Amateur-to-Amateur

I want to put in a belated plug for Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter’s Cato Policy Analysis, “Amateur-to-Amateur: The Rise of a New Creative Culture.” They do a fantastic job of describing how the rise of the Internet has enabled the emergence of a new model for cultural production.

They walk the reader through the “supply chain” of the culture industry (creating new works, selecting works for publication, producing copies of the work, distributing them to consumers, and promoting them) and shows how technolog is radically decentralizing each of them. Fifty years ago, only wealthy people and commercial movie studios could afford the technology needed to create professional-quality videos. Today, you can do the same thing with a few thousand dollars of equipment, and the cost of that equipment drops every year. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to become a nationally-known pundit, you needed to spend decades working your way up through the ranks of a large, hierarchical media organization like the New York Times. Now, as Julian explains, you just start a blog, and the size of your audience is limited only by the quality of your work. A decade ago, creating an encyclopedia required hiring dozens of full-time employees to solicit and edit articles. Today, a far more comprehensive encyclopedia is being produced by volunteers, and it’s available for free on the Internet.

Some people dismiss these developments as anomolies, or at least as isolated incidents. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source software, and the rest are just manifestations of people having too much free time on their hands, the theory goes–the real work is still done in hierarchical, commercial enterprises. What Lastowka and Hunter do a good job of demonstrating, I think, is that these phenomena deserve to be regarded as a new form of production on par with the 20th century’s industrial production model. It’s in its early stages yet, so naturally it still accounts for only a minority of cultural products, but that’s not surprising, given that industrial production methods had a 100-year head start.

I do have a criticism of the paper, however.

I think the authors ought to more clearly distinguish between decentralized production of new content and decentralized distribution of content that’s already been produced. For most of the paper, the authors celebrate the fact that amateurs are creating new works on a scale that people a decade ago couldn’t have imagined. Yet in their penultimate section, they seem to be holding out Kazaa and Morpheus as examples of this creative culture. I think that’s wrong. Whatever one thinks of the legal merits of Kazaa’s case, it’s clearly the case that (at least at present) the popularity of those programs (and their successors) is parasitic on the industrial content industry. Most of the files being traded on those networks were created and distributed by centralized, capital-intensive music labels. It may be that in the future, peer-to-peer networks will be dominated by music created for the purpose of free online distribution, but that hasn’t happened yet. And I think it undermines our argument to conflate creating free music with stealing commercial music. The authors don’t come out and say that we should cheer the widespread copyright infringement occurring on peer-to-peer networks, but they also don’t seem bothered by it.

Relatedly, the authors flirt with the notion that we don’t need commercial culture at all They suggest that in the future, we’ll have amateur music, peer-produced replacements for all commercial software, and–perhaps–an open-source blockbuster movie. Therefore, they seem to suggest, copyright doesn’t really matter.

This strikes me as wrong. As I’ve argued before, certain types of cultural production are unlikely to be amenable to peer production. Blockbuster movies and certain kinds of commercial software are two examples. Novels and textbooks might be other examples. Obviously, I could be wrong, but it strikes me as extremely premature to start discussing the end of copyright. If peer-production is superior in a particular domain, it will crowd out commercial production with or without copyright law. This is already happening with punditry, and I suspect it will begin to happen with music in the next decade or so. Although at the margin copyright does discourage certain kinds of cultural production (and, accordingly, I think certain aspects of the law should be reformed) copyright at its core is not a significant obstacle to peer production.

Anyway, I highly suggest reading their paper, which is very well done.

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