If music is not protected, then neither are you

I hope people will read the whole article at the following link:

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/04/david_lowery_silicon_valley_must_be_stopped_or_creativity_will_be_destroyed/

Scott Timberg
Dec 3, 2013

David Lowery, the frontman for the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, has become perhaps the most assertive and polarizing figure in the movement for musicians’ rights in the Internet age. Between his appearances onstage leading his bands – both of which recently toured — speaking to the business-of-music classes he teaches at the University of Georgia, and the blog he helps run, the Trichordist, Lowery works to stop the exploitation of artists.

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Let’s just zoom out a little bit to Silicon Valley in general. There’s Silicon Valley and then there’s a more radical, ideological version of Silicon Valley, and I think that’s what we’re dealing with here. This phrase gets bandied about called “permission-less innovation.” The idea is that you just do stuff without asking permission. In the down-the-rabbit-hole never-never land of Silicon Valley, they seem to present this unabashedly as if this were a good thing.

It’s good for them. Commercially, it’s good for them. Let’s think about it. Silicon Valley, there’s a part of it that has this notion of permission-less innovation, that they treat this as a good thing, but think about this as a civilian. You put your photos on Instagram and then is permissionless innovation just using those photos without your permission? Is permissionless innovation just using whatever you might have written on the Web in any way that any commercial entity sees fit? That’s largely what we’re talking about here.

The bigger fight here is that if they can do this with our songs, with our lyrics, then they can do it with your Instagram photos, they can do it with your Facebook profile, they can do it with anything you put on your Web page without your permission. That’s what permissionless innovation is. I don’t think the majority of people want that.

It strikes me that the people preaching permissionless innovation are the same people who work very hard to patent their software and their algorithms and things like that.

Yes. But, on the other hand, “permissionless innovation” is a favorite phrase of Google, and you see them in all kinds of patent battles — like their Motorola patents — with other companies. So, I guess, the big corporations get to have different intellectual property rights than artists or people who use Instagram or something like that. Do we want a world like that?

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I think Silicon Valley has gotten a pass on this. Most companies in other industries have; you think about oil companies funding global warming sort of studies that cast doubts on global warming, things like that, that are subject to scrutiny. But I think Silicon Valley in general has gotten some sort of pass from the general public and the press in general on these kinds of issues. And the end goal is not — they’re not Camper Van Beethoven lyrics and they’re not Beastie Boys songs — the end goal here, the end zone is when they get your data: your Facebook photos, your Instagram photos. When they get to you and do that as they see fit. We’re going to wake up in a world one day where we look back and say, “What the fuck were we thinking?”

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Like I said, even the Pirate Party says when it’s a commercial venture, that is when — even the most radical anti-copyright people agree that if it’s commercial, those who create that content have a right to profit or have some sort of say over how their stuff is used.

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That’s essentially the emergency versus a 64 percent decline in recorded music revenue to musicians, a 47 percent decline in artist employment. Yes. That’s true. But the four alarm fire isn’t the length of copyright. The four-alarm fire is that large, multinational corporations have figured out ways to monetize our music, our lyrics, without cutting us in on that. The currency of page views, the currency is you can set up a website that has the top 20 song lyrics, charge advertising on it, do your SEO right and you’ve got a top 500 Alexa website and you generate revenue from that. And you don’t cut in the artist. So this is kind of like the old music business of when the artist would sign a contract and they wouldn’t get any royalties; it’d go to the record companies and you’d ask them “where are my royalties,” and the record company would say, “Hey, here’s a Cadillac.” This is the same, old-school music business, except you don’t even get the Cadillac.

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if you go to something like San Francisco MusicTech, you’ll have a bunch of people standing onstage who have never made a fucking profit in their entire lives telling me, who makes a profit year after year, that I need to change my business model and innovate and embrace technology.

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