Eve 6 Lead Singer: ‘Owning Media Is Now An Act Of Countercultural Defiance’
from the it's-tragic-because-it's-true dept
Max Collins, the lead singer of the band Eve 6 has penned a great piece for Popula, noting that owning media is now an act of countercultural defiance. Specifically, he’s speaking out against basically all of the major book publishers suing the Internet Archive for making it possible to check out digital copies of books. He highlights, first, how the key gatekeepers, both in music (the record labels) and in book publishing have crafted a system that clearly screws over the actual creative folks, and how they basically want to make it so that all media you consume is on a rental model where you have to keep paying again and again and again.
And now they are coming for the authors of books, by suing the Internet Archive to ensure that books become like Spotify music: theirs, not yours or ours, to own. Owning media is now an act of countercultural defiance.
He talks about growing up going to record shops and finding the hidden gems (an experience I remember well, too). And while that may feel like just nostalgia for “the way things were,” he’s making larger point. There are elements of the new systems that are clearly better than the old. The ability of basically anyone to access almost any kind of music or books at any time is really something worth celebrating. But, he’s highlighting how, when it’s done under the terms of the labels and the publishers, the models are designed for exploitation, rather than to benefit culture.
The Internet Archive’s Open Library operates with an owning and lending model, like a traditional library. That means big publishers, who are the platform capitalists of print media, want to see it destroyed. They do not want you to be able to take digital books out from a library. They don’t even want you to own digital books. They want to move you to subscription services like Spotify, Netflix or Amazon Prime, so they can count on your monthly tithes to CEOs and shareholders coming in… forever.
I’m not sure I agree with the whole “platform capitalism” framing, but the underlying point is solid. To some extent, some of his complaints have existed for many decades (centuries?). He notes that “we’re handing art over entirely to the profit motive…” but that’s actually been quite true for a long, long time, and isn’t exactly new in the age of Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon.
But what is changing is that there were alternatives in the past and ways around that system, and that included things like the library. But that’s an anathema to the companies that want to see if they can squeeze more out of users by making the consumption of media a subscription, rather than something that the users actually have some level of control over. And digital libraries, like the Internet Archive, are important to preserve that other path for access to culture:
The Internet Archive and all other digital libraries and archives must be protected, and people need to see this ludicrously unethical suit by big publishers for what it is: an assault on art and truth and its protection for posterity.
I wish more artists were willing to speak up about this. I’ve seen far too many authors supporting the lawsuit, without realizing the end result of it is to put them even more under the control of the big publishers, which have already been exploiting them as the only games in town.
Filed Under: digital ownership, eve 6, lawsuits, max collins, ownership, subscriptions
Companies: internet archive
Comments on “Eve 6 Lead Singer: ‘Owning Media Is Now An Act Of Countercultural Defiance’”
I can bring up a perfect example of what they’re talking about: World Wrestling Entertainment.
WWE’s home video output used to involve DVDs and Blu-rays of documentary features and classic content collections…up until the WWE Network came along. Soon after the Network launched, WWE slowly cut back on its physical media releases. It has stopped releasing Blu-rays altogether and now only releases a handful of DVDs (mostly for pay-per-vi…sorry, premium live events) per year. Even after the transition from the standalone Network service to Peacock (in the U.S.), WWE remains a company with a vast library of content that can only be seen through a subscription streaming service.
Between that example and Disney refusing to release its Disney+ originals on physical media, the direction is clear: Megacorps don’t want you owning anything because they want you to pay rent on accessing any part of culture—for the rest of your life.
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And thus piracy will continue to flourish because there’s a market that’s not being met.
I have Seasons 1-6 of Star Wars The Clone Wars on dvd plus the movie but there’s been NO release of Season 7 so I can complete the series.
The fact this is the trajectory of media companies and studios to make it so you have to CONSTANTLY pay to retain access to media you like is horrific and the death knell for media ownership. Our rights as consumers are being slowly stripped away.
