Intellectual Property and the Politics of Plunderphonics
Andy Biclhbaum
Art students in Lille performed an experiment: they packaged blank CDs in professional-looking covers with instructions on how to download the samples. When passersby stopped, they were offered the CD for sale, but asked to propose a price. The students then proceeded to explain why the price was too high (it invariably was), and finally offered the CD for free.
Even after explaining why the price should be lower—breaking down the cost of the blank CD (a few cents), the cover (a 50-cent color copy) and the fact that you can download all the music quite easily, free—many of the passersby had a very hard time offering less than 15 euros, 10 euros, 5 euros….
This curious episode suggests that record companies are in no danger of losing their audience of people who wish to pay a 1500% markup on the pieces of plastic they produce for nearly nothing.
But that’s beside the point. What is the justification for such incredible markups in the first place, whether or not they’re threatened by the free-download system? Record companies say it’s the profit motive that drives innovation, development, the seeking after good things, etc. Drug companies use this same excuse for selling life-saving drugs at incredible markups, for fighting the marketing of generics in the Third World, etc. If the patents aren’t honored, who in the future will develop new technologies?
But who are these artists who supposedly benefit from record sales? Who are the ones whose creativity is stimulated by it? I don’t know the statistics, but I’m pretty sure only the most extremely successful musicians actually see enough from their record sales to live on. In movies, that’s certainly the case. The Yes Men, with theatrical releases in numerous countries, has resulted in only a trickle of cash for its creators; the same is true of other documentarists informally polled, even when their movies have been very successful. The number of documentarists who have seen money exciting enough to constitute an incentive can be counted on one hand.
As for the exceptions: regardless of how lucrative it might be for him, I’m not sure there are very many people who would maintain that Michael Moore is in filmmaking for the money…
If the situation is similar in music, then the money stimulus has to be the least efficient way imaginable of furthering creativity. Musicians, like documentary filmmakers, are by and large in it for other reasons than money, and the vast majority don’t get it from magical market mechanisms: they have to actually work—performing live, begging government agencies for funding, waiting tables, etc. The tales of young musicians getting burnt by their record deals and coming away with nothing are far, far more numerous than any other. Whether there are any tales of the profit motive driving musicians to discover a rich new vocabulary, or develop in interesting ways, is an open one.
The whole question recalls a 1999 quote by Kevin Kelly about the internet before he did a 180-degree turn and abandoned the dot-com millionaires after their crash: “Everyone knows the internet didn’t really take off until it became commercial” (a paraphrase; the original phrase seems lost to Google).
In fact, of course (and as Kelly has since noted), the main and most interesting components of the internet were developed entirely for free, before, during, and after the dot-com explosion. As for drug companies, big research breakthroughs have very rarely been made by companies working outside the government funding system. It just doesn’t work, which is why they’ve so often had to hijack the most important government research by finding ways to patent it.
The real reason for maintaining music, the internet, drugs, and even art within the framework of the free market has nothing, really, to do with logic: it’s ideological. This is illustrated by the way Corporate Social Responsibility works in Britain. Before, it was taxes on corporations, for example, that paid for art programmes. Today, taxes are lowered and it’s government-enforced CSR programmes that pay for a number of projects. Projects are still getting funded, but the money is administered by corporations, instead of the government—but with substantial government oversight, because even the most diehard neoliberal knows you can’t really trust corporations to make decisions about social projects.
The idea would seem to be: lower taxes, and show that Britain has the most neoliberal system around; on the ground, it’s a smokescreen. Who is the audience? Probably those corporations that decide where to invest based on what they perceive as the corporate-friendliness of the legal environment. Does corporate control of arts funding through CSR programmes, with government oversight of the process to ensure fairness, have a better chance of succeeding than the privatization of trains? Let’s hope so.
Jacques Servin / Andy Bichlbaum
