But isn't the central issue compensation — shouldn't the Beatles make money from their compositions, shouldn't Wilco make money from their records?
Lessig: Well, I'm a strong believer in copyright. And in my view, what copyright is is the right of the author to control what happens to his or her work. In my view, that means if Gilberto Gil says, "I want my work to be available for other people to build on top of even without paying me," he should be allowed to do that. There shouldn't be a record company that says to him, "No, we're not going to let you do that." I wouldn't favor forcing artists to turn over their work, but I would favor allowing artists to be much more creative about the ways they distribute their work.
But how are bands supposed to get paid when content is given away?
Waagner: I've always looked at the Internet as a free broadcast license and a free printing press, and whatever you do with it is just empowering. From having run an independent label and spent 20 years trying to help bands get heard, get written about and get distributed, to all of the sudden have this opportunity to just do it was so empowering.
From there, helping spread the word — selling more records, selling more concert tickets, selling more T-shirts, [doing] the things that you can't replicate online, the things you can't replicate or swap, that's really the concept.
What we did is, the band [Wilco] went from thousand seaters to selling out 3,000 [seat concert halls] to 5,000 [seat halls], and they went from selling 200,000 physical records to almost 500,000 physical records. So that's the benefit of [the Internet]. I don't think anybody hearing your music is a bad thing.
I've always felt that the record companies [could have] played the psychology of the MP3 a little smarter. [If they had] not been like, "Oh, my God!" — if they would have been like, "So what, it's an MP3 — it sounds like crap, people have been listening to music for free forever and it's not a threat," instead of going into this horrible litigious mind-set .
Lessig: I go between thinking [the major record labels] were just stupid and thinking they were extremely smart. The stupid is exactly what you just said. The extremely smart is they realized, as you said before, that they had distribution in the box. . . . And the Internet was going to destroy that ability to control distribution. So they really needed to fight this new technology if they were going to preserve their old business model.
Article comments
1 - Martin Blank
I think without a doubt the Internet can be employed as a fabulous tool to promote bands to semi-stardom who otherwise would have never been heard anywhere, anytime, outside their home towns and perhaps a very tiny worldwide cult following. But, I firmly believe that the amount of play in copyright and licensing is up to the artist -- music, literature, film, etc. This is why the "mash license" intrigues me: it gives the original artist greater flexibility in saying, You can use this for reasonable interpretations, or, without issuing such a license, You may never use this under any circumstances whatsoever without paying me.
I further believe that Cory Doctorow is a hack and a blemish on contemporary literature -- granted, I am no doubt overly picky when it comes to novelists -- but he has done the writing community a great service with his most recent book: he proved that you can release a novel for absolutely no cost via the Internet and not remarkably undermine retail sales of the book.
On the other hand -- one must love symmetry! -- the fact that you may so freely publish books or music on the Internet, no editorial and production talent involved, puts the onus on the unwashed masses to separate the meritorious from the schlock, to send the *real* hero up the pop charts. Are the filthy rabble up to the task?