Presenting the Anti-Ulrich

I'm tempted to go buy a t-shirt to support OK Go and Damian Kulash, Jr. While Kulash is overstating things a bit by describing his band as among the first to find real success on the Internet (I'll grant "via YouTube"), he did do the body politic an immense service by testifying before Congress in a way that can help our elected representatives understand the culture of the Internet. This is Kulash's description of the band's experience with the "Dancing in the Backyard" video:

With the help of my sister, we choreographed a parodic dance routine and shot a single- take home video of us performing it in my back yard. If you include the Starbucks run, the total budget for the video was about $20. We posted the clip online, and it caught on like wildfire. We watched, astonished, as the video racked up hundreds of thousands, then millions, then tens of millions of hits at online video sites. Before long, we were getting offers to play to thousands in countries where our record had never even been released.

And something even wilder started happening: fans started posting their own versions of the video. Thrilled by the direct connection with our fans, we launched a dance contest, and received homemade remakes of our video from all over the world. We got hundreds of entries, videos of the dance at weddings, in churches, at high school talent shows, in firehouses, and even a version performed by animated legos. This is a whole new phenomenon, a feedback loop of creativity that allows us to be more than just a commercial product to our fans – we are the center of an active, creative community.

It is this last point that makes me so grateful for Kulash's testimony. While the fate of the world doesn't hinge on the presence or absence of the next OK-Go-wedding-reception-parody video, this is a form of creativity, and our public policies should, wherever possible, err on the side of promoting and encouraging creativity.

Kulash's follow-up to the video offers his attempt to offer a metaphor that has the potential to counter Lars' Ulrich's infamous assertions that peer-to-peer file transfers are the equivalent of shoplifting, and that the Internet is analogous to a handgun. (My critique of Ulrich's testimony can be found in several spots within my freely downloadable book). In his
NYT editorial today, Kulash offers metaphors that extract the Internet from the criminal context that Ulrich mined, and repositions it as an engine for both creativity and free speech:

We can’t allow a system of gatekeepers to get built into the network. The Internet shouldn’t be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the many; value should come from the quality of information, not the control of access to it.

For some parallel examples: there are only two guitar companies who make most of the guitars sold in America, but they don’t control what we play on those guitars. Whether we use a Mac or a PC doesn’t govern what we can make with our computers. The telephone company doesn’t get to decide what we discuss over our phone lines. It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online. Congress needs to establish basic ground rules for an open Internet, just as common carriage laws did for the phone system.

A better Congress would have long ago figured out how to address the concerns of both the "aggrieved artists" represented by Ulrich, who reasonably fear that an unfettered Internet will diminish their pecuniary rewards, and the "concerned creatives" like Kulash, who recognize all too clearly that the default impulses of Congress will lead to an Internet that pursues compensation for copyright holders, and defers to corporate impulses (like the non-neutral 'Net) at the price of promoting creativity (dare I say "progress") in the Useful Arts.