Copybot Comes to the Music Industry

Of course, with leftist NYT columnist Paul Krugman embracing the Copybot ethos, I should have guessed that EMI hiring Cory nee Linden Ondrejka would not be far behind!

To judge from the SLogoshere's reaction, you would think the music industry has just experienced the Second Coming of Christ with this ex-Linden CTO hire. And they'll need the Second Coming, and maybe the Rapture as well, if they are to survive the invasion of insolent thieving Internet youth that have crippled their industry. I often wonder why the Broken Internet Children who write and play the music for their Broken peers don't just stop playing until they can stop the thievery -- that would concentrate their little minds wonderfully.

Well, you say, hasn't Copybot already come to the music world, with Napster and everything else, long before there was ever a Second Life? And how could Paul Krugman, who isn't in Second Life, know anything about Copybot?

No, not exactly, because Copybot is the summation of an ethos. Copybot is an ideology, a way of life. What Copybot says is this: "I can steal, as long as I'm creative and write new code". It says, "I can steal and sell other people's creations because I can, and it is technologically feasible". Copybot says, "If you can see it, you can copy it, therefore it is never worth trying to stop theft of intellectual property by technological, social, or legal means." Copybot says, like Cory Linden said in December 2006, "We will begrudingly add a TOS provision making the use of Copybot an offense, but that's only a temporary measure we view as an expedience to deal with our high-paying customers we're forced to endure now, but hopefully we will enlighten them in time and be able to drop this TOS restriction -- or get by without their revenue completely."

Copybot isn't just the program that copies your avatar or your stuff (or lately, even your groups and profile, it seems). Copybot is the Broken Internet Children's neo-communism of the future, with embodies all the thuggery of Bolshevism with all the deceptive glitter of communism's Bright Future.

The most salient feature of Copybot is that if you criticize the concept, you will be kicked from the town hall and banned from the official blog by Torley, chief protectress of the Broken Children. Eddie Stryker, maker and seller of Copybot was of course brought to the Lab and celebrated and given high honours by being put in the Architectural Working Group, which, as I've noted in recent posts, is busy trying to solve the "problem" of how to port all your stuff out of SL to other worlds, where it can be given away more freely.

There are all sorts of giddy stone-soup ideas afoot now that the music industry can save itself with "360 degree deals" (concert, magazine spread, SL appearance, t-shirts, wristbands, etc.) and with "innovative technology". What most people on the Stallmanite left mean by "saving the music industry" (including Hamlet nee Linden) is "let's come up with all kinds of other business models besides actually selling music and protecting the copyright on digital intellectual property". So, you get Krugman fantastically suggesting that you sell meat-world t-shirts and RL concert tickets like the Grateful Dead used to do. Of course, um, the Dead sold albums too, and many people bought them along with trading the pirate tapes from the sound board. What do you do when people start copying the t-shirts and scalping the tickets?! The music industry didn't solve those problems either...

Hamlet also implies that by making all kinds of art installations and surroundsounds and experimental SL stuff that you can also "save" music (he rattles off a bunch of artistic sound/light installations in SL as examples, although not everybody's idea of fun is to sit in a fractal and hear atonal blasts keyed to their avatar clicks).

I think the real revolution in music is that people like Frogg Marlowe and Jaycatt Nino are able to recreate not fractals and atonal dreck and visually dazzling computer art images, but in fact the ambience of a small cafe or corner bar or your front porch on their sims, attracting relatively small crowds (the mainland fits 320 tops on the 4 sims I believe), or usually more like 160, in order to create a live music experience. While recreating a coffee-house ambience lost in the 1960s might seem a conservative act, in fact its a blend of new technology with old values than in fact is what innovation is all about. Most people simply relate better to tapping frog feet than they relate to fractals, that's all there is to it.

Live acts like Frogg's in SL can bypass all the vicissitudes of the music industry or even their local indie music dragon queens controlling access by simply showing up online with a shoutcast server, going on the event list in SL, and putting out a tip jar. Of course, they'd have to count on every single listener to put at least $3.65 US ($1000 Lindens) in that jar even to break $500-600 for the two of them, not a huge windfall for a gig. They sell CDs too, but most of their income comes from multiple live shows in SL, often on a punishing schedule. Still, this method represents possibilities that were absent, with zero income, when the two sat frustrated in their real-life livingrooms without the necessary steep ramp-up of venture capital, big record company contracts, geographical location, connections, etc. etc. needed even for very talented people to break through to profit-making national exposure and careers.

When the Lindens can put live music billboards on the welcome islands and do other basic things to help this important sector in SL, it will do even better.

