users the option to modify the video by removing the music subject to the copyright claim and post the new version, and many of them are taking that option” (quoted in M. Campbell 2009).
Unaware of the decision, many uploaders wondered whether they were encountering technical difficulties (Arrington 2009), while some were enraged over market forces intruding on their user-created content. One user wrote, “How does a song playing in the background of a slideshow about a colonial reenacting unit harm anyone—least of all Warner Music Group?” (quoted in M. Campbell 2009). Meanwhile, others mused that their use of the audio tracks added value for the music industry: “If we can use it then that would probably get more people to listen to the audio. It’s pretty much like us helping the artist, right?” (quoted in M. Campbell 2009).
While upsetting users, this strategy made business sense for YouTube. It provided the company a way to woo back Warner Music Group while minimizing the likelihood of further legal troubles. Indeed, as Michael Driscoll discusses, YouTube’s strategies for copyright management are generally focused on forging relationships with large copyright holders (2007, 566–567). Even though the site has expanded its “Partner Program” to “ordinary” users, promising them a cut of advertising revenues for videos that might suddenly “go viral” (Kincaid 2009), the company remains primarily focused on policing the copyrights held by large media companies for which the fingerprinting software is made available (Driscoll 2007, 566). Smaller professional and amateur producers who feel that their intellectual property has been infringed—those less likely to constitute a legal threat, to purchase significant ad inventory, or to provide licensed material—must still apply through formal channels to generate a takedown notice under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These various struggles to negotiate between YouTube as a platform for sharing and YouTube as a business model—which have taken place since the platform’s genesis—encapsulate the tensions that run throughout the Web 2.0 model. The rest of this chapter will explore those tensions in detail.
Toward a New Moral Economy
Having embraced rhetoric about enabling and empowering participants, YouTube should scarcely be surprised when users push back against shifts in the site’s policy and practice. Such shifts represent a unilateral reworking of the social contract between the company and its contributors and damage the “moral economy” on which the exchange of user-generated content rests.
The idea of a moral economy comes from E. P. Thompson (1971), who used the term to describe the social norms and mutual understandings that make it possible for two parties to conduct business. Thompson introduced the concept in his work on eighteenth-century food riots, arguing that when the indentured classes challenged landowners, their protests were typically shaped by some “legitimizing notion”: “The men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights and customs; and in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community” (1971, 78). The relations between landowners and peasants—or, for that matter, between contemporary media producers and audiences—reflect the perceived moral and social value of those transactions. All participants need to feel that the parties involved are behaving in a morally appropriate fashion. In many cases, the moral economy holds in check the aggressive pursuit of short-term self-interest in favor of decisions that preserve long-term social relations among participants. In a small-scale economy, for example, a local dealer is unlikely to “cheat” a customer because the dealer counts on continued trade with the customer (and, the dealer hopes, the customer’s friends) over an extended period and thus must maintain his or her reputation within the community.
Economic systems ideally align the perceived interests of all parties involved in a transaction in ways that are consistent, coherent, and fair. A dramatic shift in economic or technological infrastructure can create a crisis in the moral economy, diminishing the level of trust among participating parties and perhaps tarnishing the legitimacy of economic exchanges. This moral economy might empower corporations that feel their customers, employees, or partners have stepped outside the bounds of arrangements. Or it can motivate and empower individuals or communities when they feel a company has acted inappropriately. In these contexts, both producers and audiences make bids for legitimization, proposing alternative understandings of what constitute fair and meaningful interactions. “File sharing” and “piracy,” for instance, constitute two competing moral systems for characterizing the unauthorized circulation of media content: one put forth by audience members eager to legitimize the free exchange of material and the other by media companies eager to mark certain practices as damaging to their economic interests and morally suspect.
This sense that the moral economy was being violated motivated peasants in early modern Europe to push back against the feudal economy which had shackled them for hundreds of years, and it surely has and is motivating audience resistance in an era with much more pronounced rhetoric about audience sovereignty. Given how much the practices of participatory culture were marginalized throughout the broadcast era, many communities (particularly fan and activist groups) developed a strong sense of social solidarity and a deep understanding of their common interests and shared values, and they have carried these over into their interactions with Web 2.0 companies.2 A persistent discourse of “Do-It-Yourself” media (Lankshear and Knobel 2010), for example, has fueled not only alternative modes of production but also explicit and implicit critiques of commercial practices. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of “digital revolution” and empowerment surrounding the launch of Web 2.0 has, if anything, heightened expectations about shifts in the control of cultural production and distribution that companies have found hard to accommodate. (Game designer Alec Austin considers the emotional dimensions of a “moral contract” between producers and audiences in our enhanced book.)
Communities are in theory more fragmented, divided, and certainly more dispersed than the corporate entities with which they interface, making it much harder for them to fully assert and defend their own interests. Fan communities are often enormously heterogeneous, with values and assumptions that fragment along axes of class, age, gender, race, sexuality, and nationality, to name just a few. Yet the moral certainty shaping the reactions of such groups to debates about business models, terms of service, or the commercialization of content reflect how audiences may be more empowered than we expect to challenge corporate policies, especially as they gain greater and easier access to communication platforms which facilitate their working through differences and developing shared norms. It is important, however, to remember that the values associated with fan communities, for instance, may differ dramatically from those of other kinds of cultural participants—activists, members of religious groups, collectors, and so on. As we emphasize throughout this book, these different types of participatory culture do not command equal levels of respect and attention from the media industries.
Stolen Content or Exploited Labor?
New technologies enable audiences to exert much greater impact on circulation than ever before, but they also enable companies to police once-private behavior that is taking on greater public dimensions. Some people describe these shifts as a crisis in copyright and others a crisis in fair use. Fans defend perceived rights and practices that have been taken for granted for many years, such as the longstanding practice of creating “mix tapes” or other compilations of quoted material. Corporations, on the other hand, want to constrain behaviors they see as damaging and having a much larger impact in the digital era. Both sides accuse the other of exploiting the instability created by shifts in technology and media infrastructure. The excessive rhetoric surrounding such digital circulation suggests just how far out of balance the moral understandings of producers and audiences have become.
Consider these two quotes:
This next block of silence is for all you folks who download music for free, eliminating my incentive to create. (Baldwin n.d.)
<dsully> please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.
<jwb> you make all the content. they keep all the revenue. (Quote
