On 1/27/07, Steve Watkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Im not sure Id agree that a sense of victimization or righteous anger > are the primary driving forces behind such things, but they are in the > mix somewhere when it comes to reactions of music etc industry.
When somebody makes the argument that the profit of a third party is necessarily their loss, they are arguing from victimization. Let's say you argue that aggregated creators deserve a share of the profits of an aggregator. That doesn't follow from economics. The economic point of view is that investors in the aggregator, its owners, are the ones who deserve a share of the profits, because they also stood to lose money if it lost money. When I buy a house for $X, I stand to lose $X and also stand to gain whatever I can sell it for above $X. If the value of my house goes up because my neighbor painted and fixed up their own place, my neighbor has no claim to my profit. There are people who read my blog in Bloglines, for example, but I make no claim to Bloglines' revenues. If Bloglines goes out of business I lose nothing, so why should I stand to gain if it makes money? Ditto videoblogs and video aggregrators. Ask yourself this: if MyHeavy goes out of business, what does it cost you? And how do you know whether they are even making a profit right now? (I doubt they are). The reality is that you don't know or care whether they exist, much less whether they are profitable. The only thing that matters to you is whether *you* are profitable. People in the music business made the same bogus argument over and over again in reaction to third parties who benefit from their work. If somebody sings my song at a birthday party and everybody has fun because of that, don't I deserve a few bucks? If my song accidentally ends up in the background of a scene in a documentary, don't I get paid? If an Elvis impersonator lands a good gig in Vegas, doesn't the Presley estate get a cut? So that's my case that the sense of righteous anger is misplaced. Now for the issue of victimization -- why do I say this anger flows from a misplaced sense of victimization? The value of my house goes up because my neighbor painted and fixed up their own place. Do they deserve a cut? Why shouldn't they get a share, since it was their work? Their improvements weren't cheap either! I mean, they slaved on their fixup every weekend, they put a ton of money into the painters, they took a day off from work to get a construction permit -- where do I get off making a fortune off them!? But hold on, there's another way of looking at it. My benefit is a positive externality. Per Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality, 'an externality is a cost or benefit from an economic transaction that parties "external" to the transaction receive.' Just so for remixers and aggregators and all the other third parties, whether street people or rich corporations, who benefit from the labor and investment of a videoblogger. What matters has nothing to do with the benefit of third parties. It has to do with the health of the videoblogger. If you got what you wanted out of your vlog, who cares whether other people benefitted too? Did you have fun? Did you make friends? Did you make something beautiful and worthwhile? If so, keep doing it. If not, quit. There is no need for my neighbor to get a share of my profit if their intention was to live in a better home. Our work on CCMixter.org made it possible for remixers in the community to do stuff they couldn't have done otherwise. Ok, they lost the potential to earn money from people who sampled them, but they wouldn't have created those samples if they weren't able to sample others in the first place. Whatever they might have lost was something they wouldn't have had in the first place. As Rox says, "from way out there it all belongs to all of us. We are the messengers." So that's the arguing from victimization thing. It's an argument that doesn't flow from economics, just from a sense of entitlement. > What a totally different attitude we might have to all forms of > ownership, rights, control, freedom of all creative works, ideas, and > reuse, if we lived in some totally different world where everybody did > a practical job such as farming during the first part of the day, and > then returned home to converse, create, remix and redeploy, entertain > , amuse and educate fellow humans during the afternoon & evening. As a musician, I have no desire to do it for a living. I really do prefer to do it on the side. It makes me happy to play in the morning before I go to work, and that's all I need. -Lucas
