Why Composers’ and Musicians’ Next Cause Should Be Obliterating Digital Piracy

In a recent Facebook thread, my good friend Terry Jones made the statement that there is a lot of “pissing in the wind” happening over digital piracy, but not much action being taken. He’s absolutely right. Why is that? Well, for starters, there aren’t any solutions as of yet. That’s because there are two basic groups of very industrious and creative people fighting each other: “The Scene” and “The Devs”.

Whu? Huh? “The Scene”? “The Devs”? What the hell are you talking about now, Ogden?

Well, first, a history lesson. Grab a cup of coffee — this might take a sec.

“THE SCENE”

What is The Scene? Warez has been around, really, since the early 1970′s when people started reverse-engineering — aka “cracking” — and exploiting protected software systems at the corporate level. As the practice caught fire and files were shared manually (on floppy disk and eventually on hard drives) amongst the warez community, the practice grew and eventually became a popular pastime, much in the way that “ham radio” did during the Vietnam War-era 1960′s— at first as an underground cult-following and eventually as a subculture of the technical revolution. Today, the warez community has advanced from simply cracking infrastructure systems and databases to cracking anything and everything they think might be crackable: Movies, music, software, systems, platforms, databases, operating systems… basically anything that is digital in nature and anything else they can think of. If it’s digital, it’s crackable.

As the warez scene became a haven for formerly scrupulous engineers and coders who, for whatever reason, now found themselves with an axe to grind, a subculture formed and was somewhat organized as “The Scene” : A global community of hackers, engineers, and coders complete with rival factions who compete to see who can crack the latest and greatest titles first and get them out to the community fastest. When software developers and computer technology companies started to become aware of The Scene and it’s adopters, they quickly started to formulate ways to combat the practice of cracking. Various protection technologies were put into place by as many different developers as there were products to protect. Keygens, challenge and response codes and dongles all became popular ways for software developers to protect their products against theft and piracy by The Scene.

However, the proliferation of the Internet granted crowd-sourcing power to The Scene community, and it wasn’t long before even those protection schemes employed by Devs were also exploited right along with the software they were designed to protect. In fact, it started to become such a crazy “oil grab” of free software and content that The Scene began to refer to newly cracked goods as “releases” — thus contributing one more key ingredient to a culture that was already rabid with enthusiasm: Anticipation. Each “release” became an event; a big whoop-tie-doo that could be announced, ramped up and celebrated by the thousands of waiting and anxious downloaders who were crashing the boards in chat rooms, IRC clients and NewsGroup forums. Almost overnight, most Devs went from having a total lock on their business revenues to losing hundreds of thousands of dollars to freely-available products that were now completely downloadable and unprotected on the World Wide Web.

The Scene became a very strong, organized and well-oiled machine (see diagram to the above right). “Release groups” started forming: Teams of hackers working together on releases. They then distributed those packaged releases to “topsites” — places where members of a release group could anonymously upload all their work — which then were picked up by “couriers”, aka “uploaders”, who were the folks charged with getting the cracked material up on a sharing “site” like Rapidshare, Megaupload, Extrabit, or the myriad other peer-to-peer online repositories. Finally, the people who partake in the free goods provided by releases (essentially, end-users who are known in The Scene as “leechers”) log in to these sharing sites, either by purchasing a cheap subscription account or by utilizing the free but limited no-cost option to download the software, unpack it, and begin using it.

Because release groups became so incredibly organized and since every facet of a release was being handled by another anonymous and untraceable group of people, the Devs were now faced with a serious dilemma: A) Spend all their time chasing cracked software and trying to stop the bleeding, or B) Concentrate on developing new software like they always had, but hope and pray the government would step in and put a stop to the obvious bullshit. Some chose the former, eventually closing their doors having spent incredible resources on chasing lost profits due to The Scene. Others chose the latter. Of those who stuck it out, some still were unable to keep their doors open and were forced to go out of business. There are several, however, who were able to at least maintain enough income to keep creating, but have also just come to accept piracy as part and parcel of being a contemporary software developer in our new climate of the Culture of Free.

THE GOOD

A small handful of potential solutions to the constantly evolving problem of digital piracy have been tossed around lightly by people who cannot make a difference, and by that I mean people who have no political clout on their own. Like my buddy Terry observed, it appears that there is a lot of bitching and moaning going on and not much being done to suss out answers or stimulate forward motion. However, bitching and moaning over lost revenues, IP theft, content delivery vehicles, and the like — the “pissing in the wind”, as it were — is something that I don’t necessarily write off as such a bad thing. Before any major overhaul or revolution (if I can be so bold as to use such a word) there is always a public cry of dismay or an expression of discontent with the status quo. Also, the problem of downloadable IP theft, despite having been around since the dawn of the Internet, is just now, in 2012, becoming a collective worry amongst digital creators. Up until recently, the issue was a threat, but it wasn’t a stark earth-shaking reality by way of lost revenues. I liken it to the global warming debate phenomenon: Most people either don’t realize or have long forgotten that it was actually Republican United States President Richard Nixon back in 1969 who first brought up the issue of global warming as a threat to the planet, yet the issue has only really taken off in the last decade as scientists have provided convincing evidence of the effects of it over time. So conversation is good. Complaining is good. Public awareness is good. Education is good. It’s always been there, but since you now have 1,000 Tweeters and Facebookers a day ranting and raving about it you might feel like it’s all you hear about. I would suggest that it’s the signal-to-noise ratio that might be annoying you, not an alternate reality where nobody is doing anything about it.

