sherman, RIAA.

Pirates were a bigger problem a couple hundred years ago; back then they sacked trading posts and stole chests of Aztec gold and rarely looked like Johnny Depp. Nowadays they illegally share software and copyrighted art via peer-to-peer filesharing networks (and rarely look like Johnny Depp). To hear entertainment industry groups like the RIAA and MPAA tell it, these downloading savages - like their Barbary Coast forerunners (sans cutlasses and hoop earrings) - represent a threat to not only the Hollywood bottom line, but the very foundations of liberty and goodness.

But the problem isn’t that filesharers - who are breaking the law, even if it’s bad law - don’t care about copyright, or artists. It’s that their ad hoc online community doesn’t require them to. Responsibility comes from a sense of accountability and community, but p2p technologies remove such personal investment. Kids enjoy sharing as much as stealing, they say, but when it comes to digital music it seems sharing isn’t an option…

In the mid-90’s, the band Phish could sell-out Madison Square Garden in an afternoon. Not unprecedented, but what made Phish’s popularity remarkable was that they built their audience entirely through word of mouth and relentless touring; in 1994 alone they played more than 120 shows, all behind a single that got no radio play, and the lamest MTV video of all time.

The Phish phenomenon, like the Grateful Dead’s before, revolved around tape traders. Most of the discussion on the wildly popular Phish.net, an early discussion board, consisted of requests for recordings, kvetches about unreliable traders, ‘tape tree’ announcements (a taper dubbed a show for 5 more, who did the same, down to the ‘leaves’ who only owned 1 tape deck), and ‘B+P offers’ (where a trader would trade ten copies of a show for say, blank tapes and the cost of postage - generous and surprisingly common).

Every tape had a story, and every story involved a fan and a tape deck (and maybe some quality weed). A good trader was like a musical sommelier, identifying good vintages, tossing quality recordings to new traders, and guarding the borders: ‘bootlegs’ were live shows redistributed without the band’s permission, for profit. There was no worse crime among traders. Phish didn’t have to worry though, the fans enforced this policy themselves via public shaming and ostracism.

The band’s message was play fair, and we will rock you. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander: Phish’s farewell tour in 2004 pulled in $23 million in only 18 shows.

That day is done. Filesharing has made the Maxell XL-II cassette obsolete. But the communitarian vibe of online groups like the Phish.net and rec.music.gdead still exists in filesharing communities like etree.org and furthur.net - websites that explicitly forbid copyright violations, reselling, or trading any show that’s commercially available. These sites serve fans of like-minded bands, from college-rock favorite Dave Matthews to acid-jazz/funk outfits like Medeski Martin & Wood and Soulive, to local boys Guster and The Slip (world tours, no radio play: sound familiar?). The styles are different, but the ethic and ethics are the same: instead of treating online filesharing as stealing from the band, they see it as the band sharing with the fans, and encourage fans to work the same way, creating an underground economy of gifts not theft. Thousands of fans take those ethics very seriously.

There’s a moral in there for record-label execs - and the recent Apple/EMI deal to sell mp3’s with no anti-piracy ‘protection’ is a good sign. But there’s also a broader significance: these fans are mostly kids, the same amoral savages that (according to the media) single-handedly keep CD prices high and force BigMediaCorp to employ ‘Digital Rights Management’ technologies. Yet those kids understand the complex moral code of this far-flung community of rock’n’roll tape traders, a richer and more flexible method of appreciating great music than anything offered by industry leaders or instant-gratification media-pirates.

Just imagine a generation raised on Instant Messaging (and gratification) adopting the positive, systematic ethics of true ‘peer-to-peer’ communities that existed long before the Internet. So much for the hoops and cutlasses; sounds a lot like the foundations of liberty and goodness to me.

Kitten photo by generetic.org