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+---
+layout: post
+title: "SOPA, Hadopi and the future of culture"
+date: 2012-03-29 08:24
+comments: true
+categories: [sopa, hadopi, copyright, music, movies, culture]
+---
+
+The copyright industry is busy trying to force the US to adopt the SOPA
+law while its French counterpart, Hadopi, is already up and
+running. This brings two questions:
+
+* What will be the future model for accessing culture ? Will today's
+  giants be part of it ?
+* How can we ensure that laws are made by people with sufficient
+  knowledge of the field they try to regulate ?
+
+I will cover the first question in this post and the second one in a few
+days.
+
+
+[![Concert](http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2608/3697785107_579dac8a0f_n.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/27539822@N05/3697785107/)
+*by [Christian Holmer](http://www.christianholmer.com/ "Author")*  
+
+
+## Dying industries in this new era
+Since the beginning of the "Internet at home" era, the music and movie
+industries have been fighting tooth and nail against filesharing.
+Deeming filesharers "pirates", they spent the last decade suing a lot of
+P2P users, protecting CDs and DVDs with DRMs and lobbying for a strict control of
+the Internet.  
+
+Basically, their line is "if you don't want what we
+offer, when we offer it and at the price we're offering it, you always have
+the option of not getting it". They may be right, but they're not [pragmatic](http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic "pragmatic"). Consumers don't like to pay for CDs that are DRM-locked, or for a zone 1 DVD that only works in 2 countries and begins with a 10 minutes ["illegal downloading is ripping out a beating human heart" ad](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWPfcEOr2Yg "Bender piracy warning"). In fact, consumers don't even want to drive to the nearest Virgin Megastore to get the latest season of Game of Thrones.  
+
+That's why these industries will die eventually: they try to stick to
+their old business model of selling *products* (CDs, DVDs, MP3 files) ladden with commercials while the public only
+wants access to *culture* (songs, movies, series, books). And the Internet has proven
+to be pretty good at providing exactly this, for free.
+
+
+## People still want to pay for what they love
+Does that mean that artists are doomed to become destitue as consumers
+will get their work for free, as the story championed by these
+industries go ? Of course not ! People want to pay for what they love.
+For example, you can look at [Flattr](http://flattr.com/ Flattr). Or you
+can consider the fact that [Radiohead made between $6M and $10M from a
+"pay-what-you-want" album](http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2007/10/estimates-radio/ "Radiohead").  
+
+But as I said, *what we love is culture, not products*. We don't to pay
+for pieces of plastic anymore. Now that we have a mean to access content
+for almost nothing, we don't see why intermediaries such as Sony and
+Universal should get the lion's share of the profits instead of the
+artists and the recording studios. In fact they should not even exist.
+
+
+## How artists can get paid
+I believe that *the best model for giving access to culture to consumers
+is that of a global license*, where you pay a fixed amount every month
+(say, $30) and you can download anything. The exchanges would be
+monitored so that the most downloaded artists receive more money than
+the others. The redistribution system could also be tweaked in favor of
+smaller, unknown artists to support discovery.  
+
+The above only concerns the content consumption at home, which has to be
+cheap since high prices cannot compete with free alternatives. But *there
+are alternative revenue streams for artists and the culture industry that cannot be copied or downloaded*. You cannot download a concert
+experience, watching a movie in a theatre is a much more enjoyable than at home, you cannot print you own Metallica posters, and
+so on. There is a huge amount of money here, more than enough to ensure
+sustainable culture creation. In fact, *I think that mp3s and divxs
+should be seen as marketing for these experiences*, which is why they
+should be so cheap.  
+
+So I'm not worried about artists, we will find a way to give them our
+money, and encourage content creation. But the current model will soon
+be dead, and [we should hasten its demise](http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html "we should hasten its demise").
+