The Pirate's Dilemma
29 Jul '08 - 15:30 by orangeekFew weeks ago I finished reading "The Pirate's Dilemma - How Youth Culture reinvented capitalism" by Matt Mason.
I think it's a great book, especially since it succeeds to give a historical blackground to the "pirate" movement.
We (?) actually could think that the piracy is always related to mp3, p2p and file sharing in general.
And so, what happens if we learn that the some older pirates were into the filmmaking, cable companies, DJ/mixtape businesses?
And why we couldn't think at piracy as a new way to do business instead? an opportunity rather than a menace? A new way to follow the "Ocean Blue" strategy?
After the jump some highlights from the book (that is freely downlodable from the main site)
Guess who? pag. 36
Another
pirate nation that began in a fashion similar to Sealand is the USA.
During the 19th century Industrial Revolution, the Founding Fathers
pursued a policy of counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring glbal
patents, and stealing intellectual property wholesale.
"Lax
enforcement of the intellectual property laws was the primary engine of
the American economic miracle", writes Doron S.Ben-Atar in Trade Secrets. "The
USA employed pirated know-how to industrialize". Americans were so well
known as bootleggers, Europeans began referring to them with the Dutch
word "Janke", then slang for pirate, which is today prononunced
"Yankee".
Trace the origins of recorded music, radio,
film, cable TV, and almost any industry where intellectual property is
involved, and you will invariably find pirates at its beginnings. When
Edison invented the phonografic record, musicians branded him a pirate
out to steal their work, until a system was created for paying them
royalties.
Edison, in turn, went on to invent filmmaking,
and demanded a licensing fee from those making movies with his
technology. This caused a band of filmmaking pirates, among them a man
named William, to flee New York for the then still wild West, where
they thrived, unlicensed, until Edison’s patents expired. These pirates
continue to operate there, albeit legally now, in the town they
founded: Hollywood. William’s last name? Fox.
When cable
TV first came about, in 1948, the cable companies refused to pay the
networks for broadcasting their content, and for more than thirty years
operated like a primitive illegal file-sharing network, until Congress
decided that they, too, should pay up, and a balance was struck between
copyright holders and the pirate TV broadcasters.
The Pirate Bay POV Pag. 56
The
Pirate Bay is a militant file-sharing space powered by its founders’
desire to defend free culture. Their actions were reactions to the fact
that many regulators are arguing that the only way to defend copyright
law is to invade and infringe upon people’s rights and privacies.
This
is already happening—some entertainment companies, for example, have
embedded spyware in hardware and software such as DVD players or CD
albums that note everything you record. Like all successful pirates,
the Pirate Bay’s actions created fierce debate.
On one
side is the entertainment industry, scared for its future, as it was in
the 1980s, when cassette tapes and video recorders were introduced.
Cassette
tapes and video recorders both brought the film and recording
industries hugely lucrative new revenue streams once they had stopped
fighting the new formats and started figuring out how to make money
from them.
On the other side of the debate are people
eager to consume media in new ways, enjoying the freedom to make
back-up copies they always have, who are being threatened with
million-dollar fines and prison sentences for what is essentially no
different from home taping. The debate over the Pirate Bay’s legality
escalated into an international wrangle involving Hollywood, the White
House, the World Trade Organization, and the Swedish government. The
wrangle became so heated it sparked a new political movement: the
Pirate Party.
“Copyright has been said to be necessary
for the creation of culture, and patents have been said to be necessary
for innovation to happen,” declares the Pirate Party’s website. “This
has been repeated so often, that nobody questions it. We do, and we say
that it’s just a myth, perpetuated by those who have something to gain
from preventing
new culture and technology. When push
comes to shove, copyright PREVENTS a lot of new culture, and patents
PREVENT a lot of innovation. Above all, today’s copyright laws has
[sic] no balance at all between the creator’s economic interests and
society’s cultural interests.”
Pirate-à-Porter Pag.94
Intellectual property works very differently in fashion
than it does in the world of entertainment. The 2-D design of a garment
is protected, but the 3-D physical object is not, so copying is, and
always has been, rife.
Freedom to copy other people’s
designs is taken for granted in the world of fashion, which makes it
unusual, but it’s also the reason it’s so successful. Haute couture
designs are copied, sampled, and modified,
gradually
trickling down until there are versions of last season’s catwalk
designs in bargain basements everywhere. The view that remixing or
sampling a design is a serious threat to business is not one held by
the fashion industry.* There are rarely objections from design houses
when an idea is copied; in fact, it’s almost encouraged. This is an
industry where as soon as a high-priced designer garment becomes a
trend, there are factories full of copies and knockoff designs competing
at lower prices.
This
approach seems counterintuitive. But as Professors Kal Raustiala and
Chris Sprigman observed in a 2006 Virginia Law Review article, this
approach, in the case of the fashion industry, actually
encourages innovation.
In
“The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion
Design,” Raustiala and Sprigman make the case that the remix stimulates
growth in the industry. Because designs are copied quickly and styles
diffuse down to the mass market, the original luxury items lose their
allure, creating demand for new trends, and this pirate-induced demand
drives the entire business forward. Raustiala and Sprigman call this
process “induced obsolescence,” arguing that copying
in
fashion is “paradoxically advantageous for the industry. IP
[intellectual property] rules providing for free appropriation of
fashion designs accelerate the diffusion of designs and styles....If
copying were illegal, the fashion cycle would occur very slowly.”
Instead,
they argue, appropriation speeds diffusion. The article quotes Miuccia
Prada: “We let others copy us. And when they do, we drop it.”
Listen to us... and sell something we actually want. Pag.222
Browsing
times in stores are falling, too. Whether it’s shopping or youth
culture, we just don’t have the time for long-term commitments anymore.
We
still need devices of mass production, but they are taking a backseat.
Viruses are center stage, the only real capital we have left. We don’t
need marketing people to pigeonhole music or compartmentalize
scenes anymore, because we do it ourselves.
We
can transmit to the world a carefully managed perception of who we are,
what we think is cool, what we wear and listen to. We need the network
or no one will hear us, but we retain the power. Marketers
can’t
sell us meaning; we have to find it in their products, and if we do,
and we’re passionate about them, we’ll happily tell everyone we can.
But by the same token, if a brand or an idea makes one wrong move, it
can cause the entire crowd to walk away.
Companies have
to fight harder for our attention, youth markets are becoming
increasingly difficult for brands to penetrate, and so they are working
harder than ever to jump on the next big thing. When they do, the
effect is sometimes terminal.
Comments
Trackback link: