Reviewing Gowers : Part 3
Anyone who has thought about the web in any depth will probably have come across 'the long tail' as a statistical description of how the internet presents much expanded possibilities in terms of consumer choice because of lower marginal costs of storage and distribution.
If you have not, here's a brief summary. If you visit a local book or record shop, you will notice a (usually irritatingly) restricted choice of big-selling items. This is fine if you want to read Danielle Steele or listen to bleedin' Robbie Williams, but hopeless if you're after Tony Sleep's greatest hits. There's an empirical truth behind this, called the Pareto principle, which asserts that 80% of buyers want only 20% of all available products. Or to put it one of several other ways, if you want to reach 100% of the market you have to stock 4x more products. It simply isn't a cost-efficient use of the shop's lmited resources to stock items that only a small minority of customers require. Nor is there a business case for publishers to produce and distribute them.
Their commercial profitability will be located in the orange sector of the graph, where demand (the 'y' axis) is high enough for the numbers to work profitably. Material that has a narrower appeal (the 'x' axis) will be in the yellow 'long tail' on the right, and they won't stock it. They may, if it's worth their while, order it for you, but quite possibly whatever you want has never been published or has been deleted by the publisher because it inhabits the 'not worth doing' tail for them too.
On the web it's different. The marginal costs of storing and delivering media are so small as to be inconsequential and they are partly paid by the punter. No longer do publishers have to limit themselves to sure-fire big sellers. Any author or musician can cheaply self-publish way out on the long tail and promote and potentialy build themselves an audience and viable market that may even propel them into the mainstream. I'd mention the Arctic Monkeys at this point but I think they're overrated. The long tail is generally perceived as A Really Good Thing - good for consumer choice, and hence good for business to thrive in millions of little niches that could never have previously existed.
Things are a bit different where photography is concerned because of the traditional insertion of middleman agencies. Agencies and libraries used to serve photographers equitably but the boot is increasingly on the other foot. After a decade of screwing ever-increasing percentages, fully-owned stock is now the ambition. Just 3 first tier agencies control nearly 70% of the global stock photo market, which means near total control of the market. These are big media structures aggregating and reselling rights, and like any other supermarket, their profitability is built, Pareto style, on mass-market commodity pricing and squeezing suppliers until they squeak.
There's a near-religious presumption on the part of big media and Andrew Gowers, that despite the little temporary difficulty of not really having a business model for deriving profit so much as wrecking competitors, it'll work out OK if they can achieve sufficient size, dominance and efficiency.
I think this orthodoxy has significant errors and omissions. Media are not just a commodity like spuds or widgets, they are the lifeblood of democracy itself. If information quality is sacrificed to market demands for cheaper at any cost, all that is disseminated is cut-price ignorance and foolishness. See the tabloids and magazine racks for copious examples. Freesheets are a nadir in commercial vacuity, and its only when you compare them to local papers of 20 or 30 years ago that you realise just how damaging and cynical the process has been. Local papers were once invaluable community 'glue' until some smart Alec discovered they could make more money by junking nearly all the expensive editorial and giving the paper away filled with adverts instead. Much of TV is headed toward the unwatchable US model of ads interspersed by odd moments of programming. All this will only get worse in the pursuit of profit. Freesheet dailies are an inevitability.
This entropic tendency is terribly important and points to the sting in the long tail. When Mark Getty said 'intellectual property is the oil of the 20th century' he was not anticipating that near-infinite and renewable supplies would be generated by amateurs and given away. Photography threatens to generate the longest tail ever as the web becomes the world's photo album. Of course 99.9% is rubbish but this doesn't matter so long as you can find the 0.1% you personally want. Uneven quality is manageable on the web through portals, search engines and community, especially social tagging of the sort seen at Flickr, and word of mouth. After all, somehow you found these rare pearls of incandescent wisdom.
The existence of any free quality material poses a potentially terminal threat to any business and big media is extremely vulnerable. In the 1960's a set of Brittanica cost the equivalent of some £3,000 in today's money. The first CD editions were £300 in the late 90's. Brittanica on CD now costs under £20 and Wikipedia, Web 2.0's community-authored-and-edited competitor, costs precisely nothing. It is improving at a time when Britannica's limited revenues must inhibit their ability to invest in maintaining any quality differential. Brittanica, despite a hugely expanded market, will either have to degrade quality (ie cut what they pay their expert professional authors) or innovate some way out of impending oblivion. Eroding quality will hand the market to Wikipedia, so this is really 'innovate or die'.