Cory isn't expecting to combine virtual worlds with music, however -- he has explained amply that his move to EMI is about getting away from VWs, not bringing them elsewhere. Cory may have figured out what other programmers and software engineers may need to be hearing: Virtual Worlds are career-killers.

But...I marvel that EMI can hire someone who brags on his blog that he has bought a grand total of 5 records since 2000. I mean, my God, not even a discounted Jewel CD for $9.95 in the bargain bin at the Wal-Mart's Cory?!

And that illustrates the desperation -- and giddy contact high -- of the music industry in trying to hire the Google guy, and now Cory, in repositioning themselves for the Broken Internet Children to try to induce them to buy. Good luck with that.

Cory thinks that the whole problem is that it's just too damn hard to buy music because of "all these passwords" and "all these concerns about DRM" (which he claims even for a paid-for download, strangely) and "all these obstacles".

I'm a technology dummy, but I find it infinitely easy to download the iTunes thing for free, and pay the 99 percent song. Most of my friends do the same thing. What am I missing here? Is sometimes not knowing very much an actual boon to buying music online?!

Back in the days of Napster, I think I was like a lot of people who used Napster as a way to find the songs on old record albums that didn't exist on CDs (Quicksilver Messenger Service), or to have the existing songs of CDs in fact I had purchased (Nirvana) available at work or on a Sony Walkman. It wasn't about trying to bittorrent a zillion free songs, it was about trying to make songs that were already paid for portable.

Cory claims that's the concern he will bring to the music industry is just this awareness of the friction in trying to pay when you want to. He elaborates on his blog that if he can figure out the coding to get people to be able to instantly pay when they feel like it or move music around fluidly through their existing tech toys like phones, laptops, work desktop, it will be a win for everybody. Ok, good luck with that. If you can see it, you can copy it, remember? The technology that makes porting and buying easier is the same technology that makes hacking and stealing easier.

The path to saving the music industry does not lie through code; it lies through civilizational norms and law.

I realize that the dream of communism dies very, very hard in people's minds, but it is important to remember that there is nothing innovative or progressive or cutting edge about it. It's an ideology from hundreds of years ago. It's a discredited ideology responsible for the death of millions. That fails to impress our Broken Children, of course, but the reality is, as I've posted on Ugotrade (waiting for the mod queue), is that modern life is about freeing the individual from the collective -- *that* is the revolution, not putting the individual back under the hegemony of the collective and what usually manages the collective -- the strongest, and most unaccountable forces. The collective might give you things for free; it takes away what you make and gives it away for free, too, and you don't get back what you put in.

I've responded to Ken's interview with Tish, which is all about basing an economy on a reputation system -- taking the worst features of the "idiocy of rural life" and the worst features of the collectivist commune and indoctrinating and institutionalizing them in worse forms online.

Here's what I said:

"1. The SL reputation system that used to exist was self-correcting, too. It wasn't as bad as everyone imagines. While some aspects of it were "gamed," any system can be gamed. What happened is that when there *was* self-correction -- negative votes -- oldbies whose reputations had been established by long years of gaming the system were outraged and lobbied the Lindens to nerf the system. I don't particularly care for reputation systems, but I have to say that the Linden system, if it had stuck to the idea of paying for making reputation points, and still provided some modest payout from the points, would work.

2. Re: "For this system to work as an economy, though, there has to be a way to actually get something out of your good reputation. Say, in SL, that land was given out based on reputation, and people with a certain rating got an island…it would make for a radically different environment. If there’s money coming in somewhere, it’s easier. If there is ad revenue, the higher your reputation, the higher the percentage of ad revenue passed on to you."

This is a pretty awful idea, because it immediately leads to a FIC, a privileged group who mete out land and points according to their own lights. It's not an open system. It isn't self-correcting. And that "radically different environment" would rapidly become intolerable except for the in-group that benefited from it. Reputation systems are always rapidly controlled by those who code them, and those who have the time to work them. A lot of people don't participate.

3. E-bay isn't even the marvel people imagine, and there's something very different about the very flat 2-D transaction of buy-sell with a listed product, and a "yes/no" as to whether the product was a) delivered on time b) in working order and as advertised and the far more complex transactions in a virtual world, i.e. "this hair creator made good hair and followed up to help me get it positioned right" or "this landlord provided orientation and customization and helped solve problems" etc. etc. It's a far more robust and complex system, and a plus/minus, yes/no system can't address it.

4. I don't get this allergy to money, capitalist economies (Japan has one! works well!), marketplaces. Barter and communistic models tried over the ages have always failed, even if kept as small, tightly controlled hippie commune sorts of things. It's not a model that can work in a huge decentralized widely distributed system with many different cultures and levels of people.

