Sunday, April 11, 2004
The Prelinger conjecture
My roommate introduced me a few years ago to Mystery Science Theater, a TV series that pokes fun at the worst movies ever made. The format is suprisingly engaging: two robot puppets and a human host sit in sillouette at the bottom right corner of the screen, heckling movies like Red Zone Cuba, The Pod People, or Manos: Hands of Fate. (Think of the jesters from the Muppet Show, but with a really broad array of pop cultural, political, and literary references.) The movies are undescribably bad. Much worse than that stinker you just saw at the theater. I don’t care if it was a romantic comedy starring Jim Varney, J. Lo., and Pee Wee Herman. Trust me.
There are almost two hundred MST episodes. A few dozen are available on DVD, and we’ve bought them all. The rest we’ve downloaded through file-sharing networks. The interesting thing is that if the market saw fit to provide these videos for sale, we’d have bought them. The other interesting thing is that the makers of MST themselves encourage redistribution of their work; a line in the credits urges fans to “Keep Circulating the Tapes’.
Before some of the briefer movies, MST shows short educational films from the 1950s and 1960s. These are very bad, and very funny. Many, like "Hired!", "A Case of Spring Fever", and "The Selling Wizard", were produced by an outfit called Jam Handy. Jam Handy made hundreds of shorts for schools and industry, and only a few made it to MST. Curious to find any lost classics, I sat down at Google one night to see what was on the Net. My roommate, a great believer in the power of Google and the Internet, swore that it would be years before Jam Handy episodes were available for download; that every other extant bit of video would be uploaded first; that Jam Handy’s inclusion would mark the completion of the electronic storehouse of mankind’s knowledge, if not the Apocalypse itself.
Within ten minutes, I had found hundreds of Jam Handy shorts and their ilk, in a choice of digital formats, and complete with summaries and previews, available for free download. My roommate, I suspect, would have been less disturbed by the four horsemen riding up to our door.
The source was the Prelinger Archive, an amazing resource I can only imagine is part of some insidious plot to destroy culture through the purveyance of bad movies. How I applaud them. If you dare, check out A Date with Your Family, a thinly veiled documentary of fascism, to see what I mean.
Prelinger and MST take a very different approach to intellectual property from the one the big media conglomerates use. These companies are terrified by open source anything (or at least profess to be), and they seldom see how it could actually help their sales. But as Prelinger argues, in a letter to today's NYT, that some degree of sharing might actually help sales:
I can think of lots of ways this could be true. I often buy things I have first downloaded, because I like them enough to reward and support the artist (irrational as that may seem!), because I want a high bitrate master copy, or because I want ancillary materials (I liked a few tracks from the cd, so I want the whole thing; I liked the movie, so I want the DVD extras). And it turns out I'm not alone; a very clever and well-designed study of a natural experiment shows that music downloads don't detract from album sales (see a summary here). If people were going to buy it without the net, they'll still buy it. People may download things they are unwilling to buy---but banning that activity won't increase sales, though it will sacrifice the advertising these downloads provide.
I'm not an open source radical*. Intellectual property owners will have to fight to protect their rights; eventually, copying will be so easy that the status quo will give way to wholesale theft. And the status quo may also depend on the norm that it is wrong to steal music you would otherwise be willing to pay for (even if it's not wrong to steal music that strikes you as almost worthless). This norm could erode.
But the creative use of free information probably offers advantages to intellectual property holders over the bullheaded insistence on charging everyone the same high price for information. It also leads to much more creativity, especially as cultural capital recombines and mutates in new directions, unchained by rigid, unending enforcement of copyright.
Of course, the "price" for us, and our culture, may be that A Date with Your Family, the Chicken of Tomorrow, and Monster A-Go-Go are never more than a few clicks away. A sort of cinematic original sin, I suppose.
*Though I do think open source produces much better software than proprietary licenses, because hundreds of proud geeks slaving over free software is damn near impossible to beat.
