Pay Artists, Not 'Owners'

So far as one can tell from their recent behavior, the recording companies believe that the survival of civilization depends on terrorizing 12-year-olds. Among the 261 lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America on September 8, the preteen set has figured prominently, along with college students and (to the industry's embarrassment) a teenaged recent immigrant from Poland, whose stash of online music turned out to include mostly recordings of Polish folk songs and Hungarian hip-hop--two genres of music not controlled by the five companies that "own" 90 percent of the nation's music.

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. It's worth stepping back a little to see why, in the larger context, they are doomed to fail.

Until Thomas Edison's inventions, the vast majority of human cultural activity was not subject to the metaphor of "intellectual property." Copyright, as a device for protecting publishers under the guise of protecting authors, affected only printed works in the nineteenth century. The Edison revolution made recorded music and video possible, and also made it possible to apply the metaphor of "property" to the intangible forms of creation that were embodied in the new physical recording media of phonograph records and motion picture film. The twentieth century understood culture in terms of the physical artifacts that contained it, and so the metaphor of property made sense for the justification of the monopolies in distribution that copyright law afforded the increasingly concentrated oligopoly of "media" or "content" companies.

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