WEB 2.0 WENT WRONG
In December 2009, Capitol Records filed a suit against online video-sharing site Vimeo, claiming the site “induces and encourages its users” to engage in copyright infringement (Lawler 2009). Capitol argued that Vimeo failed to take sufficient action to monitor infringing material that was uploaded to its servers. They also claimed that Vimeo staff actively participated in the production and promotion of videos infringing Capitol’s copyrights. In particular, the complaint targeted the site’s regular promotion of the “lip dub”—a form of high-concept music video featuring intricate lip-syncing and choreography. Lip dubs are regularly highlighted on the site’s front page, and Vimeo staff has produced its own (some of which have drawn substantial attention online).
As word of the suit spread, people responded with a mixture of cynicism about Capitol’s motives, defenses of the recording industry’s need to protect its business models, and a litany of frustrated barbs about the lack of innovation from major industry players. At TechDirt—a site covering online technology, policy, and legal issues—readers suggested that Capitol’s actions occurred at a time when parent company EMI was suffering from massive losses. (See comments at Masnick 2009.) Rolling Stone’s Daniel Kreps (2009) noted that the action against Vimeo came soon after EMI had signed licensing deals with start-up Vevo—a site developed by YouTube and supported by a number of major U.S. labels as a central, officially sanctioned depository for music videos online. At both collaborative news site Digg and online journal Ars Technica, some commenters pondered why Capitol’s suit was necessary, given that there was no proof lip dubs result in any harm. Many people contended that such videos constituted free advertising and publicity for recording artists (see comments at LeechesofKarma 2009 and N. Anderson 2009), an argument regularly mobilized by those who disagree with “antipiracy” lawsuits.1
Conflicts between media rights holders and the platforms, such as Vimeo, which host that material have become increasingly common, particularly as the ideas behind Web 2.0 have led to a proliferation of start-ups looking to monetize and commodify user-generated content. These dramatic technological and economic shifts have disrupted normative practices but not yet produced a model satisfying any party. Throughout this chapter, we will map the varying conceptions about fair economic and social relations held by media companies and their audiences. As we do so, we will examine how value, worth, and trust are negotiated and legitimized in this shifting social-economic-technological context through a few crucial concepts—the idea of a “moral economy” derived from the work of historian E. P. Thompson and the relations between commodity and gift economies as envisioned most notably by philosopher Lewis Hyde. Both of these models suggest ways that economic relations are shaped, at least in part, by social and moral understandings between the participating parties, aspects which often get dropped out of popular representations of debates about who “owns” media content and who should be “paid” for creative “labor.”
What Is Web 2.0?
The idea of Web 2.0 was introduced at a 2004 conference of the O’Reilly Media Group. In Tim O’Reilly’s formulation, Web 2.0 companies rely on the Internet as the platform for promoting, distributing, and refining their products: treating software as a service designed to run across multiple devices, relying on data as the “killer app,” and harnessing the “collective intelligence” of a network of users (O’Reilly 2005). Since Web 2.0’s introduction, it has become the cultural logic for e-business—a set of corporate practices that seek to capture and exploit participatory culture.
More than “pasting a new user interface onto an old application” (Musser et al. 2006, 3), Web 2.0 represents a reorganization of the relations between producers and their audiences in a maturing Internet market, as well as a set of approaches adopted by companies seeking to harness mass creativity, collectivism, and peer production (Van Dijck and Nieborg 2009). The emerging business superstars in this category have promised users greater influence over the production and distribution of culture, and “users,” “consumers,” and “audiences” have been reimagined as “co-creators” (Banks and Humphreys 2008) of content and services. These co-creators are engaged as collaborators as they upload, tag, organize, and categorize content on YouTube, Flickr, and myriad other sites. Meanwhile, marketers have increasingly emphasized transmedia campaigns, interactive experiences, and participatory platforms encouraging such co-creation. The tenets of Web 2.0 entice audience members to join in the building and customizing of services and messages rather than to expect companies to present complete and fully formed experiences.
In theory, Web 2.0 companies relinquish a certain degree of control to users. What has been described as “putting the We in the Web” (Levy and Stone 2006), however, has brought with it contradictions, conflicts, and schisms, particularly around the imperfectly aligned interests of media producers and audiences.
As José Van Dijck and David Nieborg note in their critique of Web 2.0 management and business manifestos, many corporate practices effectively erode the line between “collective (non-market, public) and commercial (market, private) modes of production.” Such efforts “cleverly combine capital-intensive, profit-oriented industrial production with labor-intensive, non-profit-oriented peer production” (2009, 856). There is a considerable gap between the Web 2.0 rhetoric of happy collaboration and users’ actual experiences working with companies. On the one hand, the mechanisms of Web 2.0 provide the preconditions for spreadable media; many of the key tools and platforms through which material is spread operate according to Web 2.0 principles. On the other hand, conflicting expectations of what constitutes fair participation means that the actual spreading of media content remains a contested practice.
Taking the “You” Out of YouTube
Video-sharing platform YouTube has struggled since its inception to balance the activities of its users with the interests of large copyright holders. Founded in February 2005 and acquired by Google in October 2006, YouTube’s principal business strategy relies on advertising revenue from the attention drawn by the site’s wide range of videos (predominantly created and uploaded by users themselves). From its earliest days, YouTube has also signed revenue-sharing deals with corporate producers to distribute their videos—everything from the latest movie trailers to music videos—alongside user-created content and to provide licenses for some of the varied uses of these texts (Knowledge@Wharton 2006). YouTube has also sought to acquire, develop, implement, and refine digital fingerprinting technologies to identify texts belonging to major copyright holders and to automatically issue “takedown” notices to users presumed to have violated intellectual property law through the unauthorized uploading of videos.
Critics (Aufderheide and Jaszi 2008) have noted that automatic takedown notices fail to protect legitimate “fair use” claims, creating a “chilling effect” on a site where creative remixes of existing cultural materials have long been among the most visible and cherished contributions. However, the enforcement mechanisms and related revenue-sharing deals were developed to shield YouTube from accusations that their business rests primarily on directly or indirectly encouraging copyright infringement, a claim that Viacom leveled at the company in its 2007 legal action (Helft and Fabrikant 2007). Indeed, large media companies have sought compensation from YouTube since the site launched. (See Burgess and Green 2009; Driscoll 2007; Knowledge@Wharton 2006.) Holding users and rights holders in balance is especially difficult for YouTube given the scale of the site (as YouTube reports, more than 24 hours of video is uploaded to the site every minute; see YouTube n.d.) and the diverse range of users—professional and amateur, market and nonmarket driven—who share content through it (Burgess and Green 2009).
On January 14, 2009, some YouTube uploaders found that the soundtracks to their videos had suddenly vanished. After a breakdown in licensing negotiations with Warner Music Group (WMG), YouTube had used an automatic tool to remove audio from videos featuring music from WMG artists. In a controversial post no longer available on the site’s blog, YouTube explained that removing audio shielded users whose videos would have otherwise faced
