Member Alert


Mark Helprin's Speech from NMPA Annual Meeting - June 2009
Dear NMPA Members:

Thank you to all who attended in person the NMPA Annual Meeting on June 17 in New York.

For those of you who were not able to attend in person, our Keynote Speaker, Mark Helprin, author of the book Digital Barbarism, gave an excellent speech on the importance of copyright protection.  Please find below his remarks which I am hopeful you will find as valuable as I did.  

David Israelite
President & CEO
National Music Publishers’ Association

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Although I can hardly remember it, I grew up in show business, and I know . . . that the most difficult act to follow is a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice. Especially for me: I sing like a chicken, dance like a chicken – and I know absolutely nothing about the music business. I do, however, see certain things as an outsider. I see bands that give away what they used to sell, hoping – usually against hope, that it might get them a concert tour. This is very sad. It’s like the wolf that licks the knife. The Eskimos fix a sharp knife in the ice, with blood on the blade. The wolf happens by and licks the blood. The more he licks, the more he bleeds, and the more he bleeds the more he licks . . . until he dies – which is a metaphor for your industry, although it need not be.

You may be . . . “the big time operaytors” . . .  “on the music business scene” . . . that Van Morrison warned about. You may be – or have connections to – heat-packing Hip-Hop guys. But no matter, because guess what? There’s a little girl, in Moline Illinois – 7th grade, 4' 9', 98 pounds – and every day this little girl eats the big-time operaytor’s lunch and steals Trans X Bullet Head blind, and what are you going to do about it? Sue her? Seize her piggy bank? Attach her Cabbage Patch doll? The difficulty of the problem that I am here to address is that symbolically the people who are stealing from you are your children – which means that your defense must lack a certain vigor.

Against whom, then, might you defend? For many . . . the “whom” simply becomes a “what.” That is, technology. Of course . . . you must continue to work on copy protection . . . even if you are likely to be outraced . . . but although technology creates the potential it does not liberate the action . . .of copying. The stabbing potential of the two billion knives in North America has always gone vastly unrealized. So with guns, or cars that do not run into crowds, pillows that do not smother, matches that do not burn down houses. Your enemy is not technology, which by nature is neutral. Nor is it little girls in Moline Illinois.  What, then, is it?

It is the ideology – and the ideologues – that . .  to make the world safe for theft . .  would distort and redefine custom, decency, and law. For the benefit, I might add, chiefly of the rising informational super powers – which are the railroads and Standard Oils of the 21st century – and in service to the workers and peasants of Silicon Valley. These people are so poor that their dogs can drink only Swedish mineral water.

It is this ideology that must be your focus. And despite the rich funding and superb organization of the ideologues . . . it is an easy target, in that it is bankrupt, illogical, and embarrassing. You need never be afraid of debating it. (By the way . .  where is the debate? I have yet to hear it. Why is it not publicized and promoted? Why is the public excluded – by default – from the powerful counter-arguments you can offer, when it is the people – not lawyers or lobbyists – who will render final judgement? Though the Congress cannot resist lobbyists and campaign contributions, when it hears the strong voice of the people it snaps to attention and does what it is commanded – sometime beautifully.)

And the people . . . who generally enjoy watching nonsense deflate . . . have been told, largely without opposition, a number of things that are nonsense.

They are told. . .  that copyright . . . is a tax. Macaulay tells them that, Creative Commons tells them that, and even a justice of the Supreme Court tells them that. . . . Where is the voice that tells them that copyright is no more a tax than is the price a merchant charges for his merchandise, or the wage a laborer is paid for his labor? That a tax is compulsory, and a price is not? That you pay a tax whether or not you get something in return, whereas a price is voluntary. No one has to listen to any one of your songs. [Unless he’s in a taxi.]

They are told  – Macaulay tells them, Creative Commons tells them, and even a justice of the Supreme Court tells them – that copyright is a monopoly. Where is the voice that tells them that the copyright to a song is no more a monopoly than is the exclusive right to sell a watermelon you grew in your garden, or a seamstress’s exclusive right to payment for her sewing?

They are told . . . that copyright is a bar to creativity. This they are told by people whose idea of writing or composing is to take what someone else has written or composed, bend it, chop it, mix it, distort it, and present it as their own . . . . This they are told by people who not only cannot write or compose, but, perhaps not surprisingly, do not even know what writing and composing are.

They are told . . . that illegal copying is harmless because it is “not a zero-sum game.”     . . .  Where is the voice that tells them that it is a zero-sum game? That is: the number of potential buyers of a song – or a book – is limited. And thus, for every illegal copy that is made it is reduced, which makes illegal copying, in point of fact, a zero-sum game.

Where is the voice that says: you pay willingly and even enthusiastically for your iPods, iPhones, computers, internet connections, cell phones, etc., and yet you object to paying for what you call content, without which your iPod would be just a piece of plastic and metal junk. How is that?
And so on. The list is long. I wrote a book about it.
So what are you to do? Whereas you must continue your attempts at copy protection, and you must continue to defend your rights at the bar, and you must continue to lobby Congress . . . you will lose this fight if you do not address the public boldly, and directly. For although Congress is the master of the law, the public is the master of Congress.

Your opponents have done very well in this regard. They have the attention of the new and the participation of the young. You have the sensible and accumulated capital of a civilization that, unfortunately, modernity is washing away before your very eyes. Quite simply, you cannot win unless you join the battle for public opinion and argue every point.
What is at stake transcends the particularities of the question as it applies to you in your industry or to me in mine. Many important principles have been challenged with the greatest impudence, and they must be defended.

They are . . . the imperative of confronting absurdity in public discourse; the pre-eminence of individuality as opposed to submersion in the collective; the just necessity of private property; and the right to self-defense . . .  which must never be relinquished – by family, individual, or nation. You have that right.

What it comes down to is maybe this. Once, a  long time ago, in the dead of winter, I was riding on a bus downtown near City Hall. I looked out the window, and I saw a man . . . standing on a dumpster . . .dressed in coveralls, a black man of middle age, a demolition worker out in the cold, his face covered in plaster-and-concrete dust. I could tell. . .instantly, from my own experience . . that he was ill. He had a thousand-yard stare, and looked like someone not long for world. And yet he continued working. I imagined, anyway . . . that he was doing this. . . for his wife and children.

I have done much desperate and dangerous physical labor in my life, but I have never been condemned to it for all of my life. I cannot and would not pretend to his nobility, but I do share with him at least one thing. No one . . . no one . . . has the right to take from him the meager fruits of his labor. And no one has the right to take mine. Or yours. Your labor, and what you create, are your own. This is a self-evident right, a natural right, and a God-given right.
[Long Pause] This fight, your fight, is not over. It may not yet even have begun.