The Politics of Funny
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, December 14 2011
The comedian Louis CK reports that his experiment with a web-delivered, self-released comedy special — filmed over two nights at the high-end Beacon Theatre, produced with his own money and made available on the web at a cost of $5, with no digital rights management restrictions — has reaped a tidy profit.
This, as the movie and music recording industry seeks to use legislative change against the current structure of the Internet, arguing that the free flow of content on the web — through connections that stay open whether users are sharing a cat video or an illegal copy of Parks & Recreation — is killing their business.
Here's Louis CK:
The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we've sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.
His announcement came Tuesday, a day before bold-faced Internet names including Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Evan Williams and Jerry Yang — that's leaving out quite a few — took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times advocating against the Stop Online Piracy Act. If SOPA passes, various Internet infrastructure providers would be obliged to stop connecting people with any website with a non-U.S. domain name that finds itself the target of a court order — a large-scale shunning that folks like Williams or Dorsey or Brin or Hoffman describe in their letter as denying website owners due process of law. Tuesday, Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson put up a new blog post encouraging Etsy users to advocate against SOPA. On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee will mark up the bill and vote on advancing it, along with any proposed amendments, along to the House floor.
The vision of the Internet painted by supporters of the bill is one in which any business model for the content industry — movies, music, stand-up comedy, whatever — is shadowed by an underground and illicit trade of pirated material that generates hundreds of millions of dollars, not a cent of which content producers or the companies they work with will ever see. But the face of the entertainment industry's piracy-pushed decline is not chiseled in stone.
First, numbers can be made to say more or less anything you want. At Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-Ore.) request, the Congressional Research Service explored the entertainment industry's profits and found, citing a variety of data, that the music and motion picture industries have been steadily growing; ticket sales are on the rise; but revenue from home entertainment sales, as more people shift to cheaper outlets like Netflix, are declining.
That memo is here, and can be taken to suggest that the Internet is, in fact challenging the way the entertainment industry works. But Louis CK's experience — following earlier experiments like Radiohead's "In Rainbows" album released in 2007 — suggests that mounting a legislative battle to bake digital rights management into the Internet's structure may not be the only solution.
This post has been updated to fix a broken link.