Speaker: ACTA: Don't sell us down the river
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I'm still scratching my raggedy arse over the notion that teh bit torrents represent a 'market'. Without some sort of exchange of value, it makes little sense as a label. A 'pirate's market' is even more horse-drawn in its imagery than a quaint notion like:
the value of creators and editors and publishers and their contribution to society
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People want to have a say in how technology impacts upon our world, they're just tools after all.
People are trying to have a say, but being drowned out by commercial interests. There is plenty of evidence that downloaders spend more on attending concerts than non-downloaders, especially outside mainstream music. That's a signal that exposure equates to income for the artists (you know, the people who supposedly matter the most in all of this), and it's one that makes perfect sense to anyone who's willing to actually think about it. But, because that money doesn't end up in the hands of the labels, the moguls cry about how "piracy is destroying music." Bollocks. It's changing the nature of the relationship between the artist and the fan, and in the process it's making the labels irrelevant.
I've already said that movies are different to music, because the costs of production are significantly higher, but that doesn't mean there's no way for the industry to survive in an age of downloads. People will pay for quality and convenience, provided the price is reasonable. The assumption that people download because they don't want to pay is not supported by evidence, unless you take the pronouncements of the media cartels as factual.
Thinking about the value of creators and editors and publishers and their contribution to society is just so damn hard, who needs that shit.
How does saying that trying to force society to accept a continuation of an existing business model is unjust equate to dismissing the value of "creators and editors and publishers"? Creators have a role in any model, as by definition without the creators there's nothing to distribute. Editors, where they are necessary, will continue to be necessary in any given model. It doesn't matter if you're distributing an e-document for 25c or selling a dead-tree novel for $25, editing is of no lesser importance. Publishers are the ones who are struggling, because their stranglehold on distribution of the written word is under threat. Now you can get your work to the world for the cost of an account at DreamHost or GoDaddy. But people will buy paper books, regardless. Plenty of authors have seen sales of their back catalogues increase when they've released e copies of their new works. Yet again, people will pay for a real product, even if there's a downloadable one available, because real products have tangibility.
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Publishers are the ones who are struggling, because their stranglehold on distribution of the written word is under threat. Now you can get your work to the world for the cost of an account at DreamHost or GoDaddy.
Yeah, like, who needs Faber and Faber or Weidenfeld and Nicolson, when you have DreamHost or GoDaddy?
Of course, when old-fashioned dead-tree publishers are not strangling the distribution of the written word, they are doing stuff like finding and nurturing young authors,and marketing their work. But that is not an acceptable business model for people who want the product but don't want to pay for it.
The blacksmiths turned mechanics at least got paid for fixing the horseless carriages.
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People are trying to have a say, but being drowned out by commercial interests.
I don't disagree with your arguments that follow, but your original question was about why people don't like the argument about the blacksmith and the coming of the car.
It's very similar to the argument that manufacturing should die in the Western World because things can be made for half the price in China or Mexico. People don't necessarily want technology to always be making the decisions about important things like music and literature.
There is drowning out coming from the "adapt or die" side as well as the "downloaders are killing music". Neither necessarily impress.
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for people who want the product but don't want to pay for it.
In the words of Wikipedia, [citation needed]. That the industries affected claim it does not make it so. I'll see you the claimed "piracy decreases purchases" and raise you some authors who disagree. Already pointed to the relationship between downloading music and attending concerts (forgive me for not being at all upset that the music labels are losing out on that relationship). Exposure==sales, it's that simple. To quote from the first link, "obscurity is a bigger risk that piracy."
With movies, well, there's some argument both ways. A lot of people will go and view a movie even if they've downloaded it, but only if it's a good movie. If it's shit they don't see the point in spending $15, which is fair enough in my book. If you want people to pay, produce a quality product rather than relying on hype and ignorance. Don't blame SMS and instant messaging for the fact that your product is awful and people don't want to go and see it, come up with better products.For as long as people want to buy real books and real CDs, there will be a place for the producers of both. But don't expect society to enforce your historical dominance just because it's your very existence at stake. Find ways to be of utility in the new age, or please die quietly. Yes blacksmiths got paid when they became mechanics, but that only works as a counter argument if you're saying that nobody gets paid anything in the new age. That's bullshit, and you know it.
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People don't necessarily want technology to always be making the decisions about important things like music and literature.
No, it should be the consumers who make those decisions. Or are you arguing that the state should legislate to create a market for things? It's not technology that's making these choices, it's the people who use them. Putting the downloading genie back in its bottle isn't going to happen, so society needs to be discussing how to live with the new tech instead of discussing how to hobble it and protect the old models.
