Hi Everyone:
I wanted to develop the idea about “tangibility” a little more, because I think it helps us to understand better what is going on here. I didn’t write of it yesterday because it would have made the discussion too unwieldy, but it might be possible to sketch out a few things that I think are guiding principles that apply to any digital work, be it a song, a movie, an ebook, a journal article, whatever. I agree that most musical artists today are commercial, as they work for corporate entities…but there’s no reason music has to be made on this model, and I think there are many compelling reasons to suggest that it would be better off if it did not (they include, but are not limited to, the increase of musical diversity, creativity, originality, and user satisfaction).
Upton Sinclair, the American author who documented the horrors of Chicago slaughterhouses in the 19th century, reminds us that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” This applies to both sides of this debate: my job depends upon the free and unrestricted flow of information, which is why Canadian laws routinely waive many copyright restrictions for educational institutions. My students would think I had gone mad if I said to them, ok, here’s how the new iEducate Store works…when I teach you a formula (say Snell’s law in optics), you pay me 99 cents (the iTunes model for songs)…if I teach you two formulas, that’s $1.98. This would be crazy even if I were teaching them original research that I myself had created, rather than anyone else (now admittedly my own contributions are rather small and insignificant, but they do exist, and could, potentially, be “billable” items, if I looked upon information in this way…but I don’t). Treating academic information/journal articles as discrete, billable corporate “units” is absurd; teaching would become impossible, and research would wither on the vine. Public libraries would cease to function if you had to pay a fee every time you wanted to read a book.
I am paid instead for my ability to research and teach, which is a sort of “performance art”…when I am practicing this art, I am helping my students learn (all learning is, at root level, a rearrangement of neurons in the brain, just as all digital data is, at root level, a rearrangement of magnetic bits on a hard drive). When you download a song, all you are doing, is rearranging bits on a drive that you already own. You are making an image or visualization of something that exists in another “brain” (the sharing computer); you are not taking anything from that computer at all, because that computer still has the magnetic bits that it had before, oriented in the same manner. Again, to “steal” something means that you are depriving someone else of the use of a real object that they already own…merely xeroxing a book does not destroy that book. When I create an image in my mind of a physical object, I do not destroy or damage the object in any way; if I have an eidetic memory, I might even be able to make a “perfect” copy of the object in my mind, but the tangible object is obviously not affected by my perception of it at all. And if I share my image (describe it in great detail), all I have done is reproduce that image (albeit imperfectly) in another mind; I have not lost my own image, rather I have made two, when before there was one. Filesharing is really more like “reproduction” in this sense, except that the offspring are exact clones, and their effective cost in resources is zero. Under this model, the downloading computer is rather like a student, if you will; as it reorders and restructures its sectors into greater and greater complexity, it is doing what we call “learning” in a human brain.
The Internet by its very nature is similar, as you can see in this very discussion board…there are no fees of any kind charged for the creative posts I make (or anyone else), and people are free to use pieces from them, quote them, copy them, or do whatever they want with them (and our colleagues at Google and the Wayback Archive) will helpfully cache/copy them for anyone else, long after we are gone. Imagine what would happen if you had to charge, say, 99 cents a thread (the iCatholicAnswersForumStore) for someone who wanted to read/copy/quote them! A profit-driven model is obviously a non-starter for a discussion board.
For an interesting “cautionary tale” on how the corporate model for the internet has gone disastrously wrong in understanding it, you can’t do better than Richard Stallman’s “The Right to Read”, given here:
gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html I find the alleged “Right to Read” terrifying…hopefully you do too, and if you do, you’ll better understand where I am coming from.
I continue to maintain that the United States is not the world…while Americans may view song downloading as illegal because it is “stealing”, many countries (including my Canada) do not, and instead agree that making a copy of a song does not take the song away from anybody, and thus fails the legal test of theft.
Jacques
**