Pho List Fisk is an essay by Jack Rusher, published here Wednesday, August 13, 2003. It is part of Ideas, Big and Small.
I attended my first Pho List gathering last evening. Lawyers argued music technology policy late into the evening over sake and snacks. I listened with some interest and, in classic esprit d’escalier, here are my rebuttals to the various suggestions put forth.
Bandwidth Tax
What of bandwidth use that has nothing to do with copyrighted content? What of public domain content? To whom go the tax revenues from bandwidth used by those who download software? Free software? Should downloads of the Apache webserver generate tax revenue to be used in the remuneration of Britney Spears?
What authority shall maintain control over international tax revenues? How will access to the Internet be denied those who do not collect or pay this tax?
Redistributing the tax based on monitoring transmitted data for digital fingerprints will not work. A machine’s perception of the quiddity of a song is so specific relative to a person’s conception of same that it will always be possible to strip fingerprints from digital media without losing that part of the data that humans recognize as “the song.”
Lastly, consumers are notoriously hostile towards usage-based billing schemes: witness the popularity of flat rate cable television, mobile telephone and Internet service.
Compulsory Licensing
Who will compel whom and by whose authority? How will enforcement be handled on the international stage? What agency will handle issues of license theft? Lastly, any solution that solves the technical problems of licensing must also intrude upon the sanctity of the consumer’s privacy.
There’s little utility in designing a taxation scheme that ignores the nature of the Internet as a global, unregulated and ad hoc system of machines. The default thinking of most American pundits involves legislation through the United States government that will no more protect copyright holders from Internet piracy than it has from worldwide physical media piracy.
DVD Value Add
The argument that media will always present a value-add over downloaded data is grounded in the notion that bandwidth will remain scarce and thus that physical media will remain the best distribution mechanism for large datasets. This is a naive theory that can be debunked by casual inspection of a graph of available Internet bandwidth over the last ten years.
There will come a time when the entire life’s work of Duke Ellington can be downloaded in a moment. What then will be the value add of the plastic token that is a DVD?
The argument that humans will be compelled to collect these artifacts by a fetishistic impulse fails to take into account an even stronger human impulse: laziness. Convenience trumps quality and marketing changes minds, thus McDonald’s and Microsoft. The minority of users who desire album art and liner notes in physical (rather than web site) form are neither the source of the piracy problem nor a part of its solution.
In Summary
Suggestions presented by non-technical persons typically hinge on central control and accounting of the public Internet. The Internet was designed in such a way as to make this entirely unpracticable. Central planning is not a robust solution to these, or most other, problems.
The survival of the unit sale mechanism depends upon the creation of a robust micropayment system that will provide the market lubrication necessary to reduce the cost of legal acquisition until cheating is more effort than it’s worth. There will, of course, still be piracy in that future, but it will be lost in the noise of commerce.