RIAA’s Pie Gone Bad

In an age where information is so abundant that can easily become redundant or even misleading and dangerous unless doubled by a trusty “filter” or objectivity tool, to see a pseudo-explanation of a phenomenon of such amplitude like file sharing countered immediately by a solid argumentation is like a breath of fresh air.

P2P (pie-to-pie) Fable

Surfing the net the other day I came across a great article by Mike Masnick at Techdirt, a sort of a reply to a recent RIAA statement. First of all, let’s remember some of the trade group’s latest desperate attempts to demonize file sharing and anyone coming close to it – from its efforts to link the Chinese hack of Google to Google's stand on copyright, the foolish claim that file sharers were having a negative effect on humanitarian aid in Haiti to the recent use of a fable to describe what’s wrong with file sharing.

Here’s the “exposition” courtesy of Mike:

Perhaps it's part of the RIAA's propaganda campaign for school children, but in a recent blog post, RIAA VP Joshua Friedlander compared the file sharing situation to the children's fable Nobody Stole the Pie by Sonia Levitin.
You may have heard the story. It's about a bunch of villagers all taking a little nibble of a pie, insisting that just a little bit won't hurt — and then, of course, the entire pie is gone, and everyone claims that it was "Not I" who ate the pie.

Now let’s check out what’s wrong with the picture, RIAA so keenly and self-infatuatedly presents:

“The reason the pie story functions the way it does is because the pie is a scarce and limited resource. As such, each time someone takes, it means that there is less for others. It's a zero-sum game. In contrast, with a digital file, the content is abundant and an infinite resource. Each time someone makes a copy, rather than less for everyone, there's actually more for everyone. You're actually growing the pie. Neat!”, points out Mike.

The author then goes on emphasizing the true source of the concern RIAA has when it comes to file sharing:
“The problem the RIAA and its labels face is not everyone nibbling on the pie. It's that it has always focused on selling pie at greatly inflated prices, because in the old world, you could only get the pie from a few RIAA-run pie shops. In the new world, with abundant pie, where each copy of a piece of pie expands the pie, suddenly people can get their pie from many other places. And it's been great for pretty much everyone, other than the proprietors of the RIAA pie shops.” Then he adds: “More musicians are able to get their "pies" out there, since the old pieshop gatekeeper is no longer the bottleneck. More musicians are able to make money since they no longer have to rely on the pieshop to fund their ability to make new flavors of pie.”

Artists taking the matter of selling their music in their own hands and on their own terms and keeping a revenue much larger than they would do if collaborating with a large record label, is a prospect not very appealing to music industry. Bands like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead have proved it. Leaving aside the fact they were already famous when they made the decision to give away their albums for free and paradoxically ended up more money than they had expected, new artists could be inspired to adopt similar ways to promote themselves and that would just mean a lot of companies being forced to retire or change. And who wants changes when everything is going lavishly smoothly?

So let’s wrap it up with another fragment of Mike’s post addressing the issue of music industry vs. file sharing.

Recent studies have shown that the music industry has been growing, not shrinking over the past few years. It's just that the money is going to different places. Again, the RIAA has a blindspot for all the other places where people can get pie, and how they've build up great business models around it, assuming that if you're not getting pie from an RIAA shopkeeper, then you must be "stealing." But that's like saying every time I order pizza from Domino's, I'm stealing from Pizza Hut. Or, even worse, every time I make my own pizza at home, I'm stealing from Pizza Hut.

The real problem is not different people taking "just a little bit." The people haven't been taking, they've been growing the pie. Massively. And the musicians and record labels who understand this have been growing and profiting nicely. So, seriously, RIAA, let's leave the children's fables where they belong and start focusing on updating your antiquated business model to deal with the twenty-first century.

Nice piece of writing Mike!