BUSINESS Free Ride: How the Internet is Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back by Robert Levine Bodley Head, 307pp. £18.99
THE WORLD WIDE WEB turned 20 last weekend, and who, back in August 1991, could have imagined just how immensely disruptive the extraordinary technological advances would be. For some, the web has been a deeply painful development, because most of those disruptions have been based on providing online content free of charge. The web was designed not as a business platform but as an information network, with no need for a payment mechanism to be "baked in", and as a result it has been particularly traumatic for businesses that traded in information, be it text, audio or video. Protecting the rights of culture creators and copyright holders, and developing practical ways to compensate them, is the most intractable problem raised by the web over the past 20 years, with no clear solution in sight.
In Free Ride, Robert Levine details just how the various media corporations are suffering, extensive interviews with many insiders in the music labels, movie studios and newspaper offices revealing the degree to which the concept of "free content" is damaging their viability. This meticulously researched book examines the technological and legal battleground on which these disputes are being fought. (Though none are as bloody as the Battle of Cooldrumman of 561, which Levine cites as the first dispute over copyright, with saints Colmcille and Finnian arguing before King Diarmaid after the former copied the latter's Psalter.)
As the title suggests, the book is preoccupied with the effect of the internet, and particularly online piracy, on the "culture business", rather than the more nebulous concept of "culture" itself. As such, it functions more as a defence of the business interests of the large media conglomerates that have come to dominate the culture business in recent decades than an examination of the plight of those artists and writers and musicians who are suffering from reduced incomes. The assumption that the culture business as it existed before the web took off was an industry deserving of particular protection from technological change goes unchallenged, but the media industry's stranglehold on monetising our culture presents its own practical and ideological problems, as copyright reform activists are wont to point out.
As the former executive editor of Billboard magazine, Levine has an intimate knowledge of the fate that befell the music industry as a result of downloading and illegal file-sharing - it was, in some ways, the canary in the coalmine, a harbinger for future media disruption. Levine suggests that the accepted narrative of sclerotic and incompetent music labels being saved from irrelevance by Steve Jobs and Apple's iTunes music store isn't all that accurate, but the first-hand accounts Levine has gathered from music industry insiders suggests that was, indeed, what happened. In particular, the idea of 99 cent downloads, which iTunes introduced, is singled out as particularly pernicious - but in this worldview, fat profits from overpriced CDs, full of filler to pad out the two or three songs consumers actually want to own, are the music industry's God-given right.
The chapters on European efforts at regulating the technology companies and the possibilities of blanket licensing are much more persuasive, and a chapter looking at the plight of the newspaper industry is perceptive (the vast difference in advertising rates between print and online publishing accounts for most the woes of the newspaper industry, rather than readers accessing free content online), although it does paint James Murdoch as something of a media visionary, an image that is difficult to uphold after recent events.
Levine's solutions are sensible: reasonable fines rather than onerous lawsuits for illegal downloaders; experimentation with blanket licensing (as Eircom is doing with its Music Hub); and if his discussion of the balance between an open and neutral net and online copyright enforcement is ultimately inconclusive, it's a vital discussion we need to be having.
This is a book that relates, almost exclusively, the media business perspective on the impact of the internet. In this telling, the media corporations are helpless victims, and not only illegal filesharers, but also technology companies and copyright reform activists, are parasitically thriving off their products. But the fact that these media industries were once profitable and are now less profitable is not in itself a convincing argument for their protection. Drawing any sort of equivalence between the financial fortunes of the "culture business" and the health of culture itself is quite misleading. Falling CD sales do not equate to fewer or worse songs being written, after all, and media corporations' tumbling share prices don't give much insight into the quality of the films, books, journalism or music they produce. Protecting culture from the effects of illegal filesharing is critical, and understanding the perspective of those companies that sell culture is an important part of that battle, but it is by no means the whole story.
Unfortunately, it could very well take another 20 years before we discover if the web is a positive or negative influence on our shared culture.
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Davin O'Dwyer is a freelance journalist
