Welcoming the latest addition to our bandwagon

SECOND UPDATE: $1,006,996.17
This is the Paypal balance shown on a screen cap Louis C.K. posted in his latest update. I don't mean to be a suck up but I'm fairly impressed by how he is handling this. Making people feel good about having spent their money might also just be the smartest game there is in this wild west of pure digital distribution.

UPDATE: Louis C.K. posted a lengthy and interesting follow-up discussing the economics and results of his experiment. It's a good inside look at taking the reins of a creative project with a significant budget. I won't give away the ending but I can say I saw a lot of online commentary suggesting that this probably didn't represent much of an investment or much of a risk for him, which is clearly untrue.

You know: no snark, in fact. It's true, people like Louis C.K. do tend to be a little "look at this amazing idea I invented" when they embrace the paradigm of self-publishing in the digital realm. But you know, so what. It's still significant, and very positive, for an A list performer whose star is distinctly rising to go this direction, and to do it right - offering his latest performance recording as a high quality, unencumbered file, a straight download in a versatile format, for a modest price.

There's nothing really to complain about: you can moan about Paypal but you know, seriously: Paypal won. They have just simply won at internet. Yes they occasionally unleash their hounds on cringing bundles of fuzzy kittens and bunny rabbits for no particular reason. You want to complain about Paypal, at this point your only recourse would be to start a service that actually competes. I suppose you could point a finger at the price point as well, five bucks is cheap but it isn't necessarily stellar for an hour of entertainment. But this starts to get into quibbling that puts me in mind of this Penny Arcade cartoon about Braid: or as it was succinctly put nearby: "You’re mad about five dollars? What? Shove your five dollars up your stupid ass."

I thought C.K.'s statement asking people not to torrent it was pretty reasonable, all things considered. I've always said that J.R.R. Tolkien's comments in the first authorized Ballantine paperback edition of his trilogy was a good model for this sort of thing, and bears repeating:

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.

I think if content industries in general and individual creators in particular had focused on this message from the beginning, this message of courtesy, of gratitude, and of enlisting one's partisans in the service of recommending others to the "authorized edition" of whatever work, there's little question it would have done much more good at little cost compared to the Keystone Kops slapstick of their ongoing attempts to stuff the digital genie back in the bottle via legal sword rattling, and useless DRM. Louis C.K.'s appeal certainly falls more to the former end of the spectrum.

I will say it would be nice, though, to see more creators engage this question in a more nuanced way, because it's actually a damn interesting grey area that really lights up the difference in most people's mind between the law and ethics and where both - but particularly ethics - are very slippery indeed. I'd like to hear someone owning up and engaging the fact that they are copyright cheats, because EVERYBODY is a copyright cheat. Everybody makes mix CDs, rips CDs they check out from the library and decide they really like, and watches or listens to what basically amount to bootlegs on YouTube and the like. Don't tell me there's any comedian out there between the ages of 35 and 55 who never wore out a bootleg cassette of some friend's comedy album when they were a teenager. It would be nice to see someone with significant skin in the game take on the question of advocating the ethical right of the creator to realize the benefit of an exclusive right to copy their own production without merely invoking the simplistic analogy of theft. It would be nice to see someone wrestle with the unquestionable benefits of things like the proliferation of old, often out of print intellectual property finding its way online by the agency of fan curators. I don't expect to hear it from Louis C.K. but it would be nice to hear it from someone.