How a generation’s freeloading has starved creativity

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/07/fifteen-years-utter-bollocks-how-generation-s-freeloading-has-starved-creativity

BY CHRIS RUEN PUBLISHED 16 JULY, 2014

Driving down civilisation road, it takes effort to grapple with the ramifications of our choices along the way. Out of basic self-interest, we often ignore our own effects upon the world. You throw your rubbish out the window as you drive on by, thinking "I’m just one person, so why worry?"

Such was my mentality as a college student during what we might call the Napster Boom, where suddenly recorded music was digitised and transformed into free content via one “file-sharing” service after another. And yes, those are ironic quotation marks. Because describing exploitative digital piracy sites as though they are benign swap-shops where one can ‘share’ ‘files’ is just one of the many kinds of bollocks that pepper this debate.

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Things changed for me when I got a job in a Brooklyn café in the late 2000s. Many of the most respected and critically-praised bands of the day were customers there, but my excitement at getting to know them was dimmed when I realised that rather than enjoying the fruits of their success, they were, well, just as broke as I was - a lowly part-time barista living in a shoddy NY rental.

I was troubled by the knowledge that millions of music fans were freeloading music from these artists without a second thought, and more so that I was one of them, hypocritically claiming to “love” music all the while. Once I realised that the great majority of artists and musicians actually needed their legal rights enforced under copyright just to have the chance to break even, the usual excuses for digital piracy started to look like sophomoric drivel.

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Any desperate excuse was good enough, so long as it justified the original campaign. Otherwise, the people who fought against copyright in this battle would have to confront the fact that they were never carrying the flag for freedom or “openness”, but for aggression, entitlement and selfishness masked by superficial delusions of grandeur.

When made today, the argument that availability is the problem is even more boneheaded. Legal, reasonably priced options for digital content are spreading throughout the globe. Arguably there is also whole new generation of consumers out there who, although they might once have believed the drivel about piracy being OK, have now, like me, realised it is nothing more than stealing. Some of those people have even started bands of their own and had the epiphany about artists’ rights first-hand.

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The big question is: how would things look if the illegal free option weren’t as convenient, if the internet took a leap in “development”? Would Hollywood not be quite as dependent upon comic book blockbusters and take a few more chances on new stories? Perhaps American culture wouldn’t be quite as dominant globally, with local creative industries having a better shot at investment and growth to better compete with American film and music? With stable promotional budgets for record labels and studios, a few more daring artistic voices might find an audience, and charge their way onto the pop culture radar, and even change the way some of us think about the world.

It’s only common sense that the devaluation creative industries face is having a sustained negative effect on the investment available for sustainable artistic careers. Through new groups like the Content Creators Coalition, artists have begun to advocate for themselves. But forging an internet that takes individual rights (including privacy), cultural diversity and sustainable progress seriously also requires that consumers get on board.

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No one is entitled to nonconsensual ‘free’ labor from artists, or anyone else for that matter. This should not be a controversial proclamation in 2014. The fact that it is greeted with self-righteous indignation from Silicon Valley’s true believers indicates a retrograde, sociopathic mindset that masks itself in self-serving rhetoric of “innovation” and “disruption”. Punching someone in the face and breaking their nose is also “disruptive” and “innovative,” but probably not something we want to incentivise and scale.

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