YouTube, SchmooTube – WhoseTube? (Guest Blogger)
This is a rant that my friend Ellen Scordato wrote which was read on air on Wolfville Community Radio by me on March 22 at around 4:30 pm
Why do I care about the Viacom/Google-YouTube suit? I care not just because I can’t find Jon Stewart on YouTube anymore.
Why do I care about the Copyright Royalty Board? I care not just because my favorite radio webcaster is closing down because new CRB regulations will put it out of business.
I care because I like to think. And I like to know what others think. I like to communicate. Media is communication. And communication is power.
The lawsuits and regulations brewing over intellectual property are really an argument about who holds the power to communicate, and what will be communicated. We’d better care!
Last week Viacom brought a $1bn suit against Google, owner of YouTube, Viacom (which broadcasts Jon Stewart, etc.) alleged that YouTube allowed Viacom content to appear on its service, and made money by doing so.
Viacom wants all the money made from showing its content for itself; it recently bought Joost, a peer-to-peer TV distribution technology, so it can distribute its own content.
Last week, The U.S. federal Copyright Royalty Board jacked up the royalty rates small webcasters and Internet radio stations must pay. The rate hike will effectively kill small, independent radio stations, whose royalty payments will now total more than their gross annual income. It’ll kill stations that play the kind of non-corporate less-than-commercial-blockbuster music I adore. It’ll kill a lot of National Public Radio stations as well – stations that happen to offer a lot of liberal political views. The CRB did that because of pressure from the Big 4 music producers (sony BMG, Universal, EMI, and Warner). They want to force big distributors – like YouTube-to cut them a bigger piece of the action. If it kills the small distributors, so what?
Last week, News Corp, which owns FoxMedia, which owns MySpace, started making noises in the business press about enabling MySpace users to post Fox content on their MySpace profiles. It wants to own a piece of MySpace content.
Viacom, and NewsCorp want to create and own the content AND create and own the channel of distribution. They want vertical integration – they want to own the factories and the delivery tubes. And if they have to stomp on grass-roots internet innovation like YouTube and MySpace and webcast radio to do it, they will. They’ll just buy the innovators and pay off regulators to stomp on competition.
First, I saw all this vertical integration as a threat to my consumer choice. I’m a minority consumer; I like what a lot of other people might not. I like independent music; I like progressive politics.
I’m a niche consumer. We niche consumers want to entertain ourselves the way we want to! And the internet, with its fragmented, messy, user-controlled pipelines made made it easy for DIY niche consumers like myself to flourish.
Used to be, freedom of the presses belonged to him who owned the presses – and they used to be expensive. Media conglomerates used to own the means of production – and distribution.
Now consumers can own the means of production. Users can create the content. Computers are cheap. And the distribution is free.
It’s a grass-roots revolution and it is so much fun for us niche consumers.
The factories of ideas and creativity are decentralizing. The pipelines of distribution are decentralizing.
And that’s not good for conglomerates. They make money by owning it all, and the factory and the delivery service – the tubes, the pipelines. And who owns the pipelines makes a HUGE difference to what’s in the pipelines.
And who owns the pipelines is changing drastically. Mainly cuz of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which increased the number of stations media conglomerates could own.
On a small scale, it made radio suck. It led to Clear Channel and its ilk. And economies of scale, and the super-bland marketing-driven crap pouring out of radio speakers nationwide in the U.S.
On a large scale, that act, and the U.S. Federal Communication Committees’ abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, led to our pal the “Fair and Balanced” Fox Network, among others.
On a large scale, that matters a lot. The current debate over intellectual property, as expressed in the YouTube suit and the Copyright Royalty Board’s actions, is a flashpoint. It is about who controls the tubes – the pipelines. It is about who creates the content; them, or us. Is content fed to us from the top down, or created from the ground up? It is about internet innovation. Its about communication innovation.
It looks like the big conglomerates want to stifle internet innovation in the interest of short-term profit. Can regulators stop that? Can government encourage innovation, which is what actually helps business growth?
Big conglomerates toss money at politicians to keep their profits healthy, to manage regulation so it benefits them.
And politicians, especially in democracies, where public opinion is still the source of elective office, have their mouth jammed up so tight against the teat of the media corporations that put them in power that they dare not tear it away for a second to regulate for the greater good.
So who’s going to run the delivery service, Viacom and Fox and Clear Channel, or us? And whose going to create and control the content, Fox and the Big 4, or us?
Who runs the delivery service and the pipeline matters. When there are many pipelines, when we create the content, lots of smaller voices can be heard. Voices that just don’t sell enough records. Voices that criticize. Voices that speak out against power.
Free, fun, and fearless speech is always possible. Free, fun, and fearless speech that is widely heard is not always possible.
It depends on WhoseTube we’re speaking through. And that’s what all this is about
