Reconceive, Reconceive, Reconceive

Currently I am reading a book by Cory Doctorow called Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. You can download it for free here: (http://craphound.com/content/download/). In an address to Microsoft’s Research Group in 2004 he talked about copyright, technology and DRM [digital rights management].” (1) In his talk he gives five reasons against DRM practices.

 

1. That DRM systems don’t work

2. That DRM systems are bad for society

3. That DRM systems are bad for business

4. That DRM systems are bad for artists

5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

 

In this post I want to focus on his fourth argument – that DRM systems are bad for artists. Basically he argues that new technological developments call for new business models and new copyright laws. He turns to technological innovations in the music and film industry to make his case. He starts recalling a time when the predominant way of enjoying musical entertainment was inviting a talented pianist into your home. All this changed with the creation of the piano roll. Here is an educational video on what piano rolls are:

According to Doctorow, “the piano roll was the first system for cheaply copying music.” (15) Basically, piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by the thousands – the hundreds of thousands – the millions. They did this without a penny’s compensation to the publisher.” (15) The composers and music publishers cried “foul play” and “asked congress to ban the piano roll and to create a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should be subject to a veto from their industry association.” (15) To make a long story short, congress came up with the idea that “anyone who paid a music publisher two cents would have the right to make one piano roll of any song that publishers published.” (16) Doctorow concludes that this new compulsory license was made to fit the new technological innovation and benefitted both the inventors of the technology and the artists.

 

According to Doctorow, “this story repeats itself throughout the technological century, every ten or fifteen years. Radio was enabled by voluntary blanket license – the music companies got together and asked for a consent decree so that they could offer all their music for a flat fee.” (16) Doctorow in a sweeping summary statement writes, “Piano rolls didn’t sound as good as the music of a skilled pianist: but they scaled better. Radio lacked the social elements of live performance, but more people could build a crystal set and get it aimed correctly than could pack into even the largest Vaudeville house. MP3s don’t come with liner notes, they aren’t sold to you by a hipper-than-thou record store clerk who can help you make your choice, bad rips and truncated files abound: …. Yet MP3 is outcompeting the CD.” (18) Historically, “whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we’ve changed copyright.” (21) Doctorow argues that “the existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old production, reproduction, and distribution system, and they’ll be weakened by the new technology. But new technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that’s what tech is for.” (21)

 

Recently, I have been reading a lot on evangelism. While I was reading this essay, I constantly had to think about some of the challenges that books and articles describe concerning the church’s evangelistic practices. I want to draw a brief parallel between technological changes that call for new copyright laws and business models and cultural changes that call for new ways of conceiving of evangelism.

 

Most books that I read on evangelism argue that the cultural context has changed or is changing from a Christian, to a post Christian context, from a modern, to a postmodern context, from Christendom, to a post Christendom context, and from a homogeneous, to a pluralistic context. Moreover, they argue that old practices that assume the passing cultural context are not able to effectively reach people with the Gospel. For example, if your evangelism strategy assumes that most people have a churched background (assumes a Christendom context) but you apply it in a context where predominantly un-churched people live (post-Christendom context) statistics show that only a small percentage of people with an un-churched background come to faith. The church is challenged to rethink how to missionally engage their neighbors and to communicate the Gospel in a new cultural context.