Now y’all out there who have heard my demo know that MC K-OS is “taking it peer-to-peer-to-peer-to-peer-to-peer, I use the medium to make my message clear: Krishna and Open Source - Irresistible Object meets Unstoppable Force.”

At Red Hat our vision is to be “the defining technology company of the 21st century”, and I’m totally down with that. We are fully open source, all our software product is GPL, and we are pioneering a business model where our product is freely available and everything is open to the community. Now in another article I am going to deal a little more explicitly with what I see as the economics of the whole thing and how that relates to Vedic ideas of ages and socio-economic organization. Today I just wanted to mention in passing this point that I also think that Hare Krishna will be “the defining cultural and religious movement of the 21st century”, but unfortunately y’all gonna have to wait a little while longer for my take on that too.

What I am going to talk about today is what is happening in the wider society, and also in the Hare Krishna movement with regards to copyright and distribution.

This came up because of a recent letter released, and another one that I saw elsewhere asking for a boycott of two gentleman, let’s call them Gary and Brian, who are selling knock-off copies of Hare Krishna digital media.

When I read that, it just brought home to me how the world is changing due to disruptive technologies. In an interview with Howard Rheingold that I blogged earlier, Rheingold says: “Never before in history have we been able to see incumbent businesses protect business models based on old technology against creative destruction by new technologies. And they’re doing it by manipulating the political process.”

The idea of copyright is not just based on old technology, it is based on an old economic model. As Rheingold also says: “I think we’re seeing hints, with all of these examples, that the technology…that made capitalism possible (now) may make some new economic system possible.”

In the Vedic age (up to 5000 years ago and then vestigal after that), and even up until relatively recently, there was no copyright. In order to copy a book you had to sit down and copy it by hand, word for word. Copying and sharing information was a major undertaking. Generally people would share information orally. There was an open-source oral tradition that was at one point committed to writing in the form of the Vedic scripts. When you read a work like the Srimad Bhagavatam you see the “coding” of so many contributing authors who refer (link) back to one another to weave a complex web. Anyway, that’s another story. The point is that people wanted to get the information out there, the information wanted to be free, and nobody was making any money out of it.

Music wasn’t copyrighted either. Local musicians would play in the village. Actually, the whole village would take part, and there would be some who were more expert than others obviously. Professional musicians would also travel throughout the countryside to perform at weddings and other celebrations. There were no recordings, so there was really nothing to copyright.

The idea that you could “copyright” a song was just plain ridiculous. That someone could sing something, and then prohibit other people from singing it just doesn’t make sense. Imagine a prima donna berating a villager for singing a “copyrighted tune”.

It is only when you commoditize these things, turning information and music into economic products that the idea of copyrighting them comes into play. Unlike tangible physical resources such as grains, metals or animals, you cannot control the intangible resource by controlling access to instances of it. Intangible things, especially things that can be copied, need another type of protection. Hence the invention of the “rights of the author”, something which never existed before development of technology that enabled recording, reproducing, broadcasting, and copying of music and information.

What it really boils down to is the old “dominate the resource and deny others access, or at least charge them for it” mentality.

Philosophically it is a deviation from proper understanding, according to the Vedas. In the Sri Isopanisad it is explained: “Everything animate or inanimate that is within the universe is controlled and owned by the Lord. One should therefore accept only those things necessary for himself, which are set aside as his quota, and one should not accept other things, knowing well to whom they belong.”

That kind of lifestyle makes you happy. There is a good story to illustrate this. When there is a bag of grains left in the forest, so many animals will come and eat what they need, leaving the rest. Then some greedy human will come, eat whatever they can and take the rest home, and then maybe even sell off the surplus, or just throw it out when it begins to rot. Of course, some people would just take a little or would share it or whatever, but the point is that the idea of copyrighting something is to make sure you get all the grains.

Actually, it is to ensure that the record company or publisher or whoever gets all the grains. This is business. They then give you a cut, buying you off so that you also think that the whole thing is a good idea. The net effect is the creation of a economic structure where massive amounts of wealth can be concentrated in the hands of a few people, who by the way aren’t necessarily so happy as a result - try paging through a celebrity magazine to see what I mean.

OK, so we got that angle covered. Well check this out: according to the Vedic understanding anyone can be, at best, a secondary creator. Check out this verse from the Srimad Bhagavatam, and this one too. In the classic text Bhagavad-gita Krishna states: “I am the ability in man”

That means that the author actually has no “right” to the “created” work, because they are transforming already existing materials, gross or subtle, and because even their ability to do so is not of their own creation. The Bhagavad-gita recommends action without attachment to the results as being spiritual purifying. Certainly we can see while that the copyright-based monopoly inducing commercialization of music may have been great for the “industry”, it hasn’t been good for musical culture in our civilization (see this op-ed piece by Don Henly in the Washington Post).

Of course, proponents argue that by allowing moderate monopolies to develop commercial activity is incentivized and hence stimulated. Whether stimulating commercial activity is really necessary or desirable is debatable, but the success of GNU/Linux under the “copyleft” policy of the GPL license tends to temper that assertion. Of course, the business model used by Red Hat will never allow the concentration of a huge amount of wealth in the same way that Microsoft’s business model does, but is that a desirable thing for anyone, even the shareholders of the company? Not according to the Vedic wisdom: “Life’s desires should never be directed toward sense gratification. One should desire only a healthy life, or self-