Proving claims of greed and gluttony in digital media
ABC Arts recently produced a short documentary The Golden Age of Piracy examining illegal downloads of films and television programmes Australia. As I've seen on The Conversation and elsewhere, those seeking to explain or defend copyright infringement in Australia emphasise the high prices and late releases of film and television programmes in Australia compared to the rest of the world.
Of course there's not much for film-goers to like about high prices and late releases, and those who think prices are too high or releases too late are free to express this opinion. In resorting to copyright infringement to cure this perceived ill, however, I wondered if the infringers and their apologists might actually be undermining the complainants' campaign for lower prices and earlier releases.
In resorting copyright infringement to satisfy their desires, infringers allow copyright owners to make a plausible claim that copyright owners are suffering from the lawlessness of copyright users, to which the logical remedy is to enforce the law. In order to prove that the real problem is unreasonable pricing and poor service, the complainants need to both refuse to pay the price and refuse to take the product, just as they would if they believed that the price of a cake, say, was too high, and the cake stale.
I suppose that infringement apologists could also challenge copyright owners to lower their prices. Critics of copyright enforcement assert that such an action would stop or at least significantly reduce infringement, as Mark Pesce does in another recent ABC article. If infringement were to continue under these conditions, therefore, copyright owners could disprove the apologists' case (except insofar as apologists could simply insist on even lower prices — but establishing such a moving target would render their claim unprovable).
I'm not holding my breath for either side to take up such a challenge. For their part, the media industry seems content to back its claims with absurd exaggerations of how much revenue is lost to infringement. Meanwhile, infringement apologists seem content to assert their claim without any evidence whatsoever. (Mark Pesce even goes so far as to cite a study arguing that infringement does reduce cinema revenues, just not enough for Pesce to care about.) And even if a few brave infringers gave up downloading in order to prove their point, could they convince other infringers to do the same?
Jane C. Ginsburg identified the problem in a single word: greed. Neither side wants a functioning market by which they might come to a reasonable price for the exchange of artistics works. Each side instead wants a system in which it can dictate prices to the other side, thereby accumulating all of the benefits to itself at everyone else's expense.
