By Brian Carnell

Tuesday, March 6, 2001

The other day I criticized Eben Moglen's relatively utopian view of Napster and person-to-person file sharing services, but Moglen isn't the only person (obviously) on the Left to take up the issue of Napster. Much to my surprise, one of the most perceptive analyses was Michael Albert's What's Napster and Freenet? Albert understands the technology and the issues pretty well, and his solution is an excellent example of the problems with socialist economic schemes.

Unlike a lot of commentators, Albert isn't under any illusion that Napster is compatible with a working system of intellectual property rights. Albert explains,

Okay, yes, as some defenders of Napster argue, if Napster were to be at most used by only some folks to get only some of their music, it could wind up a boon to both music industry capitalists and performing artists by increasing audience size and interest, much as tape recorders did in the past. But this is disingenuous. If Napster works as intended, then the problems noted above are real. With Napsterism truly flourishing, there would be no basis for capitalists to profit off selling music or to have revenues to pay for recording studios, engineers, and diverse other components of the music production process in the first place, and likewise no basis for performers to earn income from music sales to eat, whether their meal would have been caviar or canned tuna fish. Yes, performers could still do direct performances, if they could find someone to front the costs of travel, set-up, promotion, etc., but that would still leave writers, composers, and recording engineers and editors, among others, with few if any options.

Albert goes on to note that the problems are multiplied with Freenet and other Napster-like systems which, unlike Napster, rely on distributed networks rather than centralized ones -- i.e. there is literally almost no way to trace file transfers much less shut down a widely distributed Freenet (though so far it's unclear whether Freenet will ever achieve its potential).

Albert, of course, couldn't care less about the economic damage done to "corporate profiteers" but is very concerned that Freenet and similar systems would "inadvertently, [undercut] folks creating information except now we are talking not only about music, as before, but also about film, books, articles, and research or data of any kind." If intellectual property is immediately made available for free worldwide without any compensation to the producer or information, the incentive to produce intellectual property drops precipitously.

I think there are a number of solutions to this problem, some of which are already beginning to emerge. Albert doesn't seem to think that a solution that Stephen King utilized -- promising to release successive chapters of a serialized novel provided that people paid him for initial chapters -- will work, but in fact it was a stunning success. King netted more than half a million dollars from his brief experiment. But, and this is where the insanity of socialist economics comes in, Albert opposes this idea even if it works because, of course, individual artists, musicians and writers selling their creations over the Internet directly to their fans is still, at its core, capitalism.

Albert can stomach a solution to the Napster problem only if it meets two fundamental criteria: a) the system can't benefit some artists more than others and b) the means of production must not be privately owned.

The first criteria is the most absurd, but one that Albert has long maintained as a core principle of his economic views (see his lectures on Participatory Economics for a more elaborate view of this principle). Here's what Albert has to say about this idea in the contact of the arts,

For if we are to take seriously the claim of knowledge and art and information workers that they deserve a fair income, as we certainly ought to, then we have to ask, okay, how much income is fair? But as soon as we ask this question, it is obvious that Bruce Springsteen, Frank Sinatra's heirs, Metallica, et. al. do not deserve as much income each year as a dozen, a hundred, or a thousand steel workers. They ought to earn a decent income for their labors, sure, but not in accord with what they can extort, nor in accord with what their product is worth to admirers. People should earn for their labors, but only for the useful effort and sacrifice they expend. This is what people can themselves adjust in response to the incentive of payment. We pay people to put up with the sacrifices involved in doing labor. This is also what is meritorious and deserves pay. They shouldn't get more, for example, if they have better or worse equipment, if they happen to be in a highly valued or less highly valued pursuit, if they happen to be born larger or smaller or with a quicker or less quick sense of melody or programming talent. It is only for useful effort and sacrifice that people should be paid, either morally or as an economic incentive, but the amount paid should reflect the outlay of effort, not the value of the product.

It is hard to believe that rational people actually believe this stuff. People should be paid more for engaging in a pursuit that is more highly valued, and people who are better at such pursuits should be paid more than people who are not in such pursuits. Personally, I'm not a big fan of Stephen King, but clearly people want to read Stephen King novels a lot more than they want to read, say, some novel from an academic press that might sell 500 copies if it's lucky. Albert's argument is essentially that just because people value King's novels more than they value some English professor's novel is no reason that King should reap a bigger economic reward than the professor.

And how would we decide who could get compensation for being a novelist in the first place? I could write a novel, but believe me it would be nothing you would want to read. But if I decide to write a novel and sell it, am I guaranteed an income, since it's not my fault that the demand for my novel is even less than the demand for the academic professor's novel?

Albert sticks with music examples, but you can see how this would work with books too. He writes,

To continue with the music example, suppose we see a democratically organized community of music creators and performers (but not the owners) -- as the music industry. Suppose that aspiring performers apply to the industry's members to join it, and old performers appeal to their co-workers to stay in, and likewise for all its other workers. Suppose that the Freenet community of music listeners supports this industry by collectively transferring a massive revenue payment to it, and that, in turn, the music industry of music workers, organized democratically, pays each of its members in accord with their outlay of effort and sacrifice in their work, where a full-time worker in the field, at an average level of exertion, gets some agreed full-time salary, say $50,000 a year, and where one can earn somewhat more or somewhat less due to exerting more or less than average. Now, (a) Would this be moral? (b) Would this provide incentives sufficient for the creation and performance of music to thrive? And (c), could the funds necessary for all costs and payments come forth, somehow, from Freenet? (d) Is this replicable for other information industries?

One of the fascinating things about this proposal is how quickly even some Leftists want to take the freedom that the Internet provides and immediately clamp down restrictions on it. If you eliminate private modes of production for Internet music and then turn such production over to an overarching music union, in the minds of socialists such as Albert you've suddenly transformed music into that most wonderful of things: a publicly controlled industry. What you have for artists, musicians and writers, however, is a nightmare.

Where today widespread distribution of music or books requires dealing with corporations, Albert would simply replace that with equally onerous public institutions. Rather than writers and musicians being able to appeal directly to consumers over the Internet, they would have to beg, borrow and steal their way into the musicians union or writer's union to have a chance to make a living off their craft.

No thanks. Unlike Albert I think the beauty of something such as Napster or King's online novel experiment is that it points the way to a future where capitalism and corporatism are not one and the same thing. A prime example of this is the rise of print-on-demand publishing where for a very small fee, often around $100, anyone can have a book published and made available for distribution literally worldwide and receive royalty rates that are anywhere from 30 to 40 percent while maintaining complete control and ownership over content (royalties for unknown authors typically stink and, of course, publishers maintain complete control and ownership over books they publish).

If somebody's book of poetry sells 50,000 copies, while my nonfiction opus on capitalism barely sells 100 copies, I guess that might give Albert cause to complain about the unfairness of it all, but I say more power to the poetry author who can pull that off -- he or she deserves every cent of the windfall profits.

Source:

What's Napster and Freenet? Michael Albert, Z Magazine, September 2000.

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