Oil and Water28 July 2003 I went to go see Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life over the weekend (much better than the first movie, but it would pretty much have to be) and one of the "previews" just tickled the heck out of me. It was a profile of a guy who works as a set painter in Hollywood. The piece, it or ones like it soon to be attached to every motion picture screened nationwide, painted the set painter as a regular guy with a regular job, just a poor schmoe that depended on the continued profitability of the motion picture industry to pay his bills. The idea was that bootlegging movies endangers this guy's job, and that we shouldn't do it. If you can't get 'em with reason, go for the guilt trip. I got a lot of responses over last week's column. I was called stupid, evil and just plain wrong for suggesting that bootlegging copyrighted material was okay. Which all goes to show that I'm often not as good a writer as I think I am. If you think last week's column was about saying that bootlegging is okay, I didn't do my job. That's not what I meant to say. I realize that bootlegging is wrong. I realize that copying something you don't have rights to without compensating the creator is wrong. Believe me, I know. I'm trying to get to the point where I can make a living as a writer. I don't want people ripping me off any more than Harlan Ellison wants people ripping him off. I didn't say bootlegging was okay. I said that in the absence of legitimate content, it was inevitable. And it is. Supply and demand has nothing to do with morality, folks. Wrong may be wrong, but that won't make it cease to exist. Put plainly, moralizing and even the Great American Legal System won't do a whit to stop a guy in China from turning out copies of X-Men 2 on DVD by the thousands. American law doesn't apply to him, and there's a demand to fill. Chinese people gotta eat, too. So let's put aside any moral questions about whether bootlegging is right or wrong. Let's assume it's wrong. Let's also assume it's going to happen if there is a demand for something that the content owners refuse to provide. The fact that people are willing to download 700MB movies, the fact that the fifth Potter book was scanned, proofed and posted within hours of publication, these things prove there is a demand that's not being met though legitimate channels. If we agree that bootlegging is wrong and that it should stop, how do we do that? Well, I'll tell you straight off that guilt trips like the recent MPAA attempt won't work. If anything, they're so tragic they're funny. This is going to backfire on two counts. First, the younger, less moral folks in the audience (Oy! These kids today!) will be more likely to bootleg just because they know Hollywood doesn't want them to do it. But more troubling is that these spots are shown to every moviegoer. As in, to people that probably didn't realize downloading movies was even an option. I wonder if these spots will spur an increase in broadband sales… Lawsuits don't work. The RIAA has taken to suing the parents of college students that share music. Now not only are the kids not likely to buy CDs, but the parents probably won't, either. Let's face it, suing the heck out of your customer base isn't the best way to generate goodwill and repeat business. Will the lawsuits stop bootlegging? Well, they'll almost certainly stop the people being sued. They'll probably have a distinct chilling effect among the people that personally know the people being sued. That guy in China making X2 DVD's? He couldn't care less. Lawsuits will just drive people from traceable networks like Kazaa to more truly anonymous systems like Freenet. New laws don't work. If anything, more restrictive laws combined with the negative publicity from aggressive lawsuits could turn file trading into an act of civil disobedience, an act of protest. The penalties for bootlegging copyrighted materials are way out of line with the nature of the offense, and people tend to react to unjust laws by breaking them in defiance. In the immortal words of Princess Leia, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more systems will slip through your fingers." The RIAA hasn't seen anything yet. Make bootlegging a social protest and they'll have too many bootleggers to ever track, much less catch. So what does work? Well, there are a few guys you could ask. Jim Baen, Tim O'Reilly and Steve Jobs. These guys have made a killing bucking conventional wisdom and providing what people want how they want it. They've succeeded because they understand that in order to make digital media work, there are a few rules you must follow. Don't get in the way. This is Microsoft's biggest problem with digital media. Microsoft Reader and Windows Media Player both require the user to jump through ever more complicated hoops to access digital content. A big selling point for digital media is supposed to be the convenience. Making it a pain in the rear to access makes digital content much less appealing. Don't treat your customers like criminals. Media that can only be accessed on a registered, activated device really says one thing to the customer: we don't trust you. Anyone who's been to an airport recently has probably had enough of that attitude, and we don't need it from content we've rightfully purchased. If I buy content, it's mine. I don't want the content provider hanging around controlling what I do with it after the fact. It's insulting. Reminds me of an old Yakov Smirnov joke. "I saw furniture ad last week that I didn't get. Said 'We sell you furniture and stand behind it for six months.' This is why I left Soviet Union! I don't want people standing behind my furniture!" If I see Cary Sherman behind my couch, I'm punching him right in the mouth. Do make it easy for customers to sample what they're getting. Jobs, Baen and O'Reilly get this one. One of the most oft-cited reasons for file sharing is to see what's out there and if it's worth buying at all. Now that most of the radio stations in the US are controlled by about three corporations, there's less variety in airplay than ever. A lot of people would like to see what else is out there, because if Britany and Shakira are the end-all, be-all of today's music I may as well stop listening right now. Same thing goes for ebooks. Much as I like Clancy and Grisham (and I'm curious how long it will take Clancy's new book to show up online after it's Aug 12 release), there's other writers out there. I'm rather enjoying Steve Alten for a little summer light reading, and I'm trying to figure out what the big deal is about Dan Brown (so far, I'm not impressed with his cliché dialogue, contrived plots and two-dimensional characters, but I keep reading anyway, hoping it will get better). Most of the music and books I get to these days come from sources that let me sample what I'm getting ahead of time and see if it's worth it. The Apple Music Store has a great preview feature, and both Baen and O'Reilly let you download entire books for free to see the quality for yourself. No one's going to buy media sight unseen if they can sample it for free elsewhere, but if you let them know what they're getting, they'll probably buy from you. Make sure the customer gets enough value for the money that buying the content is preferable to bootlegging it. This one is tricky. Media companies can go about this one of two ways. They can offer stuff for prices so low that it's not worth my time to go looking for it for free elsewhere. Fictionwise uses this tack, offering short stories for two bits or so a piece, and it's really not worth it to go anywhere else. Make paying a no-brainer, and people will pay. The other way is best explained by looking at DVDs. A bootleg DVD is just the movie on a disc, usually no better than a VHS dub. Just the movie. A linear progression from opening credits to closing credits, thank you for watching. And while such bootleg DVDs are common enough on the streets of New York and at a file sharing service near you, DVD movie sales are riding high and still climbing? Why? Because of the extras. A DVD movie has voice-over commentaries by the people that made the movie, explaining how things were done and why. It has behind the scenes looks at the filming. Some have music videos, DVD-ROM video games, storyboards, even scripts. For people that love movies, these extras make the $15-20 the DVD costs more than worth what they get in return. The value of the DVD is higher than the price. Music companies don't provide this. There's no value to an average CD that you can't get by downloading the damn thing and burning it yourself for free. Ebooks are only marginally more valuable than ASCII scans in that they usually have better typography. And yet, I've seen experimentation. Vernor Vinge has an ebook-only version of his Hugo-winning A Fire Upon the Deep available at Palm Digital that has hundreds of annotations by Vinge explaining how he wrote the book and behind the scenes looks at the technology and characters. Although I bought the original ebook edition of A Fire Upon the Deep in '98 when Peanut Press first released it and own two copies in paperback (don't ask), I'm thinking seriously about buying the annotated edition as well. And in the end, it comes down to this, folks. Morality and capitalism are oil and water. Supply and demand will continue to create media bootlegs until the content owners step up and, rather than attacking the bootleggers directly, change the way they do business to make bootlegging unnecessary. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |