[EDITOR'S NOTE: At my day job, I work at a trade association in the telecommunications industry. The group's members are therefore connected to the issues discussed in this post, so I would like to take a moment to state that the opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or the association's membership.]
I’m a bit of a collector. A pack rat, if you will.
If you’ve seen read Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity, or seen the film adaptation, you’re familiar with the notion of someone who collects art as objects. It’s not the song, it’s that you own the original pressing from 1967 with the photo on the cover that shows the drummer who didn’t even play on the album.
I’m not that bad, but I do understand the urge. I have a lot of books and vinyl albums. Some of them I’ve had for most of my entire life. I could replace them, but those original things hold meaning to me. The way the album cover is worn, the price sticker from when I bought it used in 1984, the liner notes on the back. An MP3 does not come with liner notes.
But I’m a fool, in a way. This way of viewing content – for that’s what popular culture is, ultimately – is going away. And for some parties, it was never meant to be.
Who Owns Content?
Generally, companies own content. Authors write, but publishing houses publish. Actors act, but film studios distribute films. Until very recently, almost every creator of pop culture made a deal with a business that paid for the right to distribute the works. And that business was based on making a copy of the work and then sending it to market.
Let’s say I’m a publishing company. An author has written a book. I buy the book; I own it. I have to print copies of that book, so that customers can buy them. But I still own the book – the fact that a reader bought a physical book is almost an accident. From a corporate standpoint, my belief is that the corporate owners of content feel that you as a consumer don’t own anything.
That means, in the digital era, I can sell you a thing, but still retain it. Remember when Amazon sold digital copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and then took them back?
“I sold you that book by accident, so I’m going to have to take it back.”
In contrast, as I pointed out in the beginning, from a consumer standpoint, I do own your book or movie or music album. I paid good money and it’s mine and I’ll do what I want with it. I should be able to play it or read it anywhere I want. I can sell my copy if I want or give it to a friend.
I have copies of books that are a hundred years old. I can read them any time I want and will still be able to in the future. That’s not true of digital media.
Let me make myself clear on this point: I’m saying that content companies always felt this way. They don’t think this is a new way of exercising their rights, just a more efficient way.
Movies: Buy or Rent?
From the L.A. Times earlier this week: More people are watching movies online, but few are buying them. The article says that Hollywood studios had been hoping that people were transfer their buying habits online.
Hollywood’s DVD gusher, which propped up studio profits for more than a decade, peaked at $20 billion in 2006, more than twice that of box office ticket sales. DVD sales were far more profitable than rentals, because the discs cost less than $1 each to stamp and were sold to retailers for $17.
But in the last few years DVD sales have plunged as recession-weary consumers cut spending and switched to cheaper rentals from Netflix and Redbox. Lower-margin rentals have, in turn, resulted in lower revenue for the studios.
By my theory, this is conflicted behavior. The studios sold you a DVD, but they didn’t really think you owned the movie. If you really owned it, you could rip a copy and put it on your iPod. But you’re not supposed to do that; instead, you’re supposed to buy another copy from the iTunes store.
Instead of buying or renting, another approach is discussed.
…Ultraviolet would allow consumers to store movies they buy in a “digital locker” accessible from any connected device. A user could theoretically buy a film from a Web-enabled TV and then allow their child at college to watch it on a mobile phone.
In this case, you’re still not buying the movie. You’re buying the right to watch it any time you want, but that’s different.
Patrick Goldstein offers his analysis of this situation:
Hollywood put so many clamps and constraints on downloading movies that consumers decided to do almost exactly the opposite of what Hollywood wanted them to do: They rent instead of buy.
But Goldstein later admits that for most consumers “a one-time viewing experience is just fine, thank you very much.”
For the average person, how many times will you watch a movie? So why buy it? Unless you’re a collector, who needs to own a physical copy of content? And in the digital world, that ownership isn’t permanent anyway. New technology comes along and your old copy won’t play anymore.
David Poland reacts to these two articles and comes to the conclusion that “Digital Sell-Thru” (i.e., ownership) doesn’t work, except for a few exceptions.
No More First Editions
So, there are a multitude of issues: buying versus renting, intellectual property, piracy, and digital rights management. But I’m stepping back and taking a wider look.
Almost all content today is owned by large companies. They think they continue to own that content, even if you paid to consume it. They retain their rights. Most people I read online don’t seem to grasp this.
And as we move forward into an environment where more and more content turns digital (It’s practical to suggest that all content will be digital eventually), the gap between these two groups is only going to get wider.
Maybe ownership was always an accident of the analog world. The fact that we had to actually go to a store and buy a book, record or VHS cassette was an unavoidable side-effect.
There are also side-effects to getting rid of ownership. There is no uniqueness to a digital copy. You can’t have a First Edition of a book. There’s no “Butcher cover” to the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today album.
But it also means that content isn’t always available, just because the digital world is supposedly infinite in size. That’s another topic for a follow-up post.
I own a couple thousand vinyl records.
3 Responses
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The Pop View » Persons A, B & C: Ownership and Purchases in the Digital Age Says:
[...] two previous posts (here and here), I touched on something about content today that I think is both important and poorly [...]
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The Pop View » Intro: Access to Pop Culture in the Digital Age Says:
[...] think it’s helpful to review how I got here. 10/22/10 – I argued that “ownership” of content by consumers is probably going away, as we move to digital [...]
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The Pop View » Forever to Behold: Access to Pop Culture in the Digital Age Says:
[...] wrote that it was mostly an accident that consumers were ever allowed to own copies of artistic works. [...]