Harm to the Collective
Thursday, August 28th, 2008 by Patrick Ross
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Did you know that thanks to the digital age, we can all share in a great collective, enjoying each other’s creative works without concern as to whether they’re produced because the motive is one of receiving praise from the collective? (See Benkler 2006 and numerous other works by kibbutz-minded professors.) When a commercial creative work is pre-released by an innovating hacker or other shadowy figure, the collective benefits as it spreads virally, right?
Well, Guns N’ Roses certainly didn’t benefit when 27-year-old Kevin Cogill pre-released songs from their unreleased album, and it didn’t benefit Cogill either, because he’s been arrested. And long-term, it doesn’t benefit the collective if artists are discouraged from producing new works. If you’re not a fan of Guns N’ Roses (like me) you don’t need to hear the works early, and if you are a fan (like my friend Karen S. back in college, who plastered her dorm room with GNR posters) you have every incentive to encourage the band, still led by Axl Rose, to wish to create more works.
Talk about waits; this album has been in the works more than a decade. How would you like to work on something for an eighth of your life, only to have it taken from you and spread virally without your authorization? Oh yeah, that’s right, once Cogill put it on the web, it was no longer a scarce good, so we can all have at it and Axl can cover ten years of songwriting and recording by selling more of those posters Karen liked so much. Sigh.
Here’s the irony — capitalism, what GNR is trying to practice here, is driven by the self-interest of consumers, yet there is a collective element required, namely that all parties play by the rules. We hear a lot of talk about all of these Wall Street firms, banks and housing guarantors not playing by the rules and people now losing their homes. That’s not good. But when self-interest of consumers leads to taking for yourself what is not meant to be taken and thus not playing by the rules, that also harms the collective. It is to avoid that harm that the Founding Fathers gave this country copyright, to promote useful Arts through an exclusive Right, and it’s disappointing people keep failing to — or choosing to — see that.
