Again, the demand of the copyright holders seemed reasonable enough:
All we are asking for is a very simple thing, that people who now take our property for nothing pay for it. We are trying to stop piracy and I don’t think there is any lesser word to describe it. I think there are harsher words which would fit it.[16]
These were “free-ride[rs],” Screen Actor’s Guild president Charlton Heston said, who were “depriving actors of compensation.”[17] But again, there was another side to the debate. As Assistant Attorney General Edwin Zimmerman put it,
Our point here is that unlike the problem of whether you have any copyright protection at all, the problem here is whether copyright holders who are already compensated, who already have a monopoly, should be permitted to extend that monopoly.... The question here is how much compensation they should have and how far back they should carry their right to compensation.[18]
Copyright owners took the cable companies to court. Twice the Supreme Court held that the cable companies owed the copyright owners nothing.
It took Congress almost thirty years before it resolved the question of whether cable companies had to pay for the content they “pirated.” In the end, Congress resolved this question in the same way that it resolved the question about record players and player pianos. Yes, cable companies would have to pay for the content that they broadcast; but the price they would have to pay was not set by the copyright owner.
The price was set by law, so that the broadcasters couldn’t exercise veto power over the emerging technologies of cable. Cable companies thus built their empire in part upon a “piracy” of the value created by broadcasters’ content.
These separate stories sing a common theme. If “piracy” means using value from someone else’s creative property without permission from that creator -as it is increasingly described today[19 ] — then every industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy. Film, records, radio, cable TV.... The list is long and could well be expanded. Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Every generation — until now.
This essay was originally published in the author's book Free Culture
Questions Concerning Copyright
Brad Hall
In my years with the United States Pirate Party, I have been interviewed by various news outlets and students doing papers on third parties for various classes. I always answer student questions whenever such an e-mail appears in my inbox. Below are a sampling of their questions and my responses to them. I hope these students all received A's for their effort. Also, I am a big anime/manga fan, and that definitely comes out in this series of questions and answers. While this essay was originally written in 2010 and has existed for some time on the main USPP website and elsewhere, this version is newly updated.
1. Do you personally acquire digital media through file sharing? Downloading copyrighted material breaks several laws, and it is not the Pirate Party’s goal to break the law, simply to bring the law’s perspective into the digital information age.
2. How would content producers profit, if their media is being provided free of charge? The easiest way would be advertising. The people who make the songs that are the most listened to and the most downloaded or whatever, would receive the larger share of the revenue pie. Of course, as a friend pointed out to me previously, “Okay, advertising. Where does that money come from? As they say, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You’re funded with advertising, someone else lost that advertising dollar.”
While an advertising-supported model has its limits, there are several models that have worked well for several companies/people.
Anime Network and Crunchyroll both have a system in place where you can watch some anime for free. Then you can watch more and other anime for a price. The price ranges from $7 per month to a yearly pass of $70 per year. I have no idea how many subscribers they get at any price. They also host a few advertisements. I have no idea how many or how much money those generate. Presumably it’s enough to keep them in business.
Kodansha recently came up with an idea of releasing manga (Japanese comic books) as a series of iPod/iPhone apps. It's a great idea, but there is that one major hurdle to cross: Apple itself. Apple is the gatekeeper for everything that is sold on the iTunes Store. If Apple does not approve of something, it does not get sold.
Selling on Amazon's Kindle ebook store would be another possibility. The overhead is lower for an Internet-based store than it is for a brick-and-mortar store. Also, there would be no physical objects to ship, so manga created for distribution on a Kindle (or other ebook reader) could retail for a lower price.
There is a comic called Megatokyo (www.megatokyo.com). It’s an American comic done in a “manga style.” Usually every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, one page is uploaded to the site. The comic has a pile of followers, including myself. The way the author monetizes it is by selling a “low bandwidth version” (book) and shirts and other things that pop up in the comic.
Every page that has ever been uploaded to the Megatokyo site is still there so anyone can go back and read the series from the beginning at any time. This is particularly helpful for new fans who want to join the story.
Though, the only way that would work with manga is if the original writers release it online the same way. Of course these pages would have to be translated into nearly every language that the fans speak to ensure they keep coming back to the primary site and not some third party site that offers the pages translated to their language.
The difference between Megatokyo and any other manga is Megatokyo was made from the beginning to be a webcomic. If you read today’s page and get frustrated and want to read the next page, or the next chapter, tough. You have to wait for the page along with everyone else. You can’t go to some website and download the entirety of the series.
While flipping through an issue of one of my favorite manga series, Loveless, I can find no t-shirts that Soubi or Ritsuka wear that make me say “Oooh! I want that shirt!” though, some weirdo fangirls might go for the cat ears or something. Maybe a messenger bag. Every series has a messenger bag. Or maybe make a tie-in MMO.
In Loveless, the villains meet up in Wisdom Resurrection, a fictional MMORPG that appears to be based on Final Fantasy XI. That’s where they hold some of their meetings. Maybe they could make an MMO based on that. Maybe take a cue from Turbine and make it free-to-play, but make money via micro-transactions.
Turbine is a company that makes video games. Two of their game series, Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online used to be MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) that operated under a subscription model, for so much money per month, you could play. Starting in 2009 Turbine started making these games free-to-play. You could still pay a monthly fee to receive certain advantages such as the ability to carry more gold and items, but you could play the games, to their completion, without paying a cent if you wanted. Many new players flocked to the games.
The third idea is to create a Hulu-like site where everything is free and available from all the major manufacturers. Force people to watch an ad or read an ad or whatever for x number of pages viewed.
The other problem with manga is this: “What’s good?” If you walk into a Books-A-Million any day of the week, you will find a pile of manga titles. Manga isn’t like a “funny book” where you can pick up any issue and know what’s going on. There’s a story. If I picked up Loveless volume six and read it without having read the previous five volumes, I’d have no idea what was going on.
“Thanks grandma… Full Metal Alchemist volume 73… thanks… yes grandma, this is one of them Japanese manga comics.” Never mind the fact I hadn’t read volume 1-72.
With a manga, you have to read about 2 or 3 volumes to figure out what the story is. That’s a cost of
