Monkey selfies (E)

0:00Okay, here's a quick music quiz for you. What song is this?

0:17Hey, it's Kevin Beach, and this is a special archived episode of Akemba.

0:26If you answered our quiz with Stairway to Heaven, I'm afraid you weren't correct, but you are not alone. That was Taurus from Spirit, a now little-known band that once toured with Led Zeppelin on the same bill. And they have spent, or the heirs of the founder of the band, have spent millions of dollars suing Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin because they have asserted that the classic Stairway to Heaven is stolen from that song, which gets to the heart of how we protect our ideas. and copyright. And before we talk about Led Zeppelin, I want to spend a minute talking about David Slater and the macaque monkeys of Indonesia.

1:12David is a hardworking wildlife photographer, and he slammed headfirst into a paradox. What did he do? Well, in order to support some wildlife efforts and also to make a living, he went to Indonesia, bringing a ton of equipment with him and a lot of expertise. And then spending a lot of time, days or weeks, figured out how to set up a shot where monkeys could perhaps take a selfie. Now, the very idea of a monkey selfie is clickbait. The monkey selfie, the chance to see ourselves as primates, the chance to understand that we can't help it when we're busy taking pictures of ourselves. Wow, a monkey selfie?

2:01That could go viral. And in fact, it did. If you go to the show notes at akimbo.link, you will see the most extraordinary monkey selfie. Here's the problem. The problem is that Slater, after spending all of this time and energy setting up the shot with lights, with lenses, with tripods, left the trigger to take the picture right there in front of the monkey. In order for it to work, it had to be a monkey selfie. The monkey had to press the trigger. But, but, copyright law, particularly in the United States, is crystal clear about this. The person who presses the button owns the copyright. Years ago, I gave a speech to an association of stock photography agencies.

2:54And at the end of my speech, as is often the case, some people would come up and ask if they could have a picture. But every other time it's ever happened, what happens is someone shows up, hands their camera to someone else, and asks them to take a picture from, I don't know, six or eight feet away. Not at this event. At this event, every single person, by instinct, refused to let anyone else touch their camera and instead stretched their arm out as far as they could to take an actual selfie. And when I asked why, some of them thought about it, and they realized pressing the button, triggering the shutter, means you own the copyright in the photo.

3:33So back to David Slater and the monkey selfies. If the copyright belongs to the monkey, the copyright belongs to no one. Because monkeys aren't allowed to own a copyright. Copyright exists for a specific reason. It's to encourage creation by people. And so the very thing that made it go viral, it was a monkey selfie, made it so that David Slater couldn't profit from it. Wikimedia put the picture up with a public domain label on it because they asserted no one owned the copyright. It even went to trial and Slater lost. Then, just to get some publicity, PETA, the people for the ethical treatment of animals, showed up and filed a lawsuit on behalf of the monkey, saying that the monkey should own all the money from the copyrights, and PETA would be happy to spend that money on behalf of the monkeys.

4:35Now, there's no doubt that the monkeys deserve a lot of our help, but the question that it brings up is, why do we even have copyright, and who owns it? It didn't used to be a big deal. The reason it didn't used to be a big deal is that a copyright didn't last that long and it wasn't worth that much. The vast majority of copyrights were never renewed and the length of a copyright was short. But now, thanks to Disney and other giant corporations, copyrights last essentially forever, as long as we are alive. Not only that, but once something starts working, I don't know, like The Wizard of Oz or Mickey Mouse, it keeps working.

5:22So a song like Stairway to Heaven, what's that worth? Millions and millions and millions of dollars. So back to spirit. That riff you heard, that's called a line cliche. Here's another one.

5:46There aren't an infinite number of line clichés, but there are a lot of them. And countless songs, from the Beatles to Duke Ellington, were built around line clichés. cliches.

6:12If you're going to say that any line cliche, just four notes, five notes, that's ever been used before can't be used again, we're going to run out of music. And simply because the instrumentation is the same, guitar compared to guitar, we might be easily tricked. But you don't get a copyright in which instrument you're using to play the music. You're getting a copyright not just in the performance, which is very narrow, but in the underlying score. And the score is simply notes. The notes don't belong to spirit. The notes belong to all of us because our shared culture requires us to be able to use all the letters in the alphabet, all the words in the dictionary, all the notes on the piano.

7:06So there are some things to think about as we consider our shared culture and copyright. First of all, should monkeys own copyrights? Probably not. Second, should David Slater have been more clear when he explained to people how the photo was taken? Because every photo that's ever been taken with an electric eye sensor, some sort of trigger to activate it, it belongs to the person who invented the photo. The trap that Slater fell into was not claiming from the beginning how much of the photo was his, which was all of it, setting it up, making the magic happen. But from a public policy point of view, a few things to point out.