There is drowning out coming from the "adapt or die" side as well as the "downloaders are killing music". Neither necessarily impress.
Clearly the "adapt or die" crowd aren't doing a very good job. If we were, ACTA would be a non-existent issue. The strident tones are an attempt to break through the "it doesn't affect me" mentality displayed by a lot of people. ACTA is being negotiated in secret, contains provisions that the people of NZ have made very, very clear that they do not want to have enacted into our statute books, and consequently is representative only of the views and positions of the "downloaders are killing music" lobby. The "adapt or die" lobby are at least trying to be a voice for the other side of the debate, and that is important when you have secret negotiations on matters of national law.
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People don't necessarily want technology to always be making the decisions about important things like music and literature.
Are you saying that manufacturing jobs and people's work in general aren't important?
(I know you're not, but it seemed an interesting slip!)
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I'm sensing that this discussion is actually turning into a pro/anti free market one. The choice between downloading or enforced purchase is very close to the choice between allowing or denying offshoring of manufacturing. Either you allow the market to speak, or you don't, there is no real middle ground that can be taken without being seen as dishonest by one side or the other.
In NZ's case, we're so far down the free market path that it's complete hypocrisy for politicians to seek to protect cultural producers when they've not protected manufacturers and workers from their operations being sent off China or Mexico. Cultural production cannot be sent offshore, as it is tied intimately to the society from which its inspiration is drawn. There is no risk that our musicians and writers will contract someone in Mumbai or Beijing to generate that which currently comes from our shores. -
Are you saying that manufacturing jobs and people's work in general aren't important?
Ah, the two sentences originally had something else between them, but then I took it out. And they were the other way around. Like Witi, I probably need a good editor.
No, it should be the consumers who make those decisions. Or are you arguing that the state should legislate to create a market for things?
Christ, lets not leave it just up to consumers. Just because it's a business model, doesn't mean it's not about something more than business. That's my point about the 'adapt or die' line. I don't want my culture to live or die by the market.
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In NZ's case, we're so far down the free market path that it's complete hypocrisy for politicians to seek to protect cultural producers when they've not protected manufacturers and workers from their operations being sent off China or Mexico.
We already do that with numerous cultural activities - half the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, NZ on Air? Funding for ballet and orchestras and radio stations and TV stations.
Clearly there's some glass half full between the two extremes you painted.
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We already do that with numerous cultural activities - half the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, NZ on Air? Funding for ballet and orchestras and radio stations and TV stations.
How many authors get state funds when they're not directly commissioned by the state? How many musicians? The state is not in the business of propping up failing bands and writers.
Even within the confines of MCH, culture lives and dies by the market. If your pitch for a TV show turns out to be a dud, the market says that you die. NZoA will not continue to fund something that the market does not want. The handful of state-sponsored touring performance groups are, as much as anything, representatives of New Zealand to the world. The state funds them because there is a perceived value to the state in having them exist.For all your fear of having culture "live or die by the market", that's already what happens. Why do you think it's only a small number of artists that get air time on radio? How many authors do you think get published out of all the ones that submit manuscripts? The market is already making decisions about culture, and the fact that there are scarce dollars being funnelled into a small number of gatekeepers (the labels, studios and publishers) means that we are exposed only to that which that object of your horror, the market, says are worthy. The internet democratises this distribution, yet you seem to find the notion terrifying. If you're successful under the existing model, of course you don't want it to change. But if you're one of the multitudes deemed unworthy, you may actually achieve some degree of success in the new world.
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Maybe not so much "Don't sell us down the river"
but more "take me to the reivers"
The modern day Freebooters
as long as they get the order right:
Rape, pillage then burn!
(though the reverse works in the digital age) -
If your pitch for a TV show turns out to be a dud, the market says that you die.
Resisting urge to niggle... fail. You don't pitch to The Market, you pitch to a Gatekeeper.
How many authors do you think get published out of all the ones that submit manuscripts?
Because Gatekeepers decide what they think the market will buy. Sometimes they get this really, really wrong - like the 30-odd publishers who rejected Harry Potter. Debates about artistic merit aside, from a market POV, they were completely wrong. But Rowling wasn't pitching to The Market, she was pitching to a Gatekeeper.
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"How many authors get state funds when they're not directly commissioned by the state?'
Actually Matthew, every NZ author who has had a book published, copies of which are on loan from public libraries. And, in some places overseas (Denmark for example) authors are paid a pension to write what they like, after they have a publishing record.
