Do I support OPEN or
SOPA? Which camp do I belong to? Hollywood or Silicon Valley? I spent some time thinking about the answers
to these deceptively simple questions …
I am an Independent Artist and
I rely on Internet sites like YouTube, Facebook, SoundCloud that have the infrastructure
and user base that enables me to distribute and promote my music, without
depending on labels. Maybe that makes me
a candidate for the Anti-SOPA Silicon Valley camp?
On the other hand, I have
invested a ton of energy, passion, time and capital towards the creation of my
music, videos and their promotion. The
list of expenses is pretty long – studio costs, session musician costs, album
production/mastering costs, video cinematography and editing costs, video venue
permits, artwork creation costs, promotion costs. When I search on Google, Bing or Yahoo for
my songs “Barkha Bahaar” or “Saari Raat”, many sites come up, offering these
tracks for free download/streaming. Without
these sites, I would have earned a lot more from my music, and likely produced
more albums from those earnings.
Regardless of the camp I join, from my perspective, i.e., an Artist’s and a Content Producer’s perspective,
the real problem statement is the following:
How do we ensure that Artists
and Content creators don’t lose earnings that they would otherwise receive if
their content weren’t given away for free by websites/platforms without their
consent?
The problem is complicated to
solve, because there are many different use cases to consider, including the
following:
1.
Platforms like
YouTube and SoundCloud that are being used by legitimate owners such as myself,
who might want to make a certain track available or upload a video. These sites
are also used by users who are a) harmlessly uploading content they don’t have
rights to because they want good music on their accounts or b) knowingly
uploading content they don’t have rights to so as to make money from the Ads
displayed on their account.
2.
Sites or
Platforms that make obscure music/videos available because its genuinely hard
to find this content on paid platforms such as iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, etc.
These sites want to offer the world & Artists a service by making this
obscure music/video available, and therefore paying the Artists is not considered
necessary.
3.
Sites or
Platforms that make free music/videos available because they are unaware of the
implications of their actions in the grand scheme of things.
4.
Sites or
Platforms that make music/videos available for free since they are operated by
individuals who believe that music/videos should be available to everyone at no
cost, with complete disregard for the time, energy, passion and financial
investment that goes into creating content.
5.
Sites or
Platforms that knowingly make music/videos available for free, solely to
attract consumers & make money by placing ads from ad networks like Google
AdSense and others.
Where does the solution
lie? Where do we begin? We could look at a few different options. Having spent many years working with Search
Engines at Inktomi and Yahoo in the past, I know that a technical solution to
identify some of these sites in the search index based on characteristics that
Google, Bing or Yahoo extract and store would be a good starting point; and I
hope that more will be done in this space by these companies because they have
the data and technical expertise to do it best.
But this is not fool proof, and for reasons mentioned above, it’s not
always clear who is at fault – is it the companies that have built platforms
and under-estimated the magnitude of the problem, or site users/owners who are
ignorant or believe that everything in the world should be available for free? Or is it ultimately the end users of these
sites/platforms who download or stream content because its unavailable
elsewhere or they don’t believe in paying for content?
Different legislative
approaches, be it SOPA or OPEN, aim to shut down or cut off funding to websites
providing free content they don’t have rights to. While legislation is an important component
of the full solution, as long as there are users who want free content, or just
want to find (obscure) content easily, new sites and platforms will keep
cropping up. Here is where technology
and consumer education play a vital role because there is a distinction between
“Freely Available Content, i.e., Ease of Access to Content” and “Free (of cost)
Access to Content”.
While quite different in
their approaches and monetary value assigned to a piece of content, companies
like Apple, Spotify, Amazon are providing large content catalogs within a user-friendly,
easy-to-use framework, to move consumers away from free, illegal download
sites. Perhaps there will be yet another variant that can import content easily from numerous sources, however, the original Artist/Creator/Owner is always attributed
and given his/her fair share? Independent Artists, Major labels in Hollywood
and Consumers will all need to be convinced to embrace these new solutions, and
a mechanism for pricing will need to be determined. In essence, we could redefine the problem as
“How do we ensure Artists and content creators get their fair share regardless
of the medium/platform?”
I hope the wars between the
camps will be over soon, so that experts in technology, legislative action, education
and media/music can unite to enable Artists such as myself to fund our
creativity & make it viable.
If you are reading this,
please buy music/videos or stream ad-supported music/videos from legal and official
sources on the internet, for example, iTunes, Spotify etc that compensate Artists for their
creation, hard work & investment, and share this article with others so
that they do the same.
My music on the Internet:
