The Price of Everything (24 page)

On the Internet, the thief is trying to convince the butcher it is in his best interest to hand the steak over to influence his dietary habits. When Google needed illustrations with which to garland its new browser, Chrome, it suggested to illustrators that providing the art for free would be in their best interest. “[W]e believe these projects provide a unique and exciting opportunity for artists to display their work in front of millions of people,” Google said. Melinda Beck, an illustrator in Brooklyn, sent Google an e-mail in response to the offer. She noted that she had worked for high-profile clients like Target and Nickelodeon, which had given her work lots of exposure. Still, she pointed out, “Both clients still paid me.”

The Google spirit is catching, though, as could be seen in an ad in the fall of 2009 for a law firm in Menlo Park, California, on the free classifieds service Craigslist. “The current economic climate has made it difficult for young lawyers to find paid positions,” it read. “Good experience with a top notch firm is what we offer. If you can realistically make a six to twelve month commitment and can get by without compensation (other than billable travel, mileage, parking and related expenses), this is an excellent opportunity.” Comments to the ad, picked up on a legal blog, were not very nice. One read: “The guys soliciting this should be rewarded with the quality of work they’re paying for and I hope they end up committing and are successfully sued for malpractice.”

 

 

THERE APPEAR TO
be two broad classes of potential solutions for information industries. One is to find more effective barriers—technological and legal—to keep content behind a paid gate. Having dropped its lawsuits against individual downloaders, the RIAA has put its sights on Internet service providers—hoping they could become the enforcers of legality online—curtailing and maybe even disconnecting the service of those who download material illegally.

ISPs could even become the collectors of user fees for legal downloads or streams, like a toll at the on-ramp to the freeway. They have become the focus of a flurry of legal activity. In September of 2009 the French Parliament passed a law that would allow ISPs to disconnect clients who were caught downloading material illegally three times. A new copyright law in Sweden forces ISPs to reveal information about unauthorized file sharers to copyright holders, paving the way for legal action. In April of 2010 Britain passed a law that would not only force ISPs to slow or stop the Internet connections of those who repeatedly downloaded pirated material, but would allow the government to demand that ISPs block Web sites that hosted substantial amounts of pirated material.

This might not work. Time and again hackers have bested even the best software locks. And creating effective legal walls would require international cooperation on copyright that might prove difficult to achieve. “Copyright is becoming obsolete,” Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, told me. “Even as the law has become more and more restrictive, the practice is getting looser and looser.” Varian doesn’t think companies can protect themselves with gadgetry either: “There is no real technological solution.”

If this is so, the only thing providers of content can do is try to reconfigure the way their content is offered to consumers, to persuade them to voluntarily pay for at least some of it. Conceptualizing the CD as an ad for the concert would fit in this category, as would the new attempt by music companies to sell subscriptions to legal music streams on mobile phones. For the news media, Varian suggests “versioning”—offering a no-frills version of the news for those who want it for free and premium offerings for those willing to pay. The point “is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay,” Varian suggested. “The producer chooses the versions so as to induce the consumers to self-select into appropriate categories.”

Hopefully some of this will work. If it doesn’t, it might force information off-line altogether. The
Newport Daily News
in Rhode Island, which faces virtually no competition from other newspapers, tried to drive readers back to the printed page. In June of 2009 it started to charge $345 a year for an online-only subscription and $100 for a print-plus-online combo. Within three months, Web site traffic was down 30 percent and single-copy sales were up 8 percent.

Ultimately, I fear free information will result in less creation of information products. In France there were 8 percent fewer albums released in the first half of 2008, and music releases by new artists fell 16 percent. More than a dozen newspaper companies in the United States have filed for bankruptcy protection since the end of 2008. This includes the Tribune Company, which owns the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
and Freedom Communications, which owns the
Orange County Register
and thirty-two other dailies. The
Rocky Mountain News
of Denver, Colorado, which had been around since 1859, published its last newspaper on February 27, 2009.

In July of 1999, 425,000 people worked for newspaper publishers in the United States. Ten years later employment in the industry had fallen by 150,000. Employment in other periodicals fell by 45,000 since its peak in 2000, and radio and television broadcasters too lost many jobs over the period. Yet for all the high hopes that dot-coms could replace crusty old-school media companies delivering the news, Internet publishing and broadcasting and Web search portals added only 15,000 jobs since their nadir in 2004. In July 2009 their total employment added up to 82,000—30,000 fewer jobs than at the peak of the dot-com bubble a decade ago.

The raiders of the Internet seem pretty sure of the power of their cause. Among the cognoscenti surveyed in December 2008 by the Pew Project on the Internet and American Life, fewer than one in three thought creators and their lawyers would find a legal way to reclaim control over their creations anytime soon. “Copying data is the natural state of computers,” said Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for civil liberties on the Internet. Giulio Prisco, a former scientist at CERN who founded Metafuturing Second Life, an Internet services company, added: “You cannot stop a tide with a spoon.”

Perhaps not. The media companies that rose in the twentieth century might be irrevocably doomed. Record labels might disappear. But I doubt that free information will ever be the natural state of affairs in a capitalist economy. In fact, I would wager that whatever the information economy looks like ten years from now, information in it will not be free.

