A recurring theme in criticism of copyright is that this isn’t really about individual creators. They are merely victims of The Man. Distributors use their market power to maximize profit, and that comes at the expense of creators.

Okay. Any individual creator, unless they occupy the far left of the Pareto Curve up where massive profits lie at the top of the Y axis, is at a market disadvantage to a distributor. This is related to copyright how exactly?

As a writer I have so many unfinished works scattered about in printed form and in digital files that I wonder at times about what I would do with all of those wasted hours. But sometimes they’re not wasted; sometimes I can dig up some of that material and repurpose it; pirate myself, if you will. Early in 2007 I was working on a paper on market power and artists that I abandoned when I launched the Copyright Alliance, but I have dug up a chart I created to use in that paper. It is below.

Now I won’t go into detail on this image, but it is a Porter’s Five Forces chart, a useful tool used in business to determine leverage of various players in the supply chain and how external forces impact those relationships. The key one to note here is that the artist supply power is weak. Why?

Because there are a heck of a lot of artists and very few distributors!

Sometimes things that are obvious to one are not obvious to others. Perhaps you have to live it. As a young freelancer, a husband and a parent, desperately trying to grab the attention of an editor being bombarded with queries for the very few slots she had in her magazine or newspaper for freelancers, I learned very early what competition is like. So has anyone trying to land a record contract, or a film distribution deal, or a photo shoot contract.

Has the digital age liberalized distribution? Obviously. Distribution channels approach infinity. But so does the related “noise” of these distribution channels. For many of us, who like to create but don’t want to become marketing and distribution experts, a distributor has an appeal, even if it involves a transfer of some rights and a forfeiture of some potential income.

We must also not forget that some of us prefer the prestige factor of an edited publication (or label or film distributor). You will take this blog entry seriously or not, but you are more likely to take it seriously if it is published in The New York Times. This matters to many creators.

Sometimes creators band together to shift the market power. One of the Copyright Alliance’s members, the Writers Guild of America West, demonstrated this not too long ago when they went on strike against other Copyright Alliance members, the major motion picture studios, and secured a future revenue stream from digital ventures. When I freelanced some of us talked about steps toward unionization, but alas, the competition was simply too fierce; any of us might have been tempted to cross the picket line if the dream publishing opportunity arose.

So throughout recorded history, individual artists have been at a market power disadvantage relative to distributors. It’s a simple matter of numbers. Yet artists have continued to create.

This has absolutely nothing to do with copyright. No change in copyright law, in particular no change that expands the use of end-users of creative works — the folks at the other end of the supply chain — will provide any more empowerment to individual creators. The desire to attack the “cartel” is fine, but don’t pretend you’re doing it to benefit artists and creators.

As someone who has supported a family as a creator in the publishing version of the Porter’s model above — and as someone who was never talented enough to rise to a market power position where I could dictate terms to distributors! — I cannot impart enough that if someone is serious about helping artists, in empowering creators, by all means seek ways to do so. Indulge hostility against distributors if you wish — buy an author a drink and you’ll never hear the end of the evils of publishers — but don’t buy into the notion that artists don’t willingly enter into business relationships with distributors, that there isn’t a symbiotic relationship between them, and that artists somehow do not benefit when distributors do benefit.

The beauty of copyright is that it gives creators choices about what to do with the products of their creativity. Partnering with a distributor is one of many choices available.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 4:11 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, culture, fair use, market forces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.