Remember how it was around ten years ago?
MP3 files were swapped left and right over the net, mostly over Napster. Many contained commercial music. The ways in which you could simultaneously send some money to the artist that performed the song and obtain a useful digital copy without handcuffs were few. Between the choice to inconvenience themselves and inconveniencing the artists, for some strange reason, people chose to not inconvenience themselves.
Today, music DRM is well dead and gone and only exists somewhat reputably in systems that really would fall apart like a house of cards if the DRM was removed, like subscription services that have turned out not to be popular once you want to act like you own the music. The reason that music DRM has went away is simply this: customer pressure. Customers were being asked to turn down something which had (and has) no proven causative link to a loss of income for the artist and instead choose a worse alternative than music CDs. The by far best performing music store in the world is now iTunes, which was launched largely with the mantra that file sharing can’t be sued out of existence, but that if customers were presented a sane, respectable choice, they might take to it. It took six years before iTunes could fully provide the respectable choice, but it has, for nearly all its life, been a more respectable choice.
This takes us to the crux of the ten year journey: for the first time since recordable audio was invented, the industry’s course of action was steered by a better alternative. They chose to vilify the customer value and the varying legal status of the steps involved in the process from all parts, they chose to sue the alternatives and they chose to sue their biggest customers. (Their biggest customers, by the way, have always teetered near the edge of legality; ask someone over the age of 35 to tell you about “bootlegs”.) They lost enormous amounts of prestige and public respect, and they’re now, if possible, seen more like assholes than before. And yet they didn’t win, because in the end they had to deliver what the customers had been asking for in the first place: downloadable, high quality music without arbitrary restrictions. After ten years, the artists may now have our money largely because they’re not calling us thieves for not giving it to them.
Which brings us back to today.
Today, I downloaded yesterday’s House episode. Like the song I downloaded in 1999, multiple choices and packaging are available to me, and the download speed may vary. Contrary to the song I might have downloaded in 1999, this episode is not yet available to me due to a regional distribution mess intended previously to enable distribution and now to maximize profits and minimize customer convenience. (There’s no reason for House to be licensed like this; House debuted in November 2004, when it was already clear to everyone that digital distribution need not include boundaries.) The series is available in iTunes, but only as DVD-style Season batches. You can’t download yesterday’s House episode from iTunes, and I say you because I certainly can’t; iTunes TV shows aren’t even available in Sweden. So where can you download yesterday’s House episode? Take a wild guess.
It is my sincere hope that the TV and movie industry will one day take a fucking hint from recent history and allow their customers a respectable choice, if they’ll get around to figuring out what “respectable” means. They couldn’t rewind the VHS tape from the timeline of history, and they can’t stop progress. What they’ll have to do is adapt. Adapting is something that’s harder the larger you get, and I respect that, but this is not really fundamentally hard. I’m told that some of the services that have emerged, like Hulu, aren’t half bad, but because of the regional licensing bullshit I haven’t been able to ever try it.
And for those who didn’t pick up on it, it is true that I’m posting this the day before a certain batshit insane law goes into effect; a law that will allow any of the aforementioned industries to continue suing customers with improved zest and zeal for daring to be tenably available for accusation of choosing the alternative that, uh, is at all available; a law that will grant them powers above any police, military or government institution in fields that matter to the prosecution; a law that makes it financially impossible for most people to fight back and theoretically untenable for those who can to win redress; a law that repeals due process, democratic principles dating back to the Roman Empire and reinstates the shame pole for a civil crime.
What this tells me is that while the music industry may be persuaded at last into offering people what they want, they haven’t actually understood anything. Or that they’ve understood everything perfectly, and are now trying to fight back the course of history and the advancement of civilization. (It also tells me that our politicians are spineless, bought off cowards that don’t mind unhinging four of the five laws with the status of constitutional law in Sweden if some party whip or industry bigwig swears that this is warranted and proportional. But we’re working on that one already.)