Music, Sweet Music

Tons of coverage recently of the RIAA decision to sue music owners for ripping CDs that they already own. It's a completely brain-dead idea, and it's interesting to see a Motely Fool column that argues this is a good reason to sell your music company stocks -- not because they're, you know, evil, but because they're going to start losing money by doing stupid stuff like this. Contrast this with an article in Wired about Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. Mr. Morris has been notoriously hostile to music customers, calling iPods "repositories for stolen music", but has since set up open MP3 downloads through Amazon.

I put this all under the heading of "Intellectual Property" -- IP. I find the whole topic immensely interesting. Companies like Universal do a great job of playing the villain. Even when they take steps like the DRM-free downloads they still come off as clueless or evil. And, well, that's right. It's also true that there's a certain strain of wild-eyed, feral anarchism that lurks behind some of the less sophisticated "information wants to be free" crowd. "How are you going to stop us?" it asks, adding very little else to the debate. Because after all, that's not an answer either.

I am a philosopher, both by inclination and by training, and we're pretty good at debating moral questions. This is a topic where the debate really means something, because the technological reality is undermining the regulatory and moral reality that drove the current situation. Not only that, but I also have an interest in intellectual property, both as a consumer and as a content creator through photography and (formerly and maybe again someday) through writing.

That tension -- consumer vs. creator -- is how the conflict is framed. Consumers want the content; creators want to get compensated for creating it. Both sides bring a mix of desires to the table, some reasonable, some not, but neither side has a complete and clear understanding of what it wants. And of course, there's no real 'sides' on the issue, since content creators represent a large swath of very different producers, and they're all consumers too.

But it's important to recognize another tension happening here, and one that's often conflated with the rest of the debate. That's the tension between individuals and corporations. This is murkier water than the consumer-creator pond, as there's no simple breakdown of this axis. A 'company' is anything from Universal Music to Google/YouTube to an indie record store, while 'individuals' include consumers as well as content producers ranging from blog posters to budding singer-songwriters to JK Rowling. It's not a simple picture. But it is absolutely crucial to the conflict.

I guess this post is just an introduction to the things I want to write about, at least in terms of IP. But to do that I want to introduce one more oppositional axis. This is not an axis of people but one of 'stuff'. I guess the best way to describe it is 'objects' vs. 'information'. Again this is not a clean dividing line, since there's no way to separate the 'stuff' from the information that comes with it. Still, this dichotomy is fundamental to the debate in countless ways. Here's one example. Until about 2003 or so, Universal Music made 100% of its sales by selling objects -- records, tapes, CDs, and the like. Of course the consumers were mostly interested in the information on those CDs -- the music -- but the money flowed through the transfer of objects. That's no longer completely the case, and companies are still struggling to deal with what that means.

This is a long post and I've really introduced more questions but answered none. I do plan to say more about the topic over time. As I said, it's fascinating. Certainly Doug Morris would think so.