Abstract

Pay Artists, Not 'Owners'

The author argues that the Recording Industry Association of America's attempts to persecute music file-sharers are self-serving and, ultimately, self-defeating. The recent vicious turn in the file-sharing struggle marks a new epoch in the defeat of ownership: Suing your own customers is not a sustainable business model. But the oligopolists of culture are running out of alternatives. The recording industry--which has done no small amount of stealing from musicians in its brief history--likes to claim that sharing a song with someone else is equivalent to stealing a CD from a store. All over the world the children of the Internet Age recognize that networks are for sharing data, and that technology makes excluding those who don't pay literally impossible. Perfect digital copying and costless electronic distribution raise once again the issue of the morality of exclusion: if we can give everyone on earth a copy of any digital work of beauty or utility for the same price that we make the first copy, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? There is every reason to believe that new forms of interaction between artist and audience can actually improve artists' financial lot. If those of us who can afford it were to set up our computers to pay a quarter automatically to the artist for each song we get by sharing and decide to keep, musicians would earn enough to repay everyone in the creative chain (songwriters, producers, engineers) while keeping more than the pittance the "owners" condescend to award them now.