A couple of weeks ago, the normally clever OR Books offered a "pay what you want" premium for Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Appetite for Free Content Stifles Creativity. I wanted to pay nothing, so I typed in zero and got the ebook. Thanks!
Anyway, the book is pretty awful. Ruen is very passionate, but is incapable of creating or sustaining a sophisticated argument about online piracy. He is a music journalist who also worked in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, where he encountered many musicians and was surprised to find that they were not rich. He also wrote an article decrying music piracy/file sharing and got some nasty letters in response. That's pretty much the book, plus or minus 200 pages or so of padding.
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I should have been a chapbook.
Ruen is the worst sort of Internet figure—he's Wikipedia Brown. He starts with a position and cobbles together Baby's First Arguments in favor of it, after madly dashing around looking for supporting evidence via Google. When he runs out of things to say, he summarizes E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops for several pages. He also abuses McLuhan's hold/cold media categories—he can't figure out which the Internet is, but he's sure that it's bad!—for grafs and grafs. Freeloading is written like an angry term paper by a B- student.
Ruen's main contention is that piracy has harmed music sales, but he's short on specifics. He looks at how few records it takes to have the #1 record on the Billboard charts these days, but so what? Does that mean that people are pirating rather than buying, or that the market has segmented significantly, perhaps because it's easier for people to find music outside of the Top 40? There is a growing literature he could have cited as regards piracy and sales—some suggesting that piracy helps sales or has little effect, some backing his claim—but he ignores most of it. Note, I don't have a strong opinion as to what piracy does in either direction—I've seen enough studies to know that the jury is still out—but it does seem as though piracy hurts the top much more than it hurts the bottom. I hope to be forgiven if I don't weep too many tears for One Direction.
Ruen is also a natural law theorist, though he probably doesn't even realize it. He is appalled at Cory Doctorow's claim that copyright is a utilitarian formation—if it serves the greater good, it's good. If it does more harm than good, it should be reformed or eliminated. Ruen objects to this and performs some light rewriting of traditional copypasta about the origins of copyright in the United Kingdom and the United States, but spends zero time and space wrestling with the legal, ethical, and economical issues that emerge when one tries to treat property rights as a right dictated by some sort of natural law, rather than something that persists because it is useful for incentives. Even tangible property is utilitarian: private property is/was historically useful because if you want to grow beets on this patch of land and I want to stable ponies on it, we have a decision to make and only a handful of ways to make that decision. Some of them involve me running you through with my sword. Ditto copyright and other forms of IP—is copyright a net social good or a net social bad? That's the only useful way to talk about it. A natural law argument is necessarily a religious argument, just like "Information wants to be free" (or information wants anything!) is.
Ruen also picks easy shots. Apparently, in 2002 David Bowie predicted that copyright would be dead in ten years. Ruen crows that Bowie was wrong. True, but trivial. So what? He also spends an enormous amount of time shaking his fist at the negative email received after publishing his article on piracy, and prizing the supportive letters he received. (He used to keep a blog for this as well.) Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think non-fiction books should be about primarily or even secondarily Reading The Comments, and then saying "Nuh-uh! You're the one what sucks!"
The book is interesting when we hear from non-Ruen individuals, such as TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone, and other people involved in the "indie" record scene. None of them take as hard a line as Ruen, and there is one very sad moment when Future of the Left, a leftist Welsh post-punk band that I like, gets their ten-dollar per diem from a record company employee to buy dinner before their big show. On the other hand, would Future of the Left actually side with, say, Metallica, against pirates? Let's hear one of their songs!
Hmm.
Ruen also fails to check to see if minor bands from the 1990s or 1980s were doing any better than his grumpy pals from the coffee shop. How much money did Run Westy Run ever make? Who knows? (Btw, I see that RWR doesn't have a Wikipedia page. I am appalled and upset.)
Ruen is even suspicious of the movement against SOPA in 2012—we're supposed to be shocked that major Internet companies were against the legislation—and declares that 501(c)4 organizations are money launderers in attempt to tie them to various obnoxious election-year pop-up groups. Note that Greenpeace, for example, is also a 501(c)4, but Ruen doesn't care about that. He's just interested in well-poisoning. He has the sheer hubris to then claim that the anti-SOPA campaign was chock full of propaganda, unlike, say...who?
Ruen does have a useful and interesting point to make that could have potentially made a decent magazine article. With record sales declining and access to performance venues tied up by a few big players, the sort of the bands that in previous generations would have sooner disbanded rather than go 'mersh are selling their songs to companies for commercial use. Here's Wilco shilling for Volkswagen:
Major music journalism venues such as The Fader and Pitchfork are basically press-release outlets for various lifestyle-branding endeavors as well these days. Perhaps the most egregious example of lifestyle branding music is Green Label Sound, brought to you by Mountain Dew. Interesting stuff, but really only tangentially related to piracy. That is, whether or not piracy is cutting incomes, it is likely that lifestyle marketing firms such as Vice Marketing would have come up with such schemes anyway, and some "indie" bands would have gone for them anyway. All that is solid melts into air after all, and selling out is as traditional as loudly declaring that one will never sell out. The inevitability of the former is why the latter so predictably exists!
Ultimately, Ruen sounds like someone's know-it-all uncle grousing about kids today, even when he highlights a few emails he received from kids today who converted after reading one of his amazing anti-piracy articles. Man, good thing I didn't pay for this stupid book, and as I read it on my phone, I was able to give my thumb a bit of a work out while skimming over the fat to get to the little veins of meat. Anyway, if you want to hear what Ruen has to say, just tweet "I love your books/songs! I just downloaded all of 'em!" at any musician or author with fewer than 3000 followers. You'll get the same stuff, 90 percent of the time.
