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ABOUT
The World
...
Par
Claude Chastagner, professeur d'anglais à l'Université Paul
Valéry à Montpellier.
Rebels
on the Net
Site
Philagora, tous
droits réservés ©
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Peer-to-peer technology
could have momentous, truly revolutionary
consequences on the culture and information
industry. Some go as far as calling it "online
socialism". Ian Clarke, the originator of
Freenet and a staunch proponent of P2P, predicts
that in the process, media empires may be
overturned. However, for John Borland of CNET
News, like many socialist cultures, reality (the
necessity of business backing) threatens to
undermine idealism. Because sites like Napster
do not contain any files (they remain on the
users' hard drives, the digital information
travels via the Internet but the files are not
actually stored on a central server) and because
they search for data on countless hard drives
simultaneously, P2P networks are fast and
efficient. Besides, P2P is not limited to music
files; anything that can be stored in a computer
file, from films and photos to books or
magazines, can be traded and pirated over the
Internet.
As
Cohen puts it, "there's no corner of the
so-called content industry, no bit of
intellectual property, no idea, that isn't in
danger of being Napsterized". The
development of P2P will create a demand for
greater bandwidth and faster, more powerful PCs
which will affect the balance of power between
computer makers, Internet service providers, and
the cable companies that carry traffic across
the Internet and are currently trying to
persuade consumers to subscribe to services like
DSL and cable modems. The intruding and
all-pervasive nature of P2P technology (anyone
will be able to dip into the hard drives of
other connected web users) will also lead us to
rethink our attitude toward digital privacy and
piracy.
 An
unexpected, strong voice has been heard in
defense of Napster, that of Courtney Love, a
major music and movie star, in a speech to the
Digital Hollywood Online Entertainment
Conference, given in New York on May 16, 2000.
What is particulary striking in her speech is
that she does not so much set out to defend
Napster (she even specifies that "It's
piracy when those guys that run those companies
make side deals with the cartel lawyers and
label heads so that they can be 'the labels'
friend', and not the artists'") as she
attacks the recording industry. For Love, the
real pirates are the majors. She first bases her
argumentation on a rather conventional
definition of piracy ("Piracy is the act of
stealing an artist's work without any intention
of paying for it"), then proceeds to
demonstrate that it is precisely what record
companies do. To make her point she uses the
hypothetic example of an unusually successful
first album selling one million copies and with
an unusually high 20% royalty rate; this would
nevertheless leave the band members, after costs
for radio promotion, recording time, tour
support, video production costs etc. have been
recouped by the record company, with $0.00 to
share.
In
the meantime, the company would gross $11
million, a neat $6.6 million profit after
expenses. To make matters worse, artists do not
even own the copyrights of their music for 35
years. A recent telling example is that of
Erykah Badu whose debut album sold three million
copies and who declared, at the Rhythm and Blues
Foundation's show, held during the September
2000 MTV Video Music Awards, "I thought it
was going to be a lot more money". Love's
attack dramatically shifts the debate from the
copyright issue to the role actually played by
the majors. From plaintiff they become
defendants, from righteous, they appear as
villains, which ultimately defuses all the moral
arguments put forward to justify their attack on
piracy. Other artists also consider Napster as a
subversive tool.
Chuck D explains how it is going to blow apart
the music industry and stresses the similarity
between Napster and rap, a movement still rich
with artists on the outer perimeters of
mainstream marketing in the music business. |
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About
The World
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