On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Dana Paxson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Everyone loses except the DRM owner, who is usually the outfit with the > most money. Not the creator of value, and not its consumer. > > We've already built a two-tier system that gets around this, but at the > cost of losing leverage and wealth for value creators. The upper tier plays > the DRM game, with the big firms. The lower tier works a paying job to > finance the creation of value, and uses the gain to produce art. The art > then sells in a set of markets restricted by lack of the big marketing money > that grants wider visibility. > I'm not sure this is an accurate characterisation. I have a few issues with it. First, you focus on 'working a paying job to finance creation of value.' That's an interesting statement right there, on both ends, and I'm not sure where to start so I'll start with 'creation of value.' What does that mean? In capitalist terms, there's no value if someone doesn't *deem* value; a free-market response to that idea would be, if no one's paying, there's no value created. That sounds harsh and I don't mean it as a -- er -- value judgement. What I mean to point out is that *value is subjective*. Unless you can sell the work or in some other way profit from it, you're creating value primarily *to you*. That other people benefit from it is irrelevant to the value equation, *except as it relates to the value you perceive in that*. On the other end, you're 'working at a paying job.' That's in fact what the vast, vast majority of writers do, and in fact it's what the vast, vast majority of all artists have always done throughout history. Aside from work-for-hire writers (who obviously do make a living writing), fictionists and writers of books hardly ever really make a living off their books or fictions. They may make a big chunk of it that way, but they'll have to go out and supplement it by teaching, giving talks, consulting, writing articles, and so on. More often than not, writers who build a living that way will be able to do it *because of *their publications. Now, that might not be what you're talking about. You may be talking about a lower tier who never actually gets published, or who obtains little to no income from their publication. Of course that's a big chunk, too, but such has always been the case. In fact, we've been blessed with such leisure and disposable income that such a class is now, in these past two or three hundred years, really possible for the first time. I actually think that most "value harvesting" is going to be happening in the upper-reaches of the middle tier -- the space occupied by in SF by the Charlie Strosses and Cory Doctorows, and in music by people like Neko Case or Ani diFranco. I'd bet you none of these people are making big bucks, but I'll also bet you that they're quite comfortable for the moment, and the reason, as another exemplar, Steve Earle, likes to explain, is because they work hard at it -- and, well, because enough people think they're really good at it. In writing, right now and for the forseeable future, there's not a means to make a "decent middle class living" (Steve Earle again) as the writing equivalent of an indie musician, where if you commit to playing a certain number of gigs in a year's time you can keep afloat playing music. That's not a fault of any system or conspiracy as much as it is of the nature of the medium: People don't pay $10/head plus drinks to read from a book for a couple of hours. That's not going to change. BB King has his own night club and a nice nest egg, but if he were a writer doing 300 readings a year, instead of a guitar player doing 300 gigs a year -- well, I don't think he'd have a nightclub and a nest egg. > > > The Web is changing that a little. Artists who would never have been seen > except in a club or a meeting now gain attention globally, but the process > is haphazard and payment is chancy at best. As many have found, it's hard > to give fine art away -- somehow big price tags seem to convey an idea of > value, which is about as misleading as things get. > Yep, that's a problem. But I'm uncomfortable with the idea of someone I respect playing that game, instead of subverting it. So I tend not to have a lot of respect for fine artists who get fat paychecks for single works, and I try to make no judgement about quality in relation to how big someone's advance was. IOW, I think the more useful thing to society as a whole is for us to not buy into the "fine art deserves a big paycheck" mentality. In fact, I tend to believe that the value of art may well end up *looking like* it's in inverse proportion to the artist's average payment for said art. At least in most cases. I recently heard Andrei Codrescu point out that art does really well in two kinds of times: Prosperous times, and desperate ones. It doesn't do so well when things are chugging comfortably along as normal. He argued that in the prosperous times, there was lots of largesse and people with money wanted to be seen supporting art, because it made them feel as though they were important. In desperate times, artists had no money but did art anyway, and people were hungrier for it because, well, things were bleak. Where he didn't go -- he gets what, 60 seconds? so I suppose I shouldn't fault him -- is what the qualities of the art were in each of those times. I think he doesn't like to go there, but I would conjecture that the art of a comfortable time is probably qualitatively different from the art of a despreate time. And my expectation (which I'd be happy to test if I had more time to think about it) would be that the art of desperate times is more disruptive, and hence has more mutational value, if you will. I think that would be true also of the lowest tier of art production. That's where I'd look for the really challenging and interesting stuff: Where it's coming out from need to produce it, not need to get paid for it. BTW, I'm not trying to denigrate your desire to be compensated for your art, Dana, and I'm not trying to preach to you. I'm thinking through this stuff in the way that makes sense to me. And I hope you'll note that I'm well aware you don't get paid much if anything for your art, and where that puts you in my conjectures ;-). > > But if we find ways to get from creator directly to consumer, without the > global slushpile getting in the way, DRM will die. It may never happen, but > one can hope... > This is the mediator