The last battle over free might serve as an illustrative precedent. Music piracy didn’t exist until the late eighteenth century because property rights didn’t cover music compositions. Agents from opera companies would attend the opening nights of their rivals to “steal” the best melodies and reuse them in their own dramas. Only in the nineteenth century, when Romanticism propagated the idea of author as genius, did composers complain. Hector Berlioz called bootleggers thieves and assassins.

Technology changed the game. The popularity of the player piano in late-nineteenth-century Britain spawned the first recorded music industry for the masses, sheet music. By 1900 Britain had one piano for every ten Britons. Music publishers were minting money, selling sheets—known as dots—at one shilling and four pence apiece. Puccini and Handel were written for player piano, as well as more popular acts. Inevitably, the pirates came, using the new technique of photolithography to copy tunes flawlessly and sell them for only two pence.

Then, like now, much of public opinion sided with the pirates. The British Parliament passed the Musical Copyright Act of 1902, which allowed for the summary seizure of pirated music. Still, music publishers floundered, confiscating hundreds of thousands of pirate sheets only to see more appear on the market. But in December of that year the police caught the “king of the pirates,” James Frederick Willetts, who ran the People’s Musical Publishing Company.

Willetts made a strong defense of piracy in court. He argued that artists should not be given a free hold over their works because their talent was a God-given gift that should be used for the public benefit. He argued that piracy allowed the fruits of this talent to reach consumers who couldn’t afford the extortionate prices charged by the labels. But Willetts lost and was jailed. And the bootleggers were cowed out of existence. Information became expensive again.

Ultimately, information cannot be free. It only looks that way sometimes. The quote by Stewart Brand that became the slogan of online freedom fighters has a prelude that acknowledges that information also “wants to be expensive” because of its enormous value to recipients. This is a reasonable proposition. Still, it leaves no space for the producer of information. Information can’t exist without her.

DEMOCRACY SEEMS TO
have taken over the world. By one account, at the end of the twentieth century 63 percent of the world’s population lived in democratic regimes, up from 12 percent at the end of the nineteenth. Democratic rule—giving citizens a choice in electing their political representatives—can mean different things in different places, however. It is an umbrella term used equally in the United States, where transfers of power between opposing parties are routine, and Zimbabwe, where the opposition is still regularly clubbed into submission.

Still, a couple of variables can help us determine the quality of democratic governance around the world. The first is the quantity of resources—Kuwaiti oil, Congolese diamonds—at the disposal of rulers to purchase the acquiescence of the ruled. The other is the going price of voters, the value they give to their vote. This provides a precise measure of the legitimacy of the political system. The most corrupt countries are those in which voters are cheapest.

The price of a vote is typically a function of a voter’s income. Poorer ones demand less because they deem their vote to be worth little compared with direly needed cash. In the 1996 Thai general elections, voters were offered an average of 678 baht apiece, but those in Bangkok were likely to receive twice as much as those in rural areas, who were poorer. In São Tomé and Príncipe, a poor former Portuguese colony on two tiny islands off the coast of West Africa, a survey of voters in the 2006 election found that the median price for a vote in the election to the national assembly was $7.10, but the average reached about $37 in the capital district.

Price is also determined by what is at stake in the election. In São Tomé and Príncipe, vote buying took off only after oil reserves were discovered offshore in the late 1990s in the Gulf of Guinea—offering the prospect of a windfall. Not all races were worth the same. A vote for a president, whose power is mostly limited to the domains of defense and foreign affairs, cost merely $4.20. The real money was in the election to the national assembly—which wields most executive and legislative power.

While the direct purchase of votes might seem a perversion of democracy, it has a long-standing tradition with substantial pedigree. In Britain, elections were bought at least as far back as the seventeenth century. The practice grew as moneyed members from Britain’s colonies and its new commercial class tried to break into the landed gentry’s monopoly of political power. In 1812, George Venables-Vernon, the second Baron Vernon, left his son-in-law, Edward Harbord, third Baron Suffield, “one sum not exceeding £5,000 towards the purchase of a seat in Parliament.” Such commerce prevailed until the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act of 1883 imposed harsh penalties on those who gave or received bribes and established tight limits to campaign spending.

Across the Atlantic, newspapers in nineteenth-century New York would quote the price of votes just like that of hogs. The
Elizabeth-town Post
quoted a vote in Ulster County, at twenty-five dollars. Voters played the system so well they would wait to be paid before voting for the candidate they preferred anyway. On November 13, 1879, the
Watkins Express
in Schuyler County printed a harangue by Congregationalist minister Thomas K. Beecher extolling the virtue of political free markets: “When a good man for a good purpose buys the vote of a fellow man, the voter—being a principal and a sovereign—is free to do as he chooses; the act is right. The buyer is no briber in the court of conscience, not at the bar of God, except he have an intent to pervert the judgment. And the humble-minded voter who accepts the gift and guidance of the good man aforesaid is obeying motives manlier and more nearly safe than those which ordinarily sway our more active and enthusiastic voters.”