5. Visa and PayPal are not a solution, because they are flat, two-way transactions. You pay me behind the firewall on those sites -- you don't pay me inworld, in the round. One of the beauties of Second Life is that you have a microcurrency that is roughly on a free currency market (although Supply Linden constantly devalues it to keep it cheap) and people can buy and sell and trade with each other inworld spontaneously without signing up a lot of information (as they would have to do in Visa or PayPal), without having to meet certain levels of payment, and without high costs to the vendor. Lindens work really well. I don't understand the aversion to them. Not having economies with buy-sell-trade interfaces in these new opensim worlds will make them exotic open-sourcey testtubes for geeks to gawk at, but not normal places for lots of people to benefit from and interact in.

As always, frankly, I'm annoyed, that under the guise of "new media technology" and "open source coding" and all the tekkie categories, the social and political issues of economy and politics are being discussed without the people who will have to participate in it, in ways that are of a distinct extremist viewpoint on the left. It opens up the question of whether you are trying to smuggle in leftist economic models by welding them into technology itself, so that people must helplessly obey their laws when the log on.

Ken, this stuff about Creative Commons is for the birds. Do *you* make your living with CC??? Do you know *anybody* who does?! I mean, seriously. It really becomes suspect for people who are consultants to companies that pay them normally in capitalist economies to then come up with these socialistic recipes for everyone else inside the world."

Comments

[Maggie Darwin]

More on the same topic:
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/06/09/rasmus-fleischer/the-future-of-copyright/

Money quote:

In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

[Ann Otoole]

You mean there will come a time when music artists will have to not record anything but earn their income like everyone else--by performing live?

How sad that a certain segment will no longer be able to afford such displays of excess.

Wherever corey goes the touch of smelly brown follows. SL is still suffering from Rosedale not purging Corey hires.

Nobody *needs* emi or record labels. talent can sell their work on their own websites and hire viral marketing firms and change the industry on their own. Provided, of course, they do not fly on private aircraft or drive in obvious bus entourages. Can't open yourself up to the record label mafia assassins.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ann, I guess you take the tekkie viewpoint on this. I don't agree that "nobody needs record labels". They emerged to serve a purpose. Perhaps the balance has been lost, but they front money, make selections, do marketing, etc. There's something to be said for the idea of a company that has a roster of artists they promote. I don't see anything inherently evil in it, and it's what enables many a career.

Viral marketing firms -- they sound like merely the same thing all over again, only possibly worse. I guess I'm just not buying the cliches here.

I don't understand the story of Cory, but I guess that's because there's a lot we don't know about it. I will never forget him standing outside the Korean bar and taking the gourd from the nearby Korean deli and mimicking its voice saying "I am the CEO of the Metaverse". Philip wasn't laughing.

[Orange Montagne]

Thanks Prokofy for standing up (over a period of years now) for intellectual property rights. IP protection is the backbone of our economic system which keeps people fed, housed, etc. etc.

Just look at the results:
* Second Life (tm) has become the most rapidly adopted and most profitable virtual world ever, creating income for thousands of residents and developer businesses. How? By creating a business based on IP protection and a closed, subscription based (hosting) model.

* iTunes has risen to become the #2 music retailer within 7 years. How? By creating a business based on IP protection inside a closed, limited use system.

* World of Warcraft has become by far the #1 MMOG, surpassing uncountable thousands of "free to play" games with essentially equivalent graphics and gameplay. How? It's based on a closed, subscription model.

* Kindle is rapidly becoming the first successful ebook reader, with those ebooks now accounting for 6% (!) of Amazon's book sales. How? With sales of IP protected digital books in a closed system.

Meanwhile the major music labels suffer year after year of declining sales of CD's - disks of digital files lacking any copy protection whatsoever.

Meanwhile, the YouTube "stunt" remains the repository of all things infringed. It's still under fire by Viacom – likely on the hook for over $1 billion USD to Viacom alone for "brazenly exploiting the infringing potential of digital technology". Everybody knows what they did, it’s not even debatable.

Second Life (tm) is one of the rare few places online where your IP can be created and reasonably protected. It's a place where you can finally escape the awful plague of mindless and manipulative corporate content.
Isn’t that a good thing? Or is their some perverse power trip in the "rippers" and copylefters for some reason needing to threaten to drown everyone with "all the music from 1950". Puh-leeze people, leave it alone!

No matter what they go on about, reality check: code is not law - law is law.
The real IP laws protect real writers, painters, and musicians and yes, even coders. The same laws protect you in the event of theft, even when the door can't be locked.

