Dirty Sanchez in El Dorado (the returning of the screw?) [Pt. II of III]

Last week, we looked at the world of Squibznik (private tracker extraordinaire), a world that is El Dorado to downloader-members, and Dirty Sanchez to the recording industry. I finished the column begging the question, (thee question if you’re wearing chocolate face fluff): why would I buy a CD?

‘Because it’s illegal not to,’ squeaks Sanchez the rec. exec, ‘downloading music is stealing!’

Is it stealing? Hmm…

In that irritatingly unskippable ad on a lot of rental DVDs, downloading is equated with stealing people’s ‘things’. ‘You wouldn’t steal a handbag… so don’t steal movies!’ Is the irony of the fact that this appears on rental DVDs lost on these eedjuts?
Whatever the case, the ad is wrong for two reasons: downloaders are not thieves, and they’re not stupid. Let’s say I steal your manbag, full of cash you earned dishpigging of a Saturday eve to pay for your tweakend shenanigans. It’s ten o’clock on Saturday night. The phones are running hot. You’re all gee-d up. And I took your money. There goes your lost weekend. I’ve taken from you, past and future: your projected fun and the time it took you to earn that cash, which you’ll never get back. Those five hours, those precious moments of your life you sacrificed washing dishes… I’ve robbed you of something you can never replace.

But mp3s are different – ‘almost’ nothing, just information telling your vibrator how to vibrate (yes, your iPod is just a fancy vibrator for your mind). Now, if I learn Japanese, I’m not depriving anyone in Japan of his or her language (imagine poor little Kenji, reduced to a lifetime’s grunting and signing because the nasty foreigner ‘stole’ his Japanese). Similarly, sharing music files doesn’t decrease a finite, scarce amount of something owned by an individual. Artists (well, living ones) ‘retain’ their music – they keep their own copies, and sometimes even the rights to its reproduction (if they’re lucky with the record deal). And they get to keep their unique ability to ‘perform’ their music face-to-face, which is something that nobody can take away from them, even though cover bands try.

The downloader hasn’t deprived anyone of ‘music’ – they’ve actually contributed to its abundance. It’s dishonest to say you’re ‘stealing music’ – historically, only record deals have had the power to steal an artist’s own music from them. What you’re actually doing is stealing ‘revenue’. Copyright, intellectual property – these are just ways of protecting profit. Because record companies see artists as sources of profit, it’s easy to see why they get confused. But, by their logic, why not sue all cover bands? Or attack second-hand record stores, who contribute nothing in royalties, and actually profit from selling other people’s music (unlike downloaders)? Or ban cassettes? But they’ve all been tolerated, because the record companies knew they retained their monopoly. Really, if you wanted to acquire a collection of music, it was impossible to bypass them. But now it is. Hence the panic. You’re not just stealing milk… you’ve Squibznicked their cashcow.

So there are two ‘real’ issues: providing a way for living artists to continue living as artists, and refusing or allowing the recording industry to retain its monopoly over the means of distribution. To me, this is a no-brainer: provided we can look after musicians and their entourage, the labels can go jump. This is an industry that ensures artists get no more than a few dollars from the sale of their own work; that has been happy to sell re-packaged versions of dead artists’ work at full price and take all the profit; that ‘forced’ digital on consumers because it was lighter, cheaper, and smaller. This aggressive, possessive parasite is screaming blue murder, now that they too have been rationalised by the same logic they forced on us… is it time to return the screw?

But what about ‘good’ record stores? Live venues? Independent distribution networks? The artists who’ve made all that incredible cover art? And the studio heads? Isn’t downloading kind of like A-bombing the temple, just because there are some thieves in it? Or is it that now, for the first time, we have to ‘think’, because we finally have a meaningful choice to make?

That’s what we’ll look at next week…

© (he he) Peter Chambers 2007