Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is not specifically about media distribution (it’s more generally about how social networks and their emergence on the internet have affected culture and business development) but it does deliver this metaphor:

When reproduction, distribution, and categorization were all difficult, as they were for the last five hundred years, we needed professionals to undertake these jobs, and we properly venerated these people for the service they performed. Now these tasks are simpler, and the earlier roles in some cases have become optional, and are sometimes obstacles to direct access, often putting the providers of the older service at odds with their erstwhile patrons. An amusing example occurred in 2005, when a French bus company, Transports Schiocchet Excusions (TSE), sued several French cleaning women who had previously used TSE for transport to their jobs in Luxembourg. The women’s crime? Carpooling. TSE asked that the women be fined and that their cars be confiscated, on the grounds that the service that the women had arranged to provide for themselves– transportation– should be provided only by commercial services such as TSE. (The case was thrown out by a lower court; it is pending on appeal.)

Though this incident seems like an unusual lapse in business judgment, this strategy– suing former customers for organizing themselves– is precisely the one being pursued by the music and movie industries today. Those industries used to perform a service by distributing music and moving images, but laypeople can now move music and video easily, in myriad ways that are both cheaper and more flexible than those mastered and owned by existing commercial firms, like selling CDs and DVDs in stored. Faced with these radical new efficiencies, those very firms are working to make moving movies and music harder, in order to stay in business– precisely the outcome that the bus company… was arguing for.

While this is certainly a well-aimed jab, and has some definite legitimacy as a criticism of the film and music industries. I think there are a couple of points that this argument (which is one you hear a lot) ignores.

1) the film and music businesses are not the same. The music business (in my opinion anyway, as a former fringe player) was pretty much founded upon exploitation of the artist and relied upon that model, for the most part, to become the monolithic entity it appeared to be until the late 90s. The way contracts were structured and revenues were distributed were designed to bring revenue to the corporations. Even indie labels had a hard time completely avoiding this structural model though they were probably less scummy about it.

The film business is not free of exploitation historically, but as a more collaborative creative endeavor with more money involved, both the existence of unions and the complicated power hierarchies within production have helped to prevent the kind of manichaean power imbalances of the music industry. While new technologies are allowing many more people to create films (by some definition of the concept), there is still nowhere near the production of films as compared to songs, and there are still more costs in creating and marketing films by an exponential amount.

2) These facts may have no mitigating relationship to the carpooling analogy, but it doesn’t seem to be a lateral comparison. In the case of the ladies creating a carpool, there are consumers creating an alternate distribution network for a service (transportation) that is abstract- the companies feel they have some entitlement to these networks because the ladies are infringing on some kind of protected market. In the case of consumers distributing film online, the problem is not entirely that consumers are creating new channels of distribution, it is that they are distributing something that is owned (not just moving themselves, as in the bussing situation). And there is not simply some organic P2P sharing happening, the distribution of these owned products creates revenue for sites who help to disseminate the files, while the creators of the films are not getting any revenue.

3) There is another difference between the music industry and film- for most musicians, it is fairly inexpensive to make a recording. If the music industry as it was once known fell into the depths of hell, most musicians would still be able to record something, if not lushly produced tracks. Film is more dependent on its industry. Without the business, big budget movies would be difficult to make. More importantly, what might be described as middle-budget films, not big-Hollywood vehicles with stars and things blowing up, but dramas or indies with higher production values are still made with a bottom line, and if there is no market in home media, it is not clear if that type of movie could be made at all. In some businesses this might just seem like product evolution but in creative industries it does seem more complex, especially since most films that have been recognized as aesthetically “excellent” fall into this middle-budget category.

There is no doubt that the film industry will have to adjust to the new “market” realities. But since the Statute of Anne there has been some sense that the creator of work should have some protections in the marketplace, “Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing… Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors… to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families:…” It is easy to duplicate works now- as Shirkey suggests, every viewing of a digital work is a duplication- but should that ipso facto mean that there should be no protection for creators?

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