And Emma has it precisely right: Gatekeepers control the writing market. I had one book rejected by every NZ publisher (and 2 overseas ones): it was only after it was published by a feminist collective - and sold like the proverbial hotcakes - that conventional publishers became interested.
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You know, `failing' is not a synonym for `unprofitable'.
Or are you arguing that the state should legislate to create a market for things?
You do realise that this is what copyright is, right? The state creating a market in something in order to ensure economically efficient production? I mean, it is hardly a novel idea that the state should intervene here. (again, public good problem.)
There is no risk that our musicians and writers will contract someone in Mumbai or Beijing to generate that which currently comes from our shores.
Yes, LA, that well known part of Auckland.
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*sigh*
You pitch to the gatekeeper. If the gatekeeper thinks the market will buy it, they'll sign you. If they don't, they won't. None of you have countered that point.
In the case of NZoA, which was the entity I had in mind with the TV pitch, if they fund your idea but it turns out to be a flop they won't keep funding it. The market speaks, and they listen. But they may decide not to fund your idea, based on what they think the market wants, and in that case the market never gets a chance to speak. Gatekeepers are not the market, and I did try to make it clear that I don't consider them to be such. They are a holder of money, hence the use of the term gatekeeper. They keep the gate between the creator and the market, they are not the market. Islander supported this notion perfectly by giving examples of situations where access to the market nearly didn't happen because the gatekeepers didn't think there was a product worth funding. In both cases the market disagreed, vocally.Keir, copyright is not the state creating a market. It is the state creating a monopoly on reproduction of a work. All the copyright in the world cannot create a market for things that nobody wants. Copyright has only existed as a concept since the 1700s, but I don't think anyone suggests that nobody made money from creative works before that time.
There is no risk that our musicians and writers will contract someone in Mumbai or Beijing to generate that which currently comes from our shores.
Yes, LA, that well known part of Auckland.
huh? I can't see Islander getting some lackey in LA to write her books. If you didn't understand my point, it was that actual creators in NZ aren't going to have someone overseas do their creating for them. Authors aren't going to contract their creative thought processes to someone in an office in Bangkok. You can't do with creativity as you can with manufacturing or design. If you do that, it's no longer your creative work.
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Because as you point out it's a right-wing free market argument for change. It's the first owners of cars turning up on the doorsteps of black smiths and going "haha you're fucked now matey, adapt or die."
That's precisely how the modernisation of newspaper production was framed -- except where it wasn't.
Murdoch fought a dreadful battle with the print unions in the Wapping years -- they wanted the process of newspapers to remain exactly as it was. And, whatever you think of Murdoch's response, they were wrong -- as even Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger noted last year.
Before all that happened, back here in New Zealand, we'd done it differently. The year I started at the Christchurch Star, the workers who'd handled the old hot metal had been retrained to work on computers, via the kind of negotiation the British print unions rejected outright.
Two years later, at Rip It Up, we got a CP/M computer. From that day, I was able to enter and format text and send it to the typesetters on a floppy disk. They presumably lost a few billable hours out of not being required to type every word of the magazine into they typesetting machines, but it made no sense to do otherwise.
Then I went to London, to discovered they were living in the past. I got work as a temp sub-editor on a music paper, and I would mark up typed copy which would wait until a courier arrived to take it to a typesetter, which would have it retyped and generate galleys to be couriered back to be proofread and then couriered back again. It was crazy, but that's how it was.
If you adopt a rule that you'll restrain technology to protect special interests, you'll end up making a lot of weird decisions. Would you ban Blogger or WordPress because it wasn't fair to conventional web designers?
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Matthew, you said:
In NZ's case, we're so far down the free market path that it's complete hypocrisy for politicians to seek to protect cultural producers when they've not protected manufacturers and workers from their operations being sent off China or Mexico.
NZ On Air clearly does that at present, in that it limits the market as it is a subsidy for NZ-based cultural outputs. A lot of NZ music only gets recorded or made into video because of their grants and subsidies. All good.
And I reserve my right to like my state intervening in cultural activities where appropriate. No matter how many times you throw ECON 101 theory into your posts.
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huh? I can't see Islander getting some lackey in LA to write her books. If you didn't understand my point, it was that actual creators in NZ aren't going to have someone overseas do their creating for them. Authors aren't going to contract their creative thought processes to someone in an office in Bangkok. You can't do with creativity as you can with manufacturing or design. If you do that, it's no longer your creative work.