Anyway, the book is pretty awful. Ruen is very passionate, but is incapable of creating or sustaining a sophisticated argument about online piracy. He is a music journalist who also worked in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, where he encountered many musicians and was surprised to find that they were not rich. He also wrote an article decrying music piracy/file sharing and got some nasty letters in response. That's pretty much the book, plus or minus 200 pages or so of padding.
I should have been a chapbook.
Ruen is the worst sort of Internet figure—he's Wikipedia Brown. He starts with a position and cobbles together Baby's First Arguments in favor of it, after madly dashing around looking for supporting evidence via Google. When he runs out of things to say, he summarizes E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops for several pages. He also abuses McLuhan's hold/cold media categories—he can't figure out which the Internet is, but he's sure that it's bad!—for grafs and grafs. Freeloading is written like an angry term paper by a B- student.
Ruen's main contention is that piracy has harmed music sales, but he's short on specifics. He looks at how few records it takes to have the #1 record on the Billboard charts these days, but so what? Does that mean that people are pirating rather than buying, or that the market has segmented significantly, perhaps because it's easier for people to find music outside of the Top 40? There is a growing literature he could have cited as regards piracy and sales—some suggesting that piracy helps sales or has little effect, some backing his claim—but he ignores most of it. Note, I don't have a strong opinion as to what piracy does in either direction—I've seen enough studies to know that the jury is still out—but it does seem as though piracy hurts the top much more than it hurts the bottom. I hope to be forgiven if I don't weep too many tears for One Direction.
Ruen is also a natural law theorist, though he probably doesn't even realize it. He is appalled at Cory Doctorow's claim that copyright is a utilitarian formation—if it serves the greater good, it's good. If it does more harm than good, it should be reformed or eliminated. Ruen objects to this and performs some light rewriting of traditional copypasta about the origins of copyright in the United Kingdom and the United States, but spends zero time and space wrestling with the legal, ethical, and economical issues that emerge when one tries to treat property rights as a right dictated by some sort of natural law, rather than something that persists because it is useful for incentives. Even tangible property is utilitarian: private property is/was historically useful because if you want to grow beets on this patch of land and I want to stable ponies on it, we have a decision to make and only a handful of ways to make that decision. Some of them involve me running you through with my sword. Ditto copyright and other forms of IP—is copyright a net social good or a net social bad? That's the only useful way to talk about it. A natural law argument is necessarily a religious argument, just like "Information wants to be free" (or information wants anything!) is.
Ruen also picks easy shots. Apparently, in 2002 David Bowie predicted that copyright would be dead in ten years. Ruen crows that Bowie was wrong. True, but trivial. So what? He also spends an enormous amount of time shaking his fist at the negative email received after publishing his article on piracy, and prizing the supportive letters he received. (He used to keep a blog for this as well.) Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think non-fiction books should be about primarily or even secondarily Reading The Comments, and then saying "Nuh-uh! You're the one what sucks!"
The book is interesting when we hear from non-Ruen individuals, such as TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone, and other people involved in the "indie" record scene. None of them take as hard a line as Ruen, and there is one very sad moment when Future of the Left, a leftist Welsh post-punk band that I like, gets their ten-dollar per diem from a record company employee to buy dinner before their big show. On the other hand, would Future of the Left actually side with, say, Metallica, against pirates? Let's hear one of their songs!
Hmm.
Ruen also fails to check to see if minor bands from the 1990s or 1980s were doing any better than his grumpy pals from the coffee shop. How much money did Run Westy Run ever make? Who knows? (Btw, I see that RWR doesn't have a Wikipedia page. I am appalled and upset.)
Ruen is even suspicious of the movement against SOPA in 2012—we're supposed to be shocked that major Internet companies were against the legislation—and declares that 501(c)4 organizations are money launderers in attempt to tie them to various obnoxious election-year pop-up groups. Note that Greenpeace, for example, is also a 501(c)4, but Ruen doesn't care about that. He's just interested in well-poisoning. He has the sheer hubris to then claim that the anti-SOPA campaign was chock full of propaganda, unlike, say...who?
Ruen does have a useful and interesting point to make that could have potentially made a decent magazine article. With record sales declining and access to performance venues tied up by a few big players, the sort of the bands that in previous generations would have sooner disbanded rather than go 'mersh are selling their songs to companies for commercial use. Here's Wilco shilling for Volkswagen:
Major music journalism venues such as The Fader and Pitchfork are basically press-release outlets for various lifestyle-branding endeavors as well these days. Perhaps the most egregious example of lifestyle branding music is Green Label Sound, brought to you by Mountain Dew. Interesting stuff, but really only tangentially related to piracy. That is, whether or not piracy is cutting incomes, it is likely that lifestyle marketing firms such as Vice Marketing would have come up with such schemes anyway, and some "indie" bands would have gone for them anyway. All that is solid melts into air after all, and selling out is as traditional as loudly declaring that one will never sell out. The inevitability of the former is why the latter so predictably exists!
Ultimately, Ruen sounds like someone's know-it-all uncle grousing about kids today, even when he highlights a few emails he received from kids today who converted after reading one of his amazing anti-piracy articles. Man, good thing I didn't pay for this stupid book, and as I read it on my phone, I was able to give my thumb a bit of a work out while skimming over the fat to get to the little veins of meat. Anyway, if you want to hear what Ruen has to say, just tweet "I love your books/songs! I just downloaded all of 'em!" at any musician or author with fewer than 3000 followers. You'll get the same stuff, 90 percent of the time.