This piece was inspired by the following Times article that appeared about two weeks ago.
Before digital media, textual artifacts (see Bernie Gendron, "Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs") were produced onto tangible material objects (paper, wax records, plastic discs, film strips, etc.) that could be bought, sold, and traded pretty much at will. If you got tired of the books that sat on your shelf, you could try selling them at a local flea market, bring them to a used book store to see what you could get, or if you just wanted them out of your house, you could donate them to a library or any other charity. (Replace "books" with "records" or "videos" and you have pretty much the same thing.) Bookstores might get rid of their stock by putting unwanted material up for sale. The second-hand book market is not as big as it used to be, but in big cities like New York, there are still plenty of places to go for them. Many of the beloved books on my shelf came either from the legendary Strand bookstore or from the guys who set up tables right in front of the NYU library on Washington Square South.
Of course, once you sold the book, it was gone. You'd have to get another copy if you wanted to read it again. Same for records, at least until the era of "home taping," but in such a case, you're making a second copy of a textual artifact before selling it. (You could of course copy an entire book, but in some cases to make photocopies of a large book would be almost as long a task as reading it. And unless you were using copy machine at the office -- which pretty much constitutes theft -- such a move wasn't really cost-effective.) And the courts decided long ago that the owner of a physical book/s had the right to sell it/them as he/she saw fit. This is the essence of the secondary book/record/etc. market.
But digital technology has blown this whole concept up and brought us back to some fundamental questions about ownership and copyright. When we own a book, what is it that we own? The courts have basically said that we can own the specific medium that contains the book, that the ideas contained belong to their creator (that's a protection against plagiarism) and the medium itself belonged to the purchaser. But two things have happened in the digital age that make content-creators (publishers, authors, record companies and recording artists, etc.) very very nervous.
First, the on-line flea market. It's one thing for a guy to schelp a vanload of books around the Village. It's another thing for that guy to sell tons of books for cheap via e-bay et al. The on-line used book market has freaked out publishers, who obviously don't get any of that revenue. Used books aren't just for college students anymore; everyone can buy them, and anyone can sell them. Titles are less hard to find than they used to be (except for one important element, which I'll get to later). When Amazon started selling used books, the publishers had a shit-fit.
Second, the digitization of content. Once it became easy for recordings and books to be available digitally, the kinds of logistical restrictions created by the need for material goods like paper and plastic were theoretically irrelevant. With instantaneous delivery of content to a computer, an entire network of manufacture and distribution became unnecessary (and another one --for the new hardware of computers and tech toys -- became popular). The music industry had to respond first, because once programs existed that could rip CD audio files to compressed formats like mp3, sharing of recordings was a piece of cake, especially after Napster was developed. The RIAA sees file sharing as piracy, as we know, and there are a number of famous cases of people being sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars over a handful of files shared. (I will refrain from commenting on the evils of this association, a contempt that I have had since the days of home-taping.) But once digital books were marketed, the publishing industry has followed suit, and they are working hard to figure out a way for people to share and sell books without dooming the industry.
Authors and publishers are very much afraid that there will be no content anymore, since how can an author make any money writing if it's so easy for people to access content for free? Public libraries offer free access to digital content, and borrowers will never have to worry about fines; when their right to read/listen/view is up, the file can be automatically deleted from the borrower's digital device/s. As companies work to develop a mechanism whereby a consumer can sell a digital copy of a book (and thus lose the ability to read it on his/her own devices), the industry fears that it will be too costly to continue to publish.
I'm very much of the belief that information should be as free and as free-flowing as possible. The insane copyright regulations -- which allow Disney to hold on to the image of the Mouse nearly a hundred years after he was first drawn -- are a detriment to the distribution of content. One of the problems of extending copyright protection to books is that publishers won't bother publishing long-out-of-print books still under copyright, and many items simply will disappear from library shelves and other archives. That's the drawback of the digital age; it's also the age where copyright protections are extended beyond any degree of fairness to the public at large.
I go back to the point that John Perry Barlow made ages ago: the group he wrote lyrics for, the Grateful Dead, allowed fans to tape concerts. Despite having only one top 40 hit in twenty years, they remained a top-grossing concert act every year from the early seventies until Jerry Garcia's death in 1995. That popularity is related, directly, to the passing and sharing of tapes of shows that inspired fans to come out and see them. You might have a hundred concerts on tape (or digital file), but there's still nothing like seeing your favorite act on stage. Creative artists will have to continue to express themselves in unique ways and that uniqueness will bring the crowds.
To get back to books and ownership. We don't consume books and other cultural products the way we do ordinary commodities. As Gendron notes, if I like how Comet cleanser cleans my sink, I can buy more Comet when my can is empty. But if I like a particular book, I'm not going to buy multiple copies of the same book. I have to find other books like it. (That's part of Amazon et al's algorithms: if you like this book, try this; people who bought this book also bought...) But now books and movies are not bound to their material form; there isn't a material artifact we can hold. As such, regulations should be created to allow the freest flow of information as possible.
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