What we do do is recognise the money and marketing heft behind marquee foreign creators and performers, and seek to tilt the balance a little towards out own creators. Hence: NZ On Air, Creative NZ and voluntary music quotas on the radio. I'm all for that kind of protection.
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You pitch to the gatekeeper. If the gatekeeper thinks the market will buy it, they'll sign you. If they don't, they won't. None of you have countered that point.
Gatekeepers create markets. A couple of years ago, people returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair saying that it was vampires all the way down. And lo it came to pass that a genre of teenage fiction was created. Small numbers of insiders - publishers and literary agents - had decided what the market would be. Of course, they had to come up with stuff that might fly, but still they created a market. The notion that the consumer is in charge is hopelessly naive.
It is the same with every other form of creative endeavour: market makers - critics, curators and so on - create and maintain markets.
The claimed success of a few unknown books by unknown authors is not an effective alternative to the book trade. The Radiohead argument does not work either, because Radiohead were already established and had been established by the old-fashioned music industry. They also had a committed following. Nobody will give you money if they don't know you; and without creative industries like publishing and music, they won't be able to know you.
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If you adopt a rule that you'll restrain technology to protect special interests, you'll end up making a lot of weird decisions. Would you ban Blogger or WordPress because it wasn't fair to conventional web designers?
I didn't say anything about restraining technology. Just that you can't sit there and go "technology did it" and not necessarily give a shit about what it means.
If, and I emphasise the "if", we discovered that technology meant that writers were just not earning as much and therefore were being turned off writing, that would be a concern. Less writers, less books being written, culturally poorer. And NZ might look at more state money going into supporting authors to ensure that we still had that important cultural output. Writers in residence, grants to support up-and-coming writers, more prizes for successful publications etc.
There will always be changes from technology, and many of them will be good. That's no reason not to look at the negative impacts and consider "is this a consequence we want to mitigate in some way?" As copyright law did for many years.
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Also, I fear that we're veering away from what's really wrong with ACTA -- the surrender of our sovereign power to make law for us, and the unacceptable (and almost unprecedented) secrecy of the process.
Apart from the Section 92A equivalents -- in my view it's simply wrong for disconnection from the internet on the accusation of infringement to be the default sanction -- there would actually be some benefits in being presented with de facto US copyright law, with its relatively generous approach to "fair use".
But not like this. Imagine if this were, say, a labour treaty, and a group of people much like ourselves had petitioned the government over an untenable legal provision in New Zealand labour law, at least partly won their case -- and then being legislated over by a secretly reached global treaty. That's what we're looking at here.
And we tend to forget what copyright maximalism would actually look like. No YouTube clips here on Fridays (and quite possibly no YouTube), maybe no search engines worth the name. All of us reach accommodations with copyright that fall short of that maximalist position, every day we're on the internet.
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Keir, copyright is not the state creating a market.
Er, it is the state creating a market. It may be that the market decides certain things are worthless, but it is quite meaningful to say that by creating a right that can be bought and sold the state creates a market*.
You can't do with creativity as you can with manufacturing or design.
Again, LA. Yes, yes, I know what you want to say, which is that NZ culture is different from American culture, and that we couldn't get that from overseas. But quite clearly there is an international market in culture, and we quite clearly do outsource large parts of our cultural identity ( Dr Who frex.) So it really doesn't make sense to hold up culture as somehow safe from off-shoring. (I could do that thing with %ages of air time for NZ music now vs 20 yrs as an example here; if it can change one way it can quite happily go the other.)
In fact that's what a lot of this ACTA stuff is, it's the totalising market etc etc.
* I guess in that rather arcane usage of the London Stock Exchange the state isn't `making a market' but I don't even know if the LSE does that any more.
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Gatekeepers create markets. A couple of years ago, people returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair saying that it was vampires all the way down. And lo it came to pass that a genre of teenage fiction was created. Small numbers of insiders - publishers and literary agents - had decided what the market would be. Of course, they had to come up with stuff that might fly, but still they created a market. The notion that the consumer is in charge is hopelessly naive.
Is not.
Witness the pilgrimage to ComicCon this year by all kinds of content owners, including producers who were making what really couldn't be considered sci-fi or comics. They desperately needed to talk to the geeks with their social media mojo.
And I'd put money on the fact that the wise heads who declared that vampires were the next thing weren't exercising some brilliant personal insight. They read it on the internet.
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There will always be changes from technology, and many of them will be good.
That's right all those labour-saving devices are freeing us up to individually have the free-time to make the world a better place...
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