Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) made a series of tweets the other day that caught my attention:
Bono thinks that worldwide Chinese-style internet surveillance and censorship will solve piracy http://tinyurl.com/yemtro5 #rockstaridiot
Bono has missed that even a totalitarian govt with power to harvest organs from dissidents can’t effectively control net-content
Bono calls on world’s govts to emulate totalitarian states in censoring/surveilling the net to safeguard his royalties #enemyofhumanity
If only greed & ignorance could sequester carbon, Bono could FINALLY save the planet
RT @Walking_Dude U2 makes more money off touring ($insaneamount) than any other band this year. So, yeah, Bono can shut up
Huh? Bono advocating Chinese-style internet censorship? Mr. Save The World promoting dictatorial rule?
Bono wrote a guest op ed for the New York Times. I’m not entirely sure what it’s about. Even after reading Bono’s intro.
IF we have overindulged in anything these past several days, it is neither holiday ham nor American football; it is Top 10 lists. We have been stuffed full of them. Even in these self-restrained pages, it has been impossible to avoid the end-of-the-decade accountings of the 10 best such-and-suches and the 10 worst fill-in-the-blanks.
And so, in the spirit of rock star excess, I offer yet another.
The main difference, if it matters, is that this list looks forward, not backward. So here, then, are 10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil. Some are trivial, some fundamental. They have little in common with one another except that I am seized by each, and moved by its potential to change our world.
Are these predictions? Suggestions? Pithy observations? Dunno. Does Bono really write like this? It’s surprisingly confused and unclear.
Here’s what Cory is referring to:
Intellectual Property Developers
Caution! The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files. The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.
A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.
We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content. Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product. Note to self: Don’t get over-rewarded rock stars on this bully pulpit, or famous actors; find the next Cole Porter, if he/she hasn’t already left to write jingles.
What? By “tracking” content, somehow the TV and movie industries are going to be saved?
I hate to break it to you, Bono, but it’s already perfectly possible to download movies and TV shows. Just about every big Hollywood movie is available on the internet and at a nearby street corner on opening weekend. And yet Hollywood somehow managed to have a record year in 2009.
There is no “law” of broadband speeds, and speed increases have not been anything near “immutable.” You will be unlikely to download an entire season of “24″ in half a minute at any point in the near future because there are practical limits to how fast you can transfer a file over an IP connection, no matter how big that connection is, and because with streaming (a la Hulu or YouTube) it doesn’t matter – you can have it instantly.
The implosion of the newspaper business has nothing to do with downloading. No one says “I won’t pay for the New York Times because I can download it for free.” No one wants to buy a newspaper now because they are the day-old bread of the news world. The 24 hour news cycle has killed the newspaper. Newspapers’ lame attempts at adapting to the internet have only made it worse.
I’m not sure what Bono means by content tracking (watermarking? fingerprinting?) or how content tracking is going to fix anything. Watermarking is already common in the film and TV world, so Bono can rest easy.
I read “don’t get over-rewarded rock stars on this bully pulpit” to mean that people like Bono should not be pontificating on this point. But perhaps I’m projecting my own notions on his piece. I suspect Cory Doctorow is doing the same. Perhaps this this kind of diffuse writing makes for compelling lyrics (everyone can take from them something that they believe to be true), but not effective rhetoric.
There are fledgling artists who have made a workable living distributing their content via the internet. Being good at what you do is not necessarily enough. You need to be able to reach your target audience. The internet only makes that easier to do.
Jonathan Coulton and Brad Sucks are my usual examples of non-mainstream musicians using the internet to distribute their music. And it has worked pretty well for established artists such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. Cory Doctorow understands this – he gives away free electronic versions of every one of his books. And they somehow make a living doing their thing.
Just being young and fledgling does not give one a right to make a living in any given field. Talent and luck also play a part. I suspect that had U2 sold their early albums direct to fans on the internet, they would have done pretty well. There’s a reason they’re one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
