Note 5 Why Culture isn't Free

. The industry began in the early 20th century as a rebellion of outsiders—a generational rebellion against live theater, against 19th- century technology, against the dominant cultural establishment, and against conventional ways of profiting from entertainment.

. the motion picture industry has established an orthodox economic method for the making, distribution and selling of movies.

. Its manifold accomplishments include building a highly profitable business model by charging consumers to watch presentations of the same movie and transforming the idea of a mass audience and, last but certainly not least, globalizing culture.

. The rebellion of the outsider has also become one of the most storied subjects for movies themselves.

. Movies might have fundamentally changed the world, but today, in the first decade of the 21st century, global change threatens to fundamentally change movies.

. Today, there’s a new generational rebellion of outsiders against the system. this digital revolution is, in part, a rebellion against the man with the movie camera. It is the revolt of a naively idealistic Internet generation against traditional mainstream media.

. This early 21st-century revolution—a populist movement of outsiders comprised mostly of academic theoreticians and an army of angry online foot soldiers—is a cultural, political and economic rebellion against the centralized, hierarchical media of the Industrial Age.

. Most provocatively, it is a rebellion against the very cornerstone of the 20th-century information and entertainment economy—the idea of "authorship" and its legal corollary intellectual property ownership.

The Pirate Party

. In the old industrial copy economy, it was hard for content to leak out of the system because books, records and movies were hard to steal in large quantities. But the technology of the digital revolution has changed all this. By enabling the replacing of physical cultural goods with digital bits, digital technology has essentially done away with the monetary value of online content.

Pirate Ideology

. Once content is digitalized and distributed on the Internet, it becomes harder and harder for its owners to protect the financial value of their product.

. But it is "control"—economic, political and, above all, cultural control—that is the primary enemy of the digital rebels.

. Author and audience therefore converge together in a deafening cacophony of user-generated content.

The Battleground

. Lessig’s misty-eyed academic dream of the cornucopia of the commons brings us back to Mason’s celebration of content "leaking out" from "the private domain" into some idealistically altruistic public space.

. Their goal in the copyright wars are to give consumer-artists the right to "remix" content, the creative pasting together of different forms of media which current copyright law restricts.

. The problem with the cult of the remix, however, is that it conveniently ignores why the majority of consumers steal content on the Internet. ---> Instead, they are downloading the latest Harry Potter movie or hit song by Madonna so that they won’t have to pay for it at the cinema or record store.

. The other problem is that most of the pirate theorists have an idealistic vision that culture should be free

. Despite trumpeting the rights of the individual creator over their corporate exploiters, none of these tenured ivory tower theorists appears to particularly respect the sensitivity of freelance artists dependent on the security of their creative content.

Solutions

. One solution that has been advanced is to punish the perpetrators of online theft.

. Perhaps most importantly, it requires the industry to do a more creative job explaining its own economics to the public