7:53Number one, this copyright thing is out of hand. We need to make copyrights much shorter, and we need to do it right away. We need to take the books of the 30s and the 40s and the 50s and the films from that era as well and put them in the public domain Because doing so will not keep the people who made those books and films from making new ones, because they're already dead. But doing so will enable a burst of creativity, of recombination, of repossibility that will benefit all of us. And next, we ought to get really clear about what's protected and what's not. because we're wasting a ton of time and effort guessing about what fair use is, what's protected, what's borrowing, what's not.

8:42If we dealt with real estate the way we deal with copyright, no one would ever build anything. If you have to guess where the surveyor lines are, if you have to worry about whether someone's going to show up and claim they own your land, it's harder than ever to make something. So, yeah, if you want to write a book about building a business by being remarkable, go at it. You just can't use my exact words. I think we all agree on that, that when human beings create something, we'd like to know that we're going to get credit for it and that we're going to get compensated for it. But what it means to create something is to be truly specific, to be unique, that it was this person who did it.

9:28Not that person, not a bunch of people, not it was in the air, but that it's something that a human did all by herself, something that she can point to and say, out of thin air, I made this, this specific expression of my idea. Because we need to encourage people to do that, not for a long time, just for a short window. Five years would be plenty. five years to earn back something for the effort you put into it, and then we need to go back and invent the next thing. So that's my rant. Thanks for listening. Feel free to share it with or without paying me a royalty. We'll see you next time. Hey Seth, it's Maria.

10:11Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth, this is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. I do love to hear from you. If you'd like to contribute a question, please visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and click the appropriate button. Hi, Seth. My name is Aliou Sidibe from New York City, and I'm calling in regard to your last episode on leverage and gearing.

10:56First of all, I wanted to thank you for all the work that you do. I had a chance to run into you in New York last month, and I'm really glad we did before this pandemic kind of started in the city. My question is, what helps you solidify your belief in focusing on a minimum viable community instead of going for leverage? and scaling. I think we live in an age where scaling became gospel and 95 % of the internet seems to be focusing on how to make things bigger and bigger. Like you get 500 views, but you want 1000 and then you get 1000 and now you want 10 ,000. And I recently started a podcast where I focus on ordinary people with extraordinary stories.

11:41Obviously some episodes do better than others, but I try not to constantly check the numbers and I'm trying to, you know, focus on the mission, which is to share inspiring stories of everyday people. I'm finishing school in May and should be kind of jumping in the real world, but I want to understand in your, when you were starting your career, what helped you choose the side of, you know, focus on the first 10 people and your tribe versus the other narrative, which is bigger is better. And that mindset that kind of is prevalent all over social media and the internet. This is a great question.

12:21Thank you for giving me a chance to distinguish between two ideas. The two ideas are resilience and the smallest viable audience. The smallest viable audience is the single best way to get big. because if you try to get big by appealing to the masses, by being average, you don't have enough money or enough time to reach all the average people. But if you try to get big by seeking the smallest viable audience, the smallest group of people who share a dream, a goal, a tribal identity, something that they want, if you overwhelm that small group of people with something so amazing and delightful that they talk about it, then the network effect, their word of mouth, will move you through the population to more people.

13:13So the discipline of seeking the smallest viable audience has nothing to do with deciding to be small. It has everything to do with putting yourself on the hook to say, I made this for you. And if that person doesn't like it, you better make something else because you can't just race around looking for the next person. This is different than the belief in resilience, that capitalism, as we heard earlier, embraces creative destruction. Get big, raise more money, get big, raise more money, crash. That is what the stock market is okay with, because the people who play the stock market, they don't care what happens to a company they used to own stock in.

13:57Their only goal is to buy stock in companies that are going up and to sell it before they go down. But you are not one of those people. You are one of the people who either runs one of the companies, works for one of the companies, or is served by one of the companies. And those three groups, I hope, prize resilience over the ups and downs of crashing into the wall. And so the choice we make as freelancers, as small business people, as people who work for an organization we care about, is not to maximize leverage, to maximize return if our bet is right, but instead to organize for the long haul, to figure out who we're serving and figure out how to serve them, to show up in a way that we are not betting everything on Red 32 every single day.

14:51because while the stock market is fine with a portfolio approach, we don't have a portfolio. We've just got this one life, this one gig right now, this one customer. So for me, resilience means the freedom to do my work. If it turns out that people stop going to live conferences and want to engage in a different way like a workshop, I'll be there. I haven't bet everything by building and leveraging and mortgaging a building so that if live events go away, I'm completely stuck. That the idea is to focus on the change you seek to make, not maximizing return on investment. Because if you are someone who's flipping houses and you are committed to that, then you need leverage.

15:41Can't do it without it. But for most of us, the opportunity is to focus on something else, to focus on who we here for, who's it for, what change do we seek to make in the world, and do we get to do it again tomorrow? Thanks for listening. Thanks for the work you do. We'll see you next time.