Change cuts both ways

Recently, Cory Doctorow published an article on BoingBoing explaining his reasons for not wanting an iPad, and why he thinks it’s a bad idea for everyone. While I do not share all of his views, I do share his contempt for the closed system that the iPad will thrive on. But there was one thing he mentioned —a tangent, at best— that caught my eye, and really got me thinking about the freely-exchangeable-content rhetoric:

I mean, look at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book kid, and I’m a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. […] So what does Marvel do to “enhance” its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous [sic] sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.

It seems to me like a lot of people share this view about a lot of things. Yet this line of thinking, this righteous demand that “my rights not be taken away”, sometimes lack a bit of perpective. I used to be able to share [insert cultural product here] back before I did everything online, why shouldn’t I be able to do it online now? And I’d be the first one to defend a pro-sharing stance on many different kinds of cultural products (and I do). But to compare yesterday’s paper-based physical book with today’s infinitely (and perfectly and reliably) copy-able digital file seems conveniently naïve. We’re talking about the same content, sure, but the medium is different, one that offers some advantages for the consumer, as well as some disadvantages.

Before, you used to own something: wood pulp, vegetable inks, and a couple of staples, all arranged in a particular order to represent ideas, which you didn’t own. Today, and were you to consume your favorite graphic stories via a digital medium such as the iPad, all you really own is a license to allow the pixels on your device to emit light in such a way as to display a representation of those ideas (a story, characters, drawings, colors).¹ In both cases, you paid for a medium X as a vehicle through which you gain access to content Y without ever really owning said content. But make no mistake: When you consume your graphic stories via digital means, you are no longer buying comic books. They may still be divided by “pages”, they may still be static images on a flat surface, but that’s about as close as it will ever resemble a book. In essence, you used to buy a medium which inherently granted you a license, while now you’re just buying a license.

I think the anti-DRM, pro-freely-exchangeable-content rhetoric —one I find myself agreeing with more often than not— can do with a bit of its own change-is-inevitable medicine: The rules are different now, a new market is emerging, and while it calls for new business models on behalf of producers, it inequivocally calls for new products and new relationships with those products on our behalf as well. Change —and the inevitable maturity that it requires— does not discriminate; it applies to both producer and consumer.

What does this mean, though? How are consumers supposed to relate to the content they consume on their digital devices? And how do we arrive at a satisfactory commercial understanding with those who offer what we demand? I don’t know yet. We’ve yet to see what new relationships we forge with our favorite content in the near (surely iPad-ridden) future. It remains to be seen how exactly we will relate to these products and how content-producers are to make money out of these relationships. For now, though: If you want to be able to swap comics, I say go out, buy comics and swap the shit out of them. Celebrate your right to swap away.