There are almost two hundred MST episodes. A few dozen are available on DVD, and we’ve bought them all. The rest we’ve downloaded through file-sharing networks. The interesting thing is that if the market saw fit to provide these videos for sale, we’d have bought them. The other interesting thing is that the makers of MST themselves encourage redistribution of their work; a line in the credits urges fans to “Keep Circulating the Tapes’.
Before some of the briefer movies, MST shows short educational films from the 1950s and 1960s. These are very bad, and very funny. Many, like "Hired!", "A Case of Spring Fever", and "The Selling Wizard", were produced by an outfit called Jam Handy. Jam Handy made hundreds of shorts for schools and industry, and only a few made it to MST. Curious to find any lost classics, I sat down at Google one night to see what was on the Net. My roommate, a great believer in the power of Google and the Internet, swore that it would be years before Jam Handy episodes were available for download; that every other extant bit of video would be uploaded first; that Jam Handy’s inclusion would mark the completion of the electronic storehouse of mankind’s knowledge, if not the Apocalypse itself.
Within ten minutes, I had found hundreds of Jam Handy shorts and their ilk, in a choice of digital formats, and complete with summaries and previews, available for free download. My roommate, I suspect, would have been less disturbed by the four horsemen riding up to our door.
The source was the Prelinger Archive, an amazing resource I can only imagine is part of some insidious plot to destroy culture through the purveyance of bad movies. How I applaud them. If you dare, check out A Date with Your Family, a thinly veiled documentary of fascism, to see what I mean.
Prelinger and MST take a very different approach to intellectual property from the one the big media conglomerates use. These companies are terrified by open source anything (or at least profess to be), and they seldom see how it could actually help their sales. But as Prelinger argues, in a letter to today's NYT, that some degree of sharing might actually help sales:
While the Recording Industry Association of America pursues its heavy-handed offensive against music downloading and file sharing (Business Day, April 5), other owners of cultural content have found ways to live (and flourish) with emerging technologies.
I have operated a small family-owned historical film archives for 20 years. Several years ago, we digitized the most sought-after images in our collection and placed them online for free downloading and nearly unrestricted reuse.
Our experience may seem counterintuitive, but it has been overwhelmingly positive: the more we give away, the more we actually sell.
File sharing and free downloading have increased the ubiquity and prominence of our collection and have given it ample publicity at very little cost, resulting in increased income.
Might there be a lesson here for the music industry?
I can think of lots of ways this could be true. I often buy things I have first downloaded, because I like them enough to reward and support the artist (irrational as that may seem!), because I want a high bitrate master copy, or because I want ancillary materials (I liked a few tracks from the cd, so I want the whole thing; I liked the movie, so I want the DVD extras). And it turns out I'm not alone; a very clever and well-designed study of a natural experiment shows that music downloads don't detract from album sales (see a summary here). If people were going to buy it without the net, they'll still buy it. People may download things they are unwilling to buy---but banning that activity won't increase sales, though it will sacrifice the advertising these downloads provide.
I'm not an open source radical*. Intellectual property owners will have to fight to protect their rights; eventually, copying will be so easy that the status quo will give way to wholesale theft. And the status quo may also depend on the norm that it is wrong to steal music you would otherwise be willing to pay for (even if it's not wrong to steal music that strikes you as almost worthless). This norm could erode.
But the creative use of free information probably offers advantages to intellectual property holders over the bullheaded insistence on charging everyone the same high price for information. It also leads to much more creativity, especially as cultural capital recombines and mutates in new directions, unchained by rigid, unending enforcement of copyright.
Of course, the "price" for us, and our culture, may be that A Date with Your Family, the Chicken of Tomorrow, and Monster A-Go-Go are never more than a few clicks away. A sort of cinematic original sin, I suppose.
*Though I do think open source produces much better software than proprietary licenses, because hundreds of proud geeks slaving over free software is damn near impossible to beat.