That is exactly what the long tail is going to do to big media, just as the existence of free amateur images is doing to us. Unfortunately Gowers' formulations seem likely to encourage aggregation and appropriation which impacts quality. For now it seems a smart move for Getty to cherrypick long-tail pennystock and try and leverage it into the mainstream where it can be sold cheaper than other Getty images. This, in Gettyspeak, broadens the market to pull in new buyers, but it's also just a supermarket tactic like white-label budget baked beans. It helps that the photographers can be flattered into paying for the dubious privilege of becoming bean suppliers to Getty, but it will undermine Getty's core pro contributors as well, because some buyers will soon discover the kids can't tell the difference between white-label and Heinz so they'll buy the cheaper product. Sooner or later Getty's core contributors will then have to drop their prices to sell more premium beans to get back to where they were. Either they accept less profit or cut quality, or go out of business entirely. This is a ratchet effect that favours the long tail, just as with Brittanica.
There's an interesting little fact buried in Gowers' report, that just 2% of all copyright material is actually available.
'Many submissions to the Call for Evidence highlighted this as a large problem, noting that a large amount of content protected by copyright is not commercially available. The existence of such a large volume of old work protected but unavailable (estimates of up to 98 per cent of published work under copyright) means that a great amount of intellectual capital is wasted. Firms and individuals are unable to restore, rework or revive these `orphan' works to create new commercial and creative capital'.
Gowers sees this as an argument for recommending the free usage of orphan works provided an insufficiently negligent search is carried out first. In my opinion this is entirely missing the point, in fact several of them. One of the things that photographers have been complaining about for years is the deliberate and accidental stripping of authors' copyright details by publishers, as a rite of passage into their databases. Gowers' orphan works procedure as proposed will finally allow them to cash in on this practice and will incentivise them to do more of it.
But the larger issue is that far more material is permanently out of reach because it would, if it were available at all, now inhabit the long tail. Big media - with a few specialised portal exceptions like Google and Yahoo! - in general has little interest in the long tail part of the market except as a source of cheap or free material for repurposing and sale in the premium segment they find profitable. Having long fallen off the peg of profitable use much of what they own is now locked away in a salt mine, carboard box, or proprietary database. Or as happened with much material during the white heat of the digital revolution when Getty and Corbis bought everything in sight and newspapers rationalised their photographic archives, it is gone to landfill.
Where, you may ask, is Gowers' balancing requirement for aggregators of intellectual capital to allow public access to material that has not been orphaned so much as dropped down a corporate black hole of not-worth-bothering? Of course Gowers won't go that far in the name of our cultural history and freedom because it would hurt their business efficiency, but he's happy enough to allow them fee-free use of untraceable individual creators' copyright. Of course this will only encourage them to push even harder for all rights as well, so they don't have to bother with clearing rights at all.
Unfortunately this isn't going to work out like Gowers hopes. It will gain big media a little time and profit through shaving costs, which I am sure they will be grateful for, and it will hasten the demise of pro photographers, which I am sure we will not. It is a move in precisely the wrong direction to take advantage of Web 2.0 and the opportunities that the long tail might present if handled better. It allows - encourages even - old media to try and cling on to their ivory tower models and fail to adapt creatively. Ultimately this is likely to prove painful for them; but long before it hurts them it will devastate their suppliers and the quality of what they produce. It has been doing so for many years now.
The long tail is not, of course, a novel feature nor unique to the internet. It's a characteristic of all technological change, and arguably it is what constitutes social economic progress. What is expensive, desirable and specialised becomes ubiquitous and cheap then ultimately almost worthless and of little interest to any but a few. Anyone who has ever bought a computer or digital camera has met the phenomenon in a very compressed timeframe.
Media is a little different though because what is produced is quite separate from how it is reproduced and distributed. The information itself can survive many evolutionary changes of medium but its value adjusts dynamically and unpredictably. A day-old newpaper is unsaleable unless you happen to be the researcher who needs it, where a book may endure months or years before becoming popular. A photo may sit on file worthlessly for 20 or 50 years before it suddenly assumes importance and value.
