Government deregulation of music — ending copyright — could reduce the advantage of centralized music production over decentralized and diverse music. In a deregulated market, the Internet could help myriads of local and noncommercial musicians find audiences. Arguably, the communication technologies of the twentieth century commercialized culture, but now the Internet may decommercialize it by eroding the power of the distribution corporations.
Internet music file sharing has become a significant factor in the social lives of children, who download bootleg music tracks for their own use and to give as gifts to friends. Thus, on the level of families, ending copyright could be morally as well as economically advantageous. On a much higher level, however, the culture-exporting nations (notably the United States) could stand to lose, although we cannot really predict the net balance of costs and benefits in the absence of proper research. We do not presently have good cross-national data on file sharing or a well-developed theoretical framework to guide research on whether copyright protection supports cultural imperialism versus enhancing the positions of diverse cultures in the global marketplace.
It will not be easy to test such hypotheses, and extensive economic research has not conclusively answered the question of whether the patent system really promotes innovation. We will need many careful, sharp-focus studies of well-formed hypotheses in specific industries and sectors of life. For example, observational and interview research can uncover the factors that really promote cultural innovation among artists of various kinds and determine the actual consequences for children of Internet peer-to-peer file sharing. However, there seems to be little interest on the part of government research-funding agencies to look at politically sensitive issues like this, so while science will be a central part of our future revolution, it is not in a position to fire the first shots.
Quite apart from the economics of music, there are also many questions in the space between governance of creativity and music technology. A half century ago, a very different technology existed that had political implications, namely tape recorders, which I can describe from first-hand knowledge. I obtained my first tape recorder in 1958. This was actually two years later than I obtained my first computer game, the remarkable Geniac.
For several years, I used tape recorders to make personal copies of classical music from New York City FM radio stations, including many European avant-garde concerts that never appeared on commercial recordings. It never occurred to me I was violating anybody’s intellectual property rights. My third and fourth tape recorders were quarter-track stereo machines that could put two hours of high-fidelity monophonic music on a single cheap tape. The radio stations published their schedules well in advance, so it was both fun and easy to make these recordings. There was little incentive to make copies for friends, both because they had different musical tastes, and because copying was more tedious than the original recording, requiring two machines plus a fair amount of labor, and added noise to the recording. Today’s DVDs and online file sharing make copying easier, but also there has been a shift in who copies what kind of music for what purpose. Reel-to-reel tape recorders like the ones I had half a century ago were often used to record live events, and were not a good technology with which to deliver popular music to the masses.
There is the real political dimension in this issue. Music distribution companies, and the mass media in general, exploit people through advertising that uses many tricks to get them to buy culturally inferior products. Teenage children, physically exhausted working class families, and people who are socially isolated from the local musical culture, learn to gobble up the latest recordings by celebrities. In general, we should seek the decommercialization of the arts, even as we seek new ways to reward very large numbers of artists in their local communities.
This brings us back to devolution, and to new technology-based forms of democracy. On the one hand, we can simply abolish copyrights and watch the music distribution industry wither away, as already seems to be happening with respect to magazines and newspapers. Or, we could create such attractive free sources of music, that the masses liberated themselves from their current cultural thralldom, and simply stopped buying recorded music, but gave the money instead to their local singer-songwriter. More likely, several things will happen at once, and a variety of collective decisions will need to be made by governments, guilds of performers, and segments of the general public. The online devolved decision-processes described above will then come in handy for music and the many subcultures within it, as it will for the art arts and many other dimensions of life.
Fluid democracy can be considered a high-tech approach for improving existing government institutions, or it can be considered a revolutionary approach that would entirely replace them. Indeed, one of the adjustment mechanisms that can be built into the new system could be how revolutionary it is in practice. For example, if fluid democracy completely replaces the old system, then all of the financial obligations incurred under the old system become void. If investors see fluid democracy rising in political significance, they would be well advised to sell any government bonds they hold, because these “securities” very well could become worthless if the new system in fact took power. Once fluid democracy was in place, the new system could avoid government debt by allocating funding across government departments in terms of a percentage of tax revenues, rather than as defined dollar amounts. That allocation could be decided annually as voters told the government database what fraction of their own taxes they wanted to go to each department, or which political party they wanted to make that decision for them.
Clearly, we have a long road to travel before fluid democracy can be a reality. In addition to political activism, much research and technology development will be required. A large number of pieces must be assembled to complete the puzzle. Yet it is clear that traditional political structures are failing, so the opportunity for healthy but radical change has now arrived, with the maturity of Internet, at this particular point in human history.
Privatizing Life
Kembrew Mcleod
Because of a landmark Supreme Court case and congressional legislation, 1980 was a pivotal year for genetic research. In the Diamond v. Chakrabarty decision, a five-to-four majority ruled that a living, genetically altered microorganism could be patented under U.S. law. Previous to this ruling, it was the policy of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) that living organisms — in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty , a bacterium that helped clean oil spills — could not be patented. But the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, stating that “anything under the sun that is made by the hand of man” is patentable subject matter. That same year, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act to encourage the commercialization of inventions produced by universities and other recipients of federal funding. An influx of private money poured into university science departments, and since the act’s passing, the private funding of university biomedical research has increased by a factor of 20.