THE BAD

But that’s just in the circle of folks who recognize digital piracy as a very real problem. What about the other segments of the population? The hard truth is that most people don’t even know there is music in movies half the time, and if they do, they don’t understand how it got there. You mean you actually wrote all that stuff? If they don’t understand that your music is in the movie they are watching, how would you ever expect them to give a damn about your IP ownership of that same music? Furthermore, have you ever tried to explain to your cousins back home how you got the music IN that movie to begin with? Uh huh… me neither. Train-wreck city. So, suffice it to say that the majority of human citizens have no worldly clue what a VST instrument is, a sample library, a plugin, a DAW, or myriad other things we might use as examples to demonstrate the seriousness of the coming flood. As such, they also have no idea that those things are being stolen and “released” on a daily basis on sites that are freely available to even them if they were ever remotely interested.

The Google Role

Here’s another thing: Recently, a second generation was born that will never know anything of an analog world. Since Day One, their world has incorporated what they see as staple necessities: Cell phones, personal computers, digital and satellite television, 3D, Dolby Digital Surround Sound, online interactive gaming systems, and of course…. the Internet.

But again, this is only part of the problem. Since Google, in one way or another, influences the stream of news that most people are consuming via the Internet, to a large degree it also controls how that news is created, maintained and legislated. The following statement is purely my own opinion, but I believe that in order to protect its own positions and interests Google has chosen to sweep the issue of digital piracy under a rug of irrelevance. It has chosen, for reasons that I personally believe are completely self-serving and financially viable for it’s own sustainability, to ignore any grassroots campaign that ever starts to rise up against online and digital piracy. In turn, this keeps people in the dark and causes them to be unconcerned with the issue.

I’m not alone in this. Many people share my concern that a lot of the onus of digital piracy falls squarely on the shoulders of Google and its policies. One of the most outspoken people in Hollywood to take up the cause against piracy is über-agent Ari Emanuel, who spoke at the “All Things D Conference” in early 2012 about Google’s resistance in helping to figure out the mess. (If you didn’t, stop and watch it now.)

But even Google, as Emanuel states in his interview (seriously, you should go back and watch it!) is not going to do anything about the problem until their user base demands it of them. People simply do not know about this problem. We have a log jam that came before anyone saw it coming: The technology hasn’t been evolved enough to be any kind of worry for people creating in the digital space. Until now. Starting with the fiasco of Napster and descending on down, we’ve watched the potential of what is possible become an absolute reality. We are now faced with losing some very credible and important industries as a result. If Napster was the warning shot across the bow, then the recent shutdown of the peer-to-peer site Megaupload might have been the left hook that landed with most people, regardless of their technical proficiency. The Megaupload incident brought the issue of digital piracy front and center in the mainstream media and made the average person at least ask the question, “What’s this digital pirate thing, anyway?” Until more of those types of things spurn more of those types of questions, to be truthful, many global citizens will remain in the dark on digital piracy, unaware that it’s even happening.

THE UGLY

So.. can it get any uglier? ‘Fraid so. I’ve said it before, but the music-making community is one of the worst proponents of digital piracy. We are literally eating our own on this one, folks. As I’ve done research on this problem in the last year in preparation for SCOREcast launching some things to help educate people on the problem, I’ve run into instances involving even heavy hitter film composers using illegal and pirated software in their studios. I’ve talked with sample library developers who can assuredly pointed out — by name — certain well-paid and successful composers who are using cracked goods to score blockbuster Hollywood films and television shows. All of the previous stuff — the history of the movement, the events leading us to where we are with it now — none of it makes me all that upset, until I learn or remember that my very own colleagues are participating.

That has to stop. I don’t know what it will take. I really don’t. I am committed to do some thing with the platform we have at SCOREcast to try and help developers, but the overall craziness of the Culture of Free is something that will need to come from all of us banding together and refusing to let it go on. I’m open for suggestions. I want to hear ideas. I’d love if you have thoughts on this and I’d be interested in extending the conversation beyond this site or this platform as well. We need to think big, bold, brash, a little bit “asshole”, and definitely way more proactively. We need to find a solution. We need to find LOTS of solutions. It will take a lot of time — in fact, we might not even see piracy get its comeuppance in our lifetime and we should be prepared for that, also. But it has to start with us. It has to start right now.