Digital Socialism

There is a new buzz word in the world of Intellectual Property protection on the Internet: “Digital Socialism”.  In the article “Digital Socialism and the Tyranny of the Consumer”, Digital Socialism is defined by the author as “The belief that there should be, in effect, some form of collective ownership and/or control of intellectual property.”  The simplest example would probably be illegally downloading music over the Internet.  Digital Socialists (in this case, the downloader) would argue that the intellectual property rights intended to protect the artist who created the music were instead used in an exploitative manner to maximize the wealth of the producer (in this case, the record company owning the rights to distribute the music).  The Digital Neo-liberalist (or whatever the opposite of a Digital Socialist would be called) would argue that the record company is legally entitled to determine exclusively how and to whom the music may be distributed (after all, it was the record company that funded the artist who created the music). And the artist may argue that they were not given enough creative control, ownership or profit of their music because the contract they signed was designed by  the more powerful party-the record company who limited the artist’s ownership of his work through complex contracts that are written in a way that intentionally mislead the artist. So, the plot thickens and apparently nobody wins.

Well, I’m guilty of downloading music illegally.  And so is pretty much everyone I know. I mean, it’s so simple that my grandmother could probably figure out how to illegally download her favorite Perry Como song.  And she’s 65 years old and doesn’t have a computer.

To be clear, I’m not advocating piracy or underplaying the tremendous importance of Internet based Intellectual Property protection. I’m just saying that (in the specific case of downloading music illegally) rather than calling it Socialism, let’s call it what it is. Lone ranger techies innovating faster than corporations.

Rather than argue for or against a Digital Socialist revolution I’ll pose a hypothetical scenario that I think relates closely enough to the argument.  Let’s say you receive two offers in the mail.  One is a promotion to rent three DVDs at your local video store for $3.99 each.  You can keep each DVD for four days.  The other offer is to sign up for a web-based company that will mail you three DVDs a month which you can keep for as long as you like for a flat monthly fee of $16.99. Although the Internet based company is charging $1.67 more per DVD than the neighborhood store, chances are that you’ll choose the $16.00 offer because it requires almost no effort of your part to receive or return the DVDs and you don’t have to worry about late fees. In a word, the web-based company is more innovative.

What is the point I’m trying to make?  Innovate. If you’re a record company and you’re mad that consumers choose to download music over the Internet rather than pay $19.99 for a CD then perhaps some of that moldy capital your company has been sitting on should have been used for research and development and perhaps you would have the rights to some of the intellectual property that would enable a superior form of the web-based consumption of music.  Let’s not turn this into class warfare. Yes, superior protection of Intellectual Property in the ever more increasingly complex Internet world is necessary.  But I think it’s worth considering the point that it might not be quite as urgent of a problem as it is if companies were a bit quicker to innovate.