It seems to me a grave discourtesy, to say no more, to issue my book without even a polite note informing me of the project... However that may be, this paperback edition and no other has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no other. And if the many kind readers who have encouraged me with their letters will add to their courtesy by referring friends or enquirers to Ballantine Books, I shall be very grateful.
- J.R.R. Tolkien, internationally famous author and cultural icon, foreword to the 1965 paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings
Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid's face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work. How can you pick on them? They've got freckles. That's a crook. He may as well be wearing a bandit's mask.
Gene Simmons, minor reality television celebrity and cultural dinosaur, 2007 Billboard Interview
I was finally getting around to patching up my battered paperback boxed set of The Lord of the Rings - nostalgically purchased for a few dollars for being twins to the set that introduced me to the trilogy - my father's original set that he purchased when he was just a few years out of the Seminary. I first read that statement about the authorized edition over twenty years ago: reading it again I was struck by the contrast to Simmons' tough guy melodrama I'd read the day before.
My dad has related to me many times how he picked up the first book of Ace's unauthorized (and hastily assembled, and error-ridden) edition off a rack without knowing anything about the book, only to discover it was part of a trilogy. His attempts to mail order the rest of the series ran afoul of the publicity backlash Ace experienced when Tolkien spread the word that the edition had been produced without his consent (and without payment to him), which spurred Ace to pull the volume and pay Tolkien a compensatory pittance. Ace's edition was probably legal, as it exploited a loophole in U.S. copyright law, but popular outcry led them drop the book without legal compulsion.
Some interesting comparisons could be contemplated between the current business situation of the "record industry" and Tolkien and his British publisher's plight in the mid 1960's, though the situations are very far from perfectly analogous. Indeed, there is a whole other article to be had picking apart Simmons' assertions about the business of music - his comparison of the perceived value of music to the price of gold is in itself a lesson in twentieth century information psychology (extending the analysis to a slightly more apt comparison, such as to the market in diamonds as the age of inexpensive engineered gemstones evolves might make for particularly interesting investigation).
But what really struck me is the contrast in the tone and content of these two statements. Simmons' tirade, while nominally directed against the record industry, bears every hallmark of the party line. From the dire assumption of the death of commercial music (with a quick violin riff for all the little people whose livelihoods will be destroyed), to the conflation of file sharing with robbery, and particularly the assumption that the only possible solution would have been massive, heavy-handed legal retribution against individuals to cow the public into respecting copyright out of fear.
Tolkien doesn't warn of some cataclysm in the business of publishing books or even suggest that his own fortunes will be destroyed by the unauthorized publication of his works. He does not treat the legalities of the issue at all, and he certainly does not suggest that individuals who might have taken advantage of Ace's cheaper edition (by selling or buying it) deserved to suffer some consequence for their action. His formal, almost courtly plea suggests that the reader might find the critical question to be of all things one of courtesy.
The appeal to courtesy is something that the the major labels and their chattels have utterly lost access to in the midst of their ongoing assault of legal attacks, specious and ham-handed social engineering, and the technological insults of DRM. More independent players who elected not to stumble along with this failed campaign might yet make very good use of it, I think.
Tolkien aside, it perpetually blows my mind that the press is willing to give a pass to the assertions of self-appointed experts like Gene Simmons that the financial woes of the record industry can be devolved to one thing: college kids with computers and their devilish P2P voodoo. It leads me to seriously consider whether the primary function of the RIAA is not so much the Sisyphean task of staunching the industry's ongoing hemorrhage as to ensconce firmly in the public mind this particular scapegoat. Which wouldn't necessarily be a surprising goal since common sense and an increasing body of empirical evidence suggest a raft of alternative contributions to the decline in music industry revenues, which mostly boil down to stupid business practices by a lazy, profligate industry that lost any serious engagement with innovation somewhere around the mid-nineties. There could be no more blatant example than the fact that the industry's current, tentative forays into selling DRM-free digital downloads comes a good seven years late (and five years after finally suing fresh-faced college student Shawn Fanning's Napster off the face of the earth, Mr. Simmons take note) - a decision based solely on the almost unimaginably technologically incompetent assertion that unencumbered digital files would somehow contribute to illicit file sharing in a manner that conventional CDs would not.
There are lessons of opportunity in every one of these examples. Every year the conventional industry fails to adapt is a year of opportunity for everyone else to take advantage of customers like me: I'm spending more money on music than ever, to a large degree because of the superior value I'm getting from alternative markets and my conviction that for the most part I'm buying through avenues that give the artists themselves a better deal. And when my (at least) third-hand copy of The Lord of the Rings wears out completely I'll be sure to buy a new copy that contributes to the estate. As a courtesy.
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