problem, and it's a biggie. Massive disintermediation was the siren-song of the original dotcom boom, and it's still echoing in the halls of web 2.0 startups and VCs. But now people are trying to build non-mediator mediators: Whether it's "smart mobs" or statistical aggregations of preference or netowrks of trust, they're trying to replace mavens with technology. It's really just replacing one mediator with another; there always has to be a mediator, whether it's Ahmet Ertegun or the iTunes recommendation system. I don't have faith that any system will very long be driven by real public input. First, that's too chancy -- people aren't going to want to stake their fortunes on that. Second, I doubt public input is going to end up being worth what Malcolm Gladwell thinks it is. But I've already said more than I should have this evening, when I should be writing something more artistic and less intellectual-ish. > > Dana > > > > Eric Scoles wrote: > > > > On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 1:30 PM, cd <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> DRM will completely rule the day, I believe. And here's why: DRM >> will be like your stock proxy statement: it need only be so confusing >> that you relent, and give up on asserting your rights. > > > > I mostly agree, with qualifications: > > > - In the "Developed" ("First"?) world; > - For the medium term. > > > Beyond the medium term I really don't believe we can say. DRM will be an > economic drain on first world economies; it's a layer of infrastructure and > process that people won't have to put up with in developing nations. > First-worlders can try to bar entry by developing nations, and that might > work. > > A really effective DRM scheme would require top-down control (or at least > visibility) of just about every activity we can engage in that can have > economic consequences. Basically a capitalist version of Big Brother. > > Your scenario is maybe a little less than fully effective: Good enough to > confuse us. You may be right. I sort of hope not, because the more extreme > vision is easier to get people riled up about. > > OTOH, that "good enough to confuse us" scenario is also good enough for > totalitarian control. > > > > >> >> >> My wife just switched her iPod from PC to Mac. She lost half her >> purchased content. Now, you can spend hours and hours, tracking down >> for each purchased recording who controls the DRM, and figure out if >> they have records that you bought it, and then see if they'll let you >> transfer. Or you can relent because you have a life, and take another >> step towards pay-per-use. >> > > > This is what I meant when I was saying that transferring DRM media > fundamentally requires an infrastructure. You either have an infrastructure, > or you have totally free media. I can see your argument about this being > steps on a path toward pay-per-use; I actually think the revenue might be > greater for pay-to-replace, if the DRM environment stays confusing to the > point of user-hostility. > > But you're right, a pay-per-use model of some kind is likely. I reckon the > more likely form it will take initially is as service fees. No smart seller > is going to want to have a blatant pay-per-use system out there, especially > not for leisure items like music or books, because it will inhibit > consumption and breed ill-will. So they'll disguise it. > > Kindle can be our guide here: Everything you get on your Kindle is tethered > to Amazon. The device has a fair amount of capacity, but you can easily > imagine people outstripping that. In such a case, Amazon just stores the > stuff for you (or so I understand). By virtue of that, or of the fact that > they have total access to your Kindle at any time, they have total control > over your library -- and they can charge you for access to it. They'll frame > it as "defraying cost" to start with, and I doubt they'll shut off your > ability to get to the content on "your" Kindle [curious: do people actually > "own" their Kindles?], but I'm betting they will in some sense start to > charge for the storage, and sooner rather than later. Probably within the > next two years. > > > > >> >> We're moving inexorably towards a model in which the corporations that >> distribute culture will demand from us pay-per-use and pay-per-media >> (e.g., that new right they invented in which they get to control not >> only the content but how you utilize it -- so you can't let an >> algorithm read it). > > > > This is really thought-control, in a sense. It's a more subtle > manifestation of the same ideas that underpin NewSpeak: Controlling the > distribution and redistribution of creative product constrains the > mutational functions of art. If you control how content can be passed > around, you can have really unprecedented levels of control over the ways > that people *think*. (Think: "The Girl Who Was Plugged In." Tiptree was > both a psychologist and a former Spook, after all.) > > It's obvious that entrenched interests would want to control the flow and > direction of art; in doing so, they could end up with the societal > equivalent of an AKC-certified purebred, good for show or > narrowly-constrained tasks, and not much of anything else. > > Societies that didn't have that kind of constraint would still be free to > adapt in ways that ours wouldn't. So that's why part of me keeps saying > (contra so many SFian authorial voices) that there's hope for the future in > places like Africa, where there's less technological infrastructure for > control. > > (Of course, since they'll be going with newer technology right out of the > gate, that window might now last long...) > > > >> >> >> I'm disgusted that many of the writer organizations are on the wrong >> side of this battle. We're as bad as Disney, making use of our >> history and then not only demanding no one make use of us, but >> supporting the choking of the channels as a result. We complain about >> the publishing business and then our organizations line up behind the >> very interests that destroy it. >> > > A lot of it seems to me to be driven by no one wanting to give up the idea > that they may one day be best-sellers with million-$$ contracts. As Tom > Tomorrow likes to put it: "I am opposed to taxing the wealthy because I > believe that I may someday become wealthy." > > > > -- > eric scoles ([email protected]) > > > > > > -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. 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