These are long-tail characteristics and are very good reasons for keeping copyright, but value is also determined by scarcity. Writing in the Middle Ages was the elitist skill of a tiny minority. There was very little 'consumer choice' : Bible or Prayer book, sire? Books took months or years of labour to produce each copy right up until Caxton and Aldus developed the first printing technologies. Then there was more choice (and more and cheaper Bibles). This continued as print got cheaper and easier, eventually achieving mass emancipation and accessibility during the 1980's with the arrival of DTP. Now you can download an entire Bible for absolutely nothing, in umpteen different formats. The gold-leafed hide binding and illustrated lettering on parchment is long gone, all you get is a heap of electrons.
That is why the internet threatens an end-game for big media - and professional photographers who are its symbiotic parasites. There is an inexorable and almost irresistible trend for information in any electronic form to trend rapidly toward zero monetary value because ease of reproduction is subversive of monopoly. Big media is about aggregation of IP and metered access to what it controls. It survives by locking people out unless they pay. Web 2.0, the participatory web, is architecturally inimical to that. It disaggregates any material it can get to and spreads it around free as fast as it possibly can. So I agree with Dan Bricklin that the long tail will inevitably wag the dog. However I'm not at all sure I can agree with the optimists who see the long tail as generator of lots of small, new niche businesses, at least not in photography where the most active example of long tail economics is microstock pics for pennies. Oversupply will drive even these prices down.
For sure the free culture vs. big media webwars I wrote about in part 2 are not going to go away. They will escalate as the long tail 'does a Britannica' to big media. I'm sorry chaps but this will undoubtedly kill off most professional photographers. I will predict now that our numbers will be culled by 80% over the next decade, replaced by pro-ams, though it could well happen in half that time or less. In fact a lot of pro's will become pro-am's themselves, diversifying into other activities to supplement income - web authoring, teaching, consultancy, taxi drivers, or maybe writing requiems for pro photography.
This is only my opinion, and who I am to argue with Gowers and a squlllion-billion dollar global industry stuffed to the gills with MBA's and chartered accountants. But Gowers again:
'Creativity, innovation and investment are crucial to boosting the productivity of the UK economy. Looking forward, their importance is set to remain centre-stage as we enter the `third industrial revolution'. The UK must be able to harness creativity and promote innovation in order to compete in the global, knowledge-based economy. Intellectual Property creates the link in the chain which incentivises individuals and firms to innovate and create, with the confidence that their investment is protected.'
This seems way off the mark where photography is concerned. Perhaps that's why he discreetly avoided mentioning it, but as far as I can see Web 2.0 photography is a loaves and fishes economy that will leave a little room for bespoke providers of oak-smoked salmon & ciabatta. The rest will come to resemble a global boot sale as pro's sell off their kit so amateurs can earn beer money on Shutterstock.
I don't think Gowers has done or not done anything that is going to make much difference to this prospect. The few proposals that impact us won't add up to much. I had a brief flutter of schadenfreud when I read his plan for setting Trading Standards onto publishers ('Under section 107(1) a person commits an offence who, without the licence of the copy right owner - (a) makes for sale or hire..'). But then I remembered that my local TS is an apparently unattended answering machine that makes a Calcutta callcentre seem like an Investors in People award-winner. Also a story I have been working on for many weeks involves a million-quid-plus rogue trader, which TS have only got around to tackling after a thousand or so complaints. As for the copyright registry, no doubt it'll be contracted to EDS or Capita and wind up expensive and unusable as every other Government IT project. If this sounds cynical, well it is, but it's not irrational.
The only thing Gowers really could and should have done is to have made copyright and moral rights unassignable, as in Germany. Paradoxically I don't think this is as vital for pro's - who generally hang on to copyright - as it is for the pro-am's who will displace us. They are less used to the predatory habits of UK publishers and are more likely to be swindled and seduced out of their rights. Obviously law is never going to be able to prevent people choosing to make bad bargains but there is a fine dividing line between choice and duress. For photographers that boundary has been comprehensively trashed by custom and practice. If the acquisition of all rights by clients application of bollock-clamps is allowed to persist we may as well not have a copyright law at all for individuals. Perhaps, probably, that is Gowers' intention. But we need to keep creator's copyright intact for the day that Web 2.0 (or 3.0) matures and the long tail of diverse free expression begins to counteract the overwhelming economic power of the corporates. Maybe then we'll see innovations that build on quality and equity rather than inhibiting them. Maybe people will by then be sick of the limitations of photography that can be achieved by part-timers. Just don't hold your breath. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
