Piracy, the Grammys, and Why We Need to Break Up with the Entertainment Industry

The Grammys is one of those events that continues to highlight our astounding ability as a culture to choke down the most insufferable bullshit imaginable. I'm not talking about the music itself (though some would argue that that too is following a downward trend). I'm talking about the recurring insolence of an industry which, despite proving itself time and again to be moral-less, abusive and driven primarily by greed, continues to unflinchingly demand our money and respect. It doesn't deserve either, and it likely never will ever again. Entertainment Industry, it's time we break up.

When Chris Brown was allowed to perform at this year's Grammy awards, it was more than just a gigantic "F- you" to every self-respecting woman on the planet; it was another one of those increasingly common moments when the music / entertainment industry makes clear that it really does not give a solitary shit about anyone it takes money from, including the artists themselves. A suspicious price hike for a Whitney Houston greatest hits album on iTunes mere hours after news broke of the singer's death seemed to be a product of this same attitude: It is the Grammys and the record labels visibly demonstrating that, to them, things like domestic abuse and loss are not serious human issues, but PR hurdles that can be overcome — or used to their advantage — through price points and manufactured mythology.

Of course, chalking up this profound and far-reaching disrespect to any single moment in time would be foolish. Recasting Brown as some sort of redeemed sinner was merely one way of recovering an asset, even if it was horribly offensive to everyone else. Furthermore, one violent neanderthal being invited to perform at the Grammys is underwritten by the fact that he and countless others like him continue to have careers in the first place, at the behest of both the industry PR machine and the forgetful, apologist masses it has hypnotized.

No one should be shocked by any of this. Like any bad relationship, our ties with the content industries are built on a self-hating, self-perpetuating cycle of abuse. But rather than focusing on the figureheads of this abuse, we should instead look at how these industries have lured us into this cycle in the first place and why, like the Grammys, we continue to put up with it.

When organizations like the RIAA and MPAA were founded, the music and movie industries were engineered to address a very specific problem: Content was being made, but there was no cheap and easy way to distribute it. After decades of scarce and centralized content dished out by big studios to movie theaters and record stores, the Internet solved that problem. Within our digital networks, content is now decentralized and infinitely abundant. And yet, the vestiges of that bygone era of media still remain.

As I've written before, the incumbents fear the future promised by the internet because in that future, producers no longer need to rely on antiquated media empires to hawk and distribute their work. The honeymoon is now over, and as a result, these entities must scramble to retain their control over their content and remain an essential part of the process by any means necessary.

The way they have sought to do this, however, does not involve investing in new distribution models like those offered by Netflix and Spotify (in fact they have been downright hostile toward them) — instead, they are indiscriminately penalizing the very people they sell to. Because anyone in the new digital mediascape can potentially be an "intellectual property thief" according to these industries, action was taken to establish a persuasive rhetoric, and new technologies, built entirely on this mistrust of consumers. The very same entities that once prided themselves on uniting us with content are now devoting countless amounts of money and resources directing us to obtain that content through narrower, less convenient and invasive channels.

Reddit's suggestion on how Hollywood could solve the piracy problem, if they actually wanted to:

At first we were being told over and over about how filesharing is devastating to artists and other content producers. The losses being claimed, however, were greatly exaggerated, which led us to wonder: Are these "thefts" — which are not technically thefts at all since digital files are infinitely abundant — motivated by the fact that people are inherently entitled assholes who want everything for free? Or is it something else entirely?

In the case of movie piracy, one of the largest contributing factors is actually a distribution problem: A recent study cites the delay between local and international releases as being directly linked to the prevalence of illegal downloading. Even further, the movies being most frequently downloaded are things like Pirates of the Carribean and other Busch-league Hollywood schlock that the downloader wouldn't watch if it wasn't free (looking at you, The Hangover, Part 2). The fact that it is still faster and easier to load up a torrent tracker and download a movie or album than it is to get it legally doesn't help either.

The rhetoric was altered: Now according to the content industry, downloading an album or movie is contributing to the destruction of thousands of precious American jobs. But that myth has been busted as well: In reality, those industries have actually been doing unusually well in terms of both profits and employment, even throughout the 2008-2009 recession. Shoddy attempts have even been made to try and prove that filesharing funds terrorism, echoed vacuously by various corporate shills within the U.S. government and elsewhere.

The overarching rhetoric does not offer any compelling reasons as to why we should support an outdated industry producing disposable, mediocre content when we can get cheaper, more accessible and very often better content online. Instead, it exudes a sense of mistrust and entitlement from those desperately clinging to the old model and expecting the same amount of respect (and money) in doing so.

The use of DRM and increasingly stringent End-User Licensce Agreements then takes this attitude beyond mistrust and into willful infringement of the rights of paying customers. The definitions of what it means to "buy" content, established through decades of reasonable expectations, become increasingly marginalized as prices increase and the authority of the individual consumer over that content erodes.

In case you haven't been keeping score, this leaves us at:

• insensitive towards others
• inability to trust in others
• creates lies and fabrications to justify bad behavior
• excessively resistant or hostile to change
• exhibits abusive behavior stemming from personal insecurities

Check marks all around. I don't claim to be a psychologist, but if corporations were people (as they seem to very much want to be) they'd make the absolute worst dating partners.

So then why can't we seem to tear ourselves away?

It's easy for us to reason that these industries are simply out for profit, and that there's no avoiding their continued hostility towards consumer sensibilities as long as they can get away with it. But are we truly locked into this state of resigned obedience? Hollywood and the RIAA would have us think that we are, but in truth that is simply not the case. Perhaps the reason it seems so hopeless is that the consumer public has been lulled into a mindset where the option to simply not buy and seek content elsewhere isn't even factored in.

The consumer base for the software and videogame industries is a prime example of this unfortunate acquiescence to false choice. Recently, after expressing my disgust on Twitter over game publisher Ubisoft's decision to cut off their customers from legally purchased content so that they could upgrade DRM servers, I found myself in an argument with a videogame journalist acquaintance. While he agreed with my sentiments about DRM, he claimed that gamers will never be able to see past their need to consume, because they simply don't care enough about the implications of their purchases.

This dispirited attitude is by far the most telltale sign of a traditional abusive relationship — recognizing the disease while refusing the possibility of a cure. Videogamers are an especially passionate lot when it comes to their content. But even they would do well to give pause and consider the options available to them. There is now an explosive wealth of independently-made games available through online distribution platforms like Steam with cheaper prices and more fulfilling gameplay than a lot of what has come from big publishers in the past decade — all they need to do is look. Perhaps then they too could reconsider who does and does not deserve their respect and money.

We all have a choice. There are plenty of fish in the sea outside the sealed, bullet-proof glass aquariums of big-dollar content industries. Either we can return to the model that has consistently abused and disappointed us, or we can muster up some self-respect, take a chance, and venture back out into the unknown.