[Yumi Murakami]

IP theft is simply the negative reaction of the populace to the emerging two-tier society, where the more fortunate creative ones essentially don't even have to participate in economic behavior, and the less fortunate ones (some of whom are just as creative) have to struggle for what's left.

SL unfortunately has gone that way also, and CopyBot became popular at about the same time.

[Edel]

http://www.kevinandkell.com/1998/kk0225.html

Nice strip on this kind of attitude.

[Cocoanut Koala]

Yumi - what the heck?

Are you talking about, like, Madonna or something?

You do realize that for every Madonna, there are thousands upon thousands of regular actors, singers, writers, artists, musicians, and so forth - ALL earning living wages, throughout their entire lives; raising families on them and everything?

Yes, "real" artists, musicians, actors, writers and whatnot. Really doing that, their whole lives long, as a living. People, skads of people, mostly with names you wouldn't recognize.

Professionals. Making living incomes from it; making GOOD livings. Filling out 1040's on it, and/or Schedule C's, every year. Not Madonna income, but certainly not clawing in the gutters for her scraps.

Participating their entire lives long in economic behavior. Writing, creating, drawing, acting, singing, etc. - for MONEY, honey! That's participating in economic behavior.

-----

On the topic in general, it always amuses me how people with the mindset that things like music should be free seem to apply that idea ONLY to creative fields.

You don't see them standing up and demanding free plasma TV's, or insisting their accountant handle their finances for nothing.

I firmly believe that the reason for that is people don't think creative occupations are actually real. You know, it's not "real" work, like being a plumber, or an IT tech.

They don't realize that the creative professions require hours and years of hard work honing one's craft, and then hours and years of constantly improving. Putting out good, reliable, and always innovative product, day after day, year after year.

Maybe it's because they can't necessarily really SEE all the labor in a creative field - or maybe it's because they don't understand the work, or understand how anyone could possibly come up with something so good from what looks like starting with nothing. Like maybe it's magic, almost.

But in any case, people get the idea it's not REALLY work, so - hey, what you create should be free, and there should be no such thing as intellectual property.

-----

As far as SL is concerned, it's not just getting paid for your work that matters.

If you've got an environment where your work automatically belongs to whoever wants it (and they can even put their own name on it), then you have an environment where few creative people would care to waste their time.

Most would likely rather be somewhere where they atleast get to decide who can have their creations, and get credit for what they have made, whether they were actually paid for making them or not.

coco

[Stroker Serpentine]

"If you've got an environment where your work automatically belongs to whoever wants it (and they can even put their own name on it), then you have an environment where few creative people would care to waste their time." Coco

...and the consequence is that _we _all_ are relegated to the medocracy of convenience.Re-hashed, re-coded, copied and canned content.

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without. Cecil B. DeMille

[Yumi Murakami]

Coco, by "economic behaviour" I don't just mean earning money, I mean having to actually behave in a way that includes economy. I know there are many "regular" creative people. But they aren't the ones constantly shown on TV and radio and everywhere else.

The result is that we have a generation now growing up who have seen every billboard blazoned with "creative" stars who have more money than they could ever spend (this is what I meant by "not being part of the economy" - essentially, there is no factor of economy in their lives; they might as well have unlimited money). They aren't seeing the "regular" creative people. As a result, they are growing up with an entirely broken concept of what creative occupations are!

When I was walking through a local music/DVD/game store IRL, I saw some teenagers playing a demo setup of Rock Band and they remarked that it was a great technological breakthrough because it "lets people like us do things that need talent". And I felt really upset by that. Rock Band games are a good thing because they enable people to experience music very much as a musician does as a pure leisure activity (ie, without having to devote huge chunks of their time to learning an instrument), but saying that it was a necessary breakthrough without which "people like them" couldn't be involved in music at all, and blaming it on unbeatable "lack of talent" just made me really sad.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yumi, I fail to see what this woe-is-me victimology stuff is all about in Second Life, where everybody has a computer, a DSL line, and disposable time.

Yes, there are haves and have-nots in SL. Yes, as in RL, that incites theft. But wait, being poor entitles you to be a thief? Hardly.

Evil star marchines couldn't exist without consumers to gobble up everything about them, including their widely-publicized break-ups and breakdowns.

Those kids should learn an instrument in school band, that would be far more satisfying than pushing a prefabbed button with a pre-made riff.

[Yumi Murakami]

Prokofy, I don't think that being poor entitles you to be a thief. But I do think it's a reality that society builders have to accept that having such large societal distinctions will lead to crime.

Also, surprisingly, those games don't come down to a "prefabbed button and a premade riff" - I actually thought that too, the same way kids' toy guitars work, but they don't actually work that way.