If this be the course they set, then it may not be long before everyone who wishes to own their media has to sail the high seas.
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If they refuse to let us own it legally, we will have no choice but to own it illegally—and it will be their fault for not offering the legal option without a monthly subscription attached.
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AFAIK, MST3K, Rifftrax, and The Mads Are Back offer DRM-free episodes of their works and I’m just happy as a clam that they have ownership as an option in a world of tenancy.
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To be fair, not every episode of MST3K is legally available due to rights issues of one kind or another. This is a kind of pain I like to call DEEP HURTING.
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That is true. And some of them which are not available now had been available digitally before. I’m looking at you, The Final Sacrifice!
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That being said, if you were lucky to buy a now-unavailable episode before the rights expired, you basically have it forever, and not just because it’s DRM-free; I bought The Final Sacrifice from Rifftrax and they allowed me to download the episode again from their web site even though the rights had lapsed! Sony won’t even do that with the Playstation for Studio Canal movies!
Re: Re: Why do they act this way?
Bluntly, because they can. If the majority of media consumers, or likely even a significant minority or them, refused rentership disguised as ownership, it would end in short order. Anyone who wants to change this needs to target the consumers to get them to changes their behaviour, because lawmakers won’t change laws without a bigger bribe than activist can afford and the perpetrators won’t change their behaviour until it costs them enough to threaten their jobs.
Re: Re: Re: Small nit-pick, but…
I believe the word you’re looking for is “tenancy”.
Thank you, have a nice day.
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I don’t think it’s “tenancy” if you don’t occupy the space. Books, movies, and other media are not land or premises.
I believe the word you’re looking for is probably something like “subscription”.
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The thing is, though, you can subscribe to a service and still own something. There used to be a service called drip.fm where one would subscribe to an independent label and they would give you WAVs and/or MP3s of each release on their label. The modern subscribe-to-own service which still exists is patreon. Some porn companies also have this business model.
However, if you stream, you’re basically renting because you don’t own the content. The company to which one subscribes can revoke access at will. That’s more akin to tenancy.
TLDR; Subscription is the payment method, ownership/tenancy is the paradigm of possession over content.
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The problem there is how the streaming services make their services more palatable than ownership. Algorithms that feed you more of what (the services think) you want to see, no having to fiddle with physical media (including storing that media)…compared to streaming, physical media ownership sounds so loathsome that people turning away from it doesn’t come as a big surprise.
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Either that, or somebody should start naming and shaming the shareholders, even those people who only hold a single share each, because they are all complicit in this kind of corporate rent-seeking tyranny.
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I take great exception to being called a “consumer”. It implies that my only function in life is to spend money.
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“Yes, spending money is your only function in life.” — capitalism, essentially
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I take great exception to being called a ‘man’. It implies that my only function in life is to be a sperm donor.
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And don’t forget that if you’re renting the content then the company still owns the distribution rights.
That season 7 of Clone Wars might be on Disney+ this month or it might be on Netflix. Nope, it’s now in Starz due to an existing licensing deal. Okay now that you signed up for Starz, it’s been moved to Amazon Prime!
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That is one of the major problems going forward for consumers, and one of the reasons why the attempt to silo everything will fail in the long term and drive people back to piracy.
Most people will pay for one or two streaming services happily to get what they want. Force them to pay for 4+, then they’re going to start switching regularly or just go without certain content, but at least they can plan ahead. Force them to start switching or re-evaluating that decision on a regular basic because things move around, or another provider decides they also want to get in on that sweet owning-a-streaming-service money? People are going to start looking back on how convenient piracy used to be and return to that.
As often stated here and in similar places – people are happy to pay for convenience, stability and choice. Start nickel and diming them in ways that make them work needlessly to try and find the content they want, and eventually they’re going to stop doing the work for you. People cut the cord for price and to stop paying for what they didn’t use. If you force prices up and get them to subscribe to 1000 movies they don’t want just to access the one they do, and they will go elsewhere.
