mp3.com, we hardly knew you (II)
Andy Orlowski has a wonderfully argued but sad piece about the sale of mp3.com to CNET. As he reports, the archive of music that was mp3.com will be destroyed. As Andy writes,
"Not since the Great Leap Forward has there been such a destruction of the commons. Back then, for political reasons, millions of books were burned. Now, for very sensible commercial reasons that we must not question, millions of MP3s will be lost to the commons. You have precisely seventeen days to grab the good stuff (and, Steb Sly - we hope you have a backup) ... CNET will follow Wal-Mart, Real Inc. and Apple Computer into the DRM business, infecting as many computers as they can with restrictive software controls that close what for a brief period has been an open computer platform. They all hope that this tentative business model, the terms of which are set by the entertainment "industry", will somehow turn them a profit. Or at least give the illusion of doing so, until a better idea comes along.
One of those better ideas that he discusses is the "compulsory license" -- which he rightly says had a stupidly "Stalinist name" but not quite rightly says the EFF has "thrown its weight behind." Some of us within EFF push the idea of a "statutory license" (the sort that the music industry was built on, see this), but EFF is just pushing the idea of alternatives.)
I've been lamenting the fast slide of mp3.com for sometime now. Now there's nothing more to lament. CNET's got a great domain name. And beyond that, Michael Robertson's vision of a new industry is over.
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Comments (6)
That piece doesn't do anything to raise my very low opinion of Orlowski's journalism (after the various hatchet-jobs he's written about blogging.)
MP3.com was a commercial storage and distribution system for other people's content, one that failed because people apparently didn't find it worth paying (or clicking ads) for. The fall of MP3.com has nothing to do with the MP3 platform, any more than the closing of a bookstore has to do with the burning of books.
(Not to mention that it's facile to call MP3 an "open" platform, when it is infamously encumbered with patent licensing issues.)
The commons has lost nothing here besides a bunch of hard disks and OC-3 lines. It is a sad loss, but the people who made that music still own it and can host it on their own websites if they want to. I'm sure they would rather have continued to let MP3.com host the tracks for free, but that didn't turn out to be a sustainable business. (Information wants to be free, but it turns out that servers and networks don't.)
I'm surprised that you could call Orlowski's piece "wonderfully argued" when it's based on a fundamental misconception what the "commons" means. The "commons" isn't any particular piece of free content or place for storing free content, it's the fundamental right of free content to exist. The real fight is to preserve people's ability to freely create, use and improve content. Mr. Lessig, you have done a great job in exposing and resisting the continual attacks on those rights. But to imply that those rights include an obligation for someone to provide free hosting for all that content, whether or not it makes market sense, is just nuts.
I too was surprised by the Orlowski piece, but perhaps in the opposite direction from the previous comment. I've always thought that Orlowski's scepticism about blogging's glorious future was basically right, even if not always diplomatically expressed. But in respect of compulsory licensing, his critical faculties appear to have deserted him. In the first-posted version of the article, he referred to a "global consensus" growing up around CL (what, even Tibetan monks?) - I am glad that CL is now merely a "tremendously popular notion".
But why? I admit, having read some of the supportive sites about it, there is a certain pleasing liberalism to some of the schemes proposed, but there is also a breezy certainty that any little teething problems with CL could quite easily be overcome.
Could they? Here are the problems with CL as I see them from my intial run over the territory. I'm sure that some of them have been answered already elsewhere, but I just haven't found the places in question.
on preview: what jens and anthony said.
Not since the Great Leap Forward has there been such a destruction of the commons.
as jens pointed out in his excellent post, this was apparently a business decision by CNET motivated, one might assume, by profit motives - not revolutionary zeal.
CNET's actions suggest that this was a rational economic decision. there were apparently few economic incentives in keeping the content. indeed, it would seem that the economic incentive was to get rid of it.
how is this anything like the wonton destruction carried out during the chinese cultural revolution?
if anything, what may properly be associated with the great leap forward is the revolutionary zeal of the "growing concensus" behind mandatory licensing schemes.
referring to them as "stalinist" is a kind adjective.
Sadly, my band will be losing the 100 songs that we put up for free download over mp3.com. We paid for a year of service, but sadly we will not even receive our full year. That doesn't seem fair.
Hey people,
The mp3.com music collection won't be destroyed, just DISPERSED. Almost every bit of it has been downloaded by somebody. The challenge will be to re-asemble it at one site.
- The Precision Blogger
http://precision-blogging.blogspot.com
Very informative post. And in general, I Wash constant reader! Very interesting to read you! Mentally thank you!