The RIAA Boycott is Not Enough

I was talking to Jessica about the RIAA March Boycott, and I came to a conclusion that surprised me: boycotting the RIAA simply isn’t going to work. Not merely because the number of participants might be too low (although that is a strong possibility), but because the RIAA and MPAA have cultivated a public expectation that their business model is the only way to make a living off of artistic work. There’s no way to overcome that with just a boycott.

If we’re going to focus on tearing down media corporations that we dislike, then we need to focus doubly on building up artists that we do like. Having a few thousand people boycott the RIAA would be great, but I’d much rather see a few thousand people give their support to local and independent artists. A slump in RIAA quarterly profits would be nice; a surge in notability for independent musicians would be fantastic.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t boycott the RIAA. Go boycott the RIAA! I hope you do it in March, and I hope you keep doing it for the rest of your life! But I also hope you find artists who are in no way associated with the RIAA, who support legal file sharing by releasing their work under a Creative Commons license, who need your support to keep making music. Buy their songs, share them with your friends, and go see them live.  By helping out independent artists, you legitimize them and their pro-sharing way of making a living from their music.

The next time the RIAA comes to Congress, complaining that their business model — which must be the only way of making a living from music — is in danger from file sharing, we can push back.  We can point to the myriad successful musicians we’re helped create, who celebrate file sharing instead of fear it. Then we can show the RIAA that their anti-piracy campaigns have become a relic of a time long past.

Not sure how to get started? First, check out Jamendo, a site that hosts over 300,000 Creative Commons-licensed tracks. (To jump right in, do a quick search by genre.)  If you like punk, Quote Unquote Records is an awesome donation-based label that encourages file sharing.  And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include Jonathan Coulton, indie musician and champion of nerd-rock (and lots of other stuff, too).

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s go defeat the RIAA!

(P.S. If you know any other good sources for pro-sharing musicians (or are one yourself!), please, leave a comment!)

Google Translate and the Tweeting Romans

Since time immemorial, historians have wondered: how did the ancient Romans encourage their friends to join their favorite microblogging services?  According to Google Translate, the Latin phrase “vitae lorem,” translates — roughly, I presume — into English phrase, “Follow me on Twitter”.  (I must have slept thought that one in Latin class.)

Seriously, though, it does.  So, how in the world did that happen?

First, you need to understand how Google Translate learns to translate.  Connections between words in different languages are created using a technique called Statistical Machine Translation.  Google finds a website or text that available in multiple languages.  For example, CNN might publish one of its news stories in several languages, and Google could feed each version of the story into Google Translate’s learning algorithms.  In short, Google is teaching its translation service with real-world training data.

The phrase “vitae lorem” is part of the “Lorem Ipsum” text, which is used by graphic designers to fill out a webpage or document template with dummy text.  Now, imagine Alice designs a blog template, and shows it off with a sample post filled with Lorem Ipsum text.  Later, Bob uses Alice’s template for his own blog, but he writes an actual blog post in English.  Later still, Google crawls Alice’s dummy blog post (which it mistakes it for Latin)  and Bob’s actual blog post (which it mistakes for an English translated version of Alice’s dummy blog).  Suddenly, Google Translate is associating nonsensical pieces of Alice’s Lorem Ipsum text with notable English phrases that show up on Bob’s blog — like “Follow me on Twitter!”

To see some ridiculous translations for yourself, grab some randomly-generated text from lipsum.com/feed/html and paste it into Google Translate.

Here are some further helpful Latin phrases I recently discovered:

“Donec imperdiet diam laoreet mi tincidunt vitae luctus lorem consequat.” > “Read my Joomla! Manager mourning to post comments.”

“Nunc, luctus tincidunt orci iaculis mollis” > “Now, you need JavaScript enabled to grief more”

“Aenean pulvinar magna eget odio suscipit.” > “Christmas to update your hatred.”

So, feel free to toss out those handy aphorisms at your next Classics meeting!

Copying is Not Theft

For most of us, it’s quite easy to understand the similarities between thievery and downloading music without permission. When someone downloads an album produced by a major record label, the artist who recorded the album doesn’t get any money, and, intuitively, that seems a lot like stealing. The artist gains nothing, the downloader gains something. This is almost the definition of theft, except that neither the artist nor the label has actually lost anything as a result of the unauthorized download. The recording industry would say they’ve lost the potential business transaction, which may or may not be true. However, the only reason they risk losing a customer (in fact, the only reason why they go to great length to compare copying with theft in the first place) is that they treat music as a commodity to be sold.

Once a digital music file has been recorded and produced, it is not a naturally scarce commidity, since it can be reproduced for infintessimally low cost. The well-established counterpoint to this, of course, is that there is a very high initial cost to create the original file: the band expects to be paid, as do the technicians, producers, marketers, and everyone else that contibutes to the finished work. The real value is created at the start of the file’s life, and the recording industry makes the file artificially scarce in order to recoup the cost of the file’s creation. If consumers circumvent the industry’s prohibition on copying, this upsets the entire business model

Selling an album like a scarce, non-reproducible commodity is what media companies have been doing for centuries, and for a long time, it made sense. The physical books available from booksellers were non-trivial to duplicate. Now that a huge amount of media is digital and can be copied easily, this business model no longer makes sense. Companies can make it work, but the system itself is no longer the best approach to profit from art. If that’s so, what is the best approach to turning a profit? It’s impossible to say what’s best, but several options are well-understood:

1. Ransom model: As mentioned above, the cost of producing media is front-loaded. The ransom model solicits payment from consumers before or immdiately after the work is complete. Once the artist has collected enough money, they release the project to the world at large. If anyone makes a copy of the work after the artist has released it, it doesn’t hurt the artist at all: he’s already been paid in full for the work. The main difficulty with this model is a chicken-egg problem: consumers won’t pay for work from an unknown artist, and an artist can’t become well-known until she produces noteworthy work. The traditional solution is that the artist makes work for free (or on a donation basis) until she has an audience who will pay for the creation of more work. A notable example is SMBC Theater, which used this method to fund the creation a science fiction miniseries before it was created.

2. Work as a platform: Artists can use their work as a way to attract an audience and then provide that audience with something that they will pay for. Independent musicians do this frequently, when they build a fanbase by allowing people to freely share their music and then charge people to attend their concerts.

3. Donations: Quote Unquote Records is a donation-based record label, which has been in operation since 2006.  At the end of the day, if people like what you make, some of them will give you money.  If this method doesn’t work stand-alone, then it still works well in conjugation with the other two methods above.

All of the above models allow consumers to share media freely, and let artists make money from their craft.  The ability to copy media files doesn’t mean that end of making a living from art; it just means that we need to think about it differently.

Great Literature #9: The Hound of the Baskervilles (or, Why Sherlock Holmes is basically Scooby-Doo)

The Hound of the Baskervilles is easily Aurthur Conan Doyle’s most famous detective story. I am sure virtually all native English speakers — even those with only a casual acquaintance with the name “Sherlock Holmes” and even those who firmly believe that Doctor Watson is a fat, doddering old man — are at least familiar with the title of the work. Doyle wrote three other novels and dozens of short stories in the Holmes canon, so what makes this book stand out so much in our cultural subconscious?

The answer is simple: The Hound of the Baskervilles was Scooby-Doo for a era that didn’t have television. If Doyle had placed Holmes and Watson in a VW van with a psychedelic 1960′s paint job, the two works would be virtually indistinguishable. Read this plot summary and tell me I’m wrong:

When a Henry Baskerville inherits his late uncle’s spooky mansion deep in the countryside, he turns to the greatest super-sleuthing team in the world to help solve the mystery of his family’s curse. After learning about the hellhound that has haunted the Baskerville family for generations, they get a letter made of ransom-note-style newspaper clippings warning Henry to keep away from his uncle’s estate. Naturally, the gang decides to split up (they can cover more ground that way!), and soon they meet the mansion’s suspicious butler, who wanders the halls every night by candlelight. Their only neighbors, Mr. Stapleston and Dr. Mortimer,  live miles away from the mansion in the midst of the Great Grimpen Mire, which periodically emits frightening, unidentifiable sheiks.

Late the next evening, Inspector Lestrade loses his glasses and accidentally stumbles into the mansion’s network of secret passages. In the commotion, they wake the killer hound and are forced to comically scramble through a bewildering system of doorways in Baskerville Hall. Finally, the gang traps the beast in a suit of armor and unmask it, revealing that the infamous Baskerville hellhound is really just an angry old banker in a dog suit who wanted to convert Henry’s estate into a set of swampfront condominiums.

I give The Hound of the Baskervilles a 9.5 out of 10. It is probably the best Sherlock Holmes story ever written, but it still loses half a point for including the anachronistic reference to condominiums, which Doyle should have caught, since condos did not even exist during his own lifetime.