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| Sympathy for the RIAA |
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12 November 03. My entry about the broken tooth seems to have, um, touched a nerve among readers, as the auxiliary anecdotes continue to come in. For example, Mr. PH of Seattle, Washington, sent in this exerpt from a blog, which cites the New Yorker, reproducing a note by someone who doesn't even get named even though he's the originator of the content:
4. While catching up on New Yorkers, an article about the thousand or so people who have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. One old man's suicide note said, "No real reason except that I have a toothache," which made me remember that supposedly I have a distant relative on my father's side who also killed himself over dental pain. This is uncorroborated, however, and my mom claims she does not know what I am talking about, which does not surprise me. There is a similarly nebulous family story about a relative who drowned in a vat of something, although who it was or what was in the vat is in dispute. I myself am a content provider of sorts, having written Cowsweeper, a game for the Palm Pilot. I think maybe 4,000 people downloaded it before Avocado crashed, which is not all that much in the grand scheme of things, but is a grand scale as far as I'm concerned. I mean, that's well over an auditoriumfull of people, all playing this dumb little game. Most of the positive reviews focused on the fact that the game was free, so why not, and the fact that the storyline was pretty good. One person emailed me to thank me in person for not using the word `addictive' anywhere in the game's description. Imagine my complete and total amusement when I found the story translated to Spanish. `Eres una vaca.' So within a week of my first posting of the thing, it had already appeared in Spanish, Czech, and a dozen English sites. Google will give you about forty hits on Cowsweeper. (No, I did not mean Codesweeper.) Since many people were downloading from my server, I could see their IP address and enter it into GeoBytes to find their location, which was literally all over the world map. Most of the time, this made me really happy. I mean, I was adding value for complete strangers out there, who were avoiding work, not listening in class, or spending way too much time in the bathroom thanks to me, and that felt great. But then, especially after Avocado died and I couldn't type `countcows' into anything to get an exact count of downloads, I started to get a little nervous about it all. There was this thing that I had put a lot of effort into, and I had no idea what was being done with it. I'm sure that if I had met many of the thousands of people who had downlodaded Cowsweeper, attracted by the exploding cow theme, I would think that many of them were complete asses. `No, you can't play my video game!' I would yell, grabbing their Palm pilot and throwing it into the nearest toilet (after removing Cowsweeper, of course). And what if I'd hoped to make money from this thing? [I initially had a little PayPal box which allowed people to give me five bucks for the game, but after about a hundred downloads and zero dollars, I removed it.] The long and short of it was that after I'd produced this thing, I had zero control over its distribution and use. This isn't so much a financial question, though some will complain that it is. Those people, who expect to break even only if nobody copies their product without paying and then go into business anyway, are idiots. It's legal to loan books to your friends, tape decks exist exclusively to dub stuff you probably didn't pay for, and the distinction between that and software is extremely subtle, to the point of being beyond the comprehension of most of the world's population. I mean, the entire concept of controlling what people do with something you sold them is a novel one; I can't speak for the entirety of human history, but I dont think you'll find products whose use by the buyer was substantially restricted before, oh, thirty years ago. Yes, I know that here in the modern day, you're not buying software at all, but are buying a license to use the software, but try explaining this to your grandmother. If you can't explain it to her, don't build a retail business model around it. But ignoring the financial---and everyone enters the software and the music business knowing with certainty that their stuff will be copied without payment so I think their right to whine is limited---there's the emotional knowledge that they have no control over what their music/software/writing/asst content will be used for. This has always been true, and has, I imagine, always been disquieting. Nirvana's music was famously used as a soundtrack for frat boys gang-raping a girl. The product of gun manufacturers the world over is used to kill family members and children, and as much as we'd like to demonize the gun industry, I can't imagine that anybody involved is OK with that. Nietsche's writing was used by his sister, after he died, as the philosophical foundation for a political party Nietsche himself despised. Oh, the list goes on. As do I. I clearly have no point here except: letting go is hard. I feel as though the fight over the copying of music is not so much about the money as about the fact that putting something on a computer embodies a complete loss of control, which is, for many, just unpleasant on a visceral level. Anyway, I have no idea who's reading this right now, but I just hope you're using it for good and not evil.
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