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And all because companies, in their short-sighted greed, think it’s better to have an entire tart than a slice of a giant pie.
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If you have it on physical media you might… loan it to someone else costing them billions!
You might end up selling it in a garage sale at a price lower than they get in the store, and that costs them billions!
You might understand that DVD rot is an actual thing, caused by shoddy cheap corner cutting, and make copies of your physical media and again they loose billions!
With all of these claimed losses for basically forever can someone please show me the corpse of one that should have failed given the 100 of billions in losses they suffered… please. (No you can’t trot out EMI on a spit, they fscked themselves & despite content being worth nothing they paid billions to acquire it which should have gotten them fired by boards for over paying for worthless crap).
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If Dibsney is indeed refusing to release its Disney+ originals on physical media, then my direction is clear: I’m not buying. Not only do I not want to put money in the company’s pockets, but ownership of physical copies is important. How can anyone let future generations know how great that series or movie was if the servers have shut down and no physical copies exist? This is how Dibsney is shooting itself in the foot, by making Disney+ originals unavailable to the public after a certain period of time. Imagine if It’s a Wonderful Life had been made today and was online only. Would anyone even know about this classic movie in twenty years’ time?
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No, because it wasa flop on release and disappeared for ~30 years until someone decided to dig stuff out of vaults to air cheap.
It would have stayed disappeared. Erased. And considering how Hollywood had a habit of burning their vaults occasionally, (so not an entirely new model, you see) it may just be luck we have it now.
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There are always a few people talking like this. But much of Disney’s profits come from kids convincing parents to spend their money, and most adults seem unwilling to say no. (See also: ridiculous prices, and fingerprinting, at Disney World.)
Are you familiar with their “vault” strategy? Scarcity is the whole point. Maybe they’ll re-release it, maybe they’ll remake it. Either way tends to be wildly profitable.
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Yes, I’m aware of Disney’s strategy of creating articifical scarcity to drive up demand. It was bullshit before Disney+ was a thing, and it’s still bullshit now.
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Are you familiar with their “vault” strategy?
Would you as blithely accept it if that was being done with food?
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Accept? I’ve been anti-copyright and anti-Disney since the late ’90s, and thought for sure that the Napster shutdown would cause that to become a more mainstream position. But it never happened; most people seem happy if Disney just makes it easier to give money to Disney, and will maybe complain a bit about the amount of money being asked for.
Even people in the free software and free cultural works communities are often rabidly pro-copyright, accepting that we should only have rights when the authors choose to grant them to us.
And there is, by the way, significant artificial scarcity in food. The dumpster-divers and “freegans” have been trying to make noise about this; but, in general, most people are quite accepting of the idea of grocery stores locking their dumpsters or sending stuff to compactors.
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I wouldn’t mind if Peacock would stop censoring everything. Lita-gate was wrestling’s version of the superbowl half-time nipple-gate.
Prime time broadcast boob on Monday night. The network marked the episode of RAW as TVMA. Peacock censored it for TVPG.
Not that anyone really cares about it, as much as it’s one of the most blatant signs of censorship by NBC.
ECW and Tristate are so butchered the library is a disaster. Most of the Japan shows are missing outright. You can’t really censor the bloodshed from death matches.
So not only must you pay the gatekeeper to not own anything, you can’t even get what you pay for in the US!
This is why I offer my music everywhere: On Bandcamp, on Spotify, or iTunes, on Apple Music, on Tidal, on Amazon, and yes: on the internet archive as well. My philosophy is to deprive no one of access to my music.
I personally don’t understand why people don’t want to own nothing and be happy.
I honestly look forward to the day when I can rent all my stuff instead of owning it.
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because tenancy means you’re playing by the landlord’s rules, where you continue to give them money for things they can take away at a moment’s notice.
With ownership, you have full control over something and can do with it what you will (within the confines of the law). I mean, would you rather be paying $4000 a month to a landlord who could evict you or own a house where you don’t have to pay any more money?
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Except even homeowners still pay rent. The only difference is, with homeowners it is not called rent, it is called “property tax”. And if you do not pay your property tax, you can be evicted from the home you own.
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Here’s the difference, though:
Rent is the price of living in someone else’s home. Taxes are the price of living in civilization.
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Which means billionaires are not part of civilization because they do not pay taxes.
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Considering how many times they want to create libertarian paradise islands in the ocean à la Andrew Ryan of BioShock, I would have to agree with you.
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The events of BioShock took place under the Atlantic, not on it.
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Details!
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The devil’s in ’em, from what I understand.
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Property tax is like nothing per year though, happily paid for fire, police / sidewalks /schools, and also fully cnotrolled by the populace.
For example, I dont appreciate state income taxes, so I dont have any.
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In some areas. Elsewhere, it’s often a major expense. In my area, it’s set at something like 2% of the original sale price, per year; then annually adjusted by CPI. And with property prices increasing much faster than CPI, it’s becoming deeply unfair: people in a 20-year-old house might pay $4000/year, whereas a similar new house will be upwards of $10000/year.
Anyway, I think people are missing the point of property tax. It’s the cost of excluding the public from a part of the public domain. In that sense, it’s ridiculous that copyright holders don’t pay property tax. They’re restricting the actions of literally hundreds of millions of people, for free (though it was only designed to restrict the actions of some hundreds of printing-press owners). And unlike real property, copyright is restricting something that’s inherenly infinite.
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Because a lack of ownership doesn’t automatically mean you spend less money in the long run. Consider paying for cheaper food that doesn’t cost as much, but renders you so malnourished you make up for the cost in your medical bills.
Most people in a position where renting is the only option won’t even be beneficial to the content industries in the long run. When the bulk of your money is going towards paying rent, what kind of income bracket are you likely to be in? Not one where you’d regularly spend money on movies, books or games, rented or otherwise.
Eventually, even renting entertainment will feel so cumbersome and prohibitive, people stuck in a loop of renting may decide to simply do without. And with reduced demand, it’s not a stretch to imagine that content producers will simply reduce or cease operations. At that point not even renting will help you. There’s only so much meaningful contribution that renting will make.
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Consider paying for cheaper food that doesn’t cost as much, but renders you so malnourished you make up for the cost in your medical bills.
That’s a new way of making the case for single-payer healthcare in America.
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YouTube, Jamendo, etc, negate your conclusion. There is no need to do without if you have access to the Internet, as there is much more free content available on it that content that is being rented out.
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There seems to be some sort of grammatical error, so I’m unsure what exactly this means. But for probably 99% of Youtube users, the content is rented rather than owned. Us “countercultural” 1% are using youtube-dl and similar.
I used to use Jamendo, like 15 years ago. I had no idea it still existed. I’m still not sure; I just get a blank page, except for a single bullet point. (The page title does say “Free music downloads”.)
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Personally, because I like to own the stuff I buy. Renting means that someone else decides the rules of consumption, and I’m not good with that.
More than that, I just like being in control of my stuff. I don’t own a smartphone, so when I’m on the go, I use an MP3 player.
Video games are headed in this direction. For the vast majority of games, even if there’s a physical release, it’s probably broken and you’ll need to let the console go online and download patches for it (as opposed to being able to download them from a site manually, and then burn them to a disc, or put them on a USB drive).
Then, every game today has a crap-ton of DLC, which can make up another 25-40% of the game and which is usually only available via letting the console go online and download it (as opposed to being able to download it manually and stick on DVD/USB). If you’re lucky, maybe they’ll put out a game of the year edition with all the DLC and few enough bugs that you can play through the entire game.
And that’s to say nothing of games that are only available via download.
Once these patches, DLC, and games are on your console, they’re forever tied to that specific console. You can make “backups”, but if the console ever dies and you need to replace it, those backups are worthless because the new console will have a new serial number.
Yes, there are some companies like GoG that sell DRM free games for computers via download, but they’re the exception. And to the best of my knowledge, such an option doesn’t exist for consoles.
I suppose there’s the piracy route, but to be honest, I don’t have the faintest clue how to go about using pirated games on a PS3, Xbox360 or anything newer. Considering the size of such games, I’m not even sure where to find them.
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A counterargument to your well-put comment is that Valve’s Steam Deck is open to third-party modifications, repairs, and third-party OS installs that it feels more like a General-purpose computer that’s great for gaming than a Video Game Console like the Nintendo Switch.
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The Steam Deck hardware does seem good, but of course the “intended” and common usage involves people having no ownership whatsoever of any games. Just log in to your account with the eponymous service, until the operators decide to shut it down or remove some games, which they’re totally allowed to do…
A lot of gamers don’t seem to mind this, saying that it’s been fine so far. Perhaps they’re too young to have seen any major services go away. Anyway, since there’s apparently no significant group of gamers pushing for actual ownership, the game makers don’t provide the option.
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There’s also a cost issue, especially for smaller devs.
Most small devs NEED services like Steam to do online distribution of their digital products, simply because they can’t afford to do a physical release, or if they can, it’s tiny in comparison to the digital releases.
The big studios can absorb the physical costs. Smaller ones can’t.
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Digital works can be released without requiring the seller to create physical copies, just make the files available for download in some controlled fashion. Indeed making copies available can tied in to momentary support via services like Patreon.
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exactly. Subscription services don’t have to imply “subscribe-to-rent”, when “subscribe-to-own” is also a valid business model and has many other precedents.
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Like book subscription services.
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I find that hard to believe. Circa 2000, even “no-name” bands released CDs. And a quick web search shows it’s still less than a dollar per CD (CDs alone, if you’re buying a hundred; “retail-ready” with labels and jewel cases, if you’re buying a thousand).
But, okay, they’d have to distribute, and that’s a pain in the ass for physical things. It’ll eat a few dollars, probably, per unit, to have some third-party handle that; and not everyone has optical drives, so it’d probably have to be USB drives. So I’ll reveal a trick that will make things easier: archive.org will handle your digital distribution for free, for as long as they exist, for anything they’re allowed to distribute without restriction. And then people still get to “own” a copy. (Remember shareware? It lost popularity, but not because it stopped working.)
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Like I said, that won’t be an issue because you can route around it. However, I do agree that we need to enshrine the concepts of right-to-repair and right-to-tinker into law so the openness that is in the Steam Deck is the standard and not the exception.
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I don’t think my ability to “route around that” means it’s not an issue. And, in fact, I don’t know how to route around it, in the sense of buying games from Steam, archiving them, and running them on a disconnected Steam Deck. Archive Team don’t seem to know either; if you do, please add archiving instructions to their page (last I checked, there was a cypherpunks login). ‘Cause, otherwise, we may eventually end up with a bunch of hardware that can run everything except the games it was meant for.
À propos of nothing…
I’m amazed we’ve commented this far and there’s not a single troll or dipshit in the comments section. Are they all on vacation?
Although I fear just by asking the question, I’m jinxing it, à la invoking Candyman…
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Please don’t jinx it. I don’t want the fool whose name begins with the same initials as toilet paper to show up.
Re: To quote That One Guy whenever out_of_the_blue was invoked:
Whenever Poochie isn’t in the room, all the characters need to start asking, “Where is Poochie?”
Although personally, I was always fine with asking “Where is Poochie?” in the context of “I need something to shit on”.
Speak of the devil...
I guess I jinxed it…the spammers have arrived!
Still better than the toilet paper guy from the Nordic Countries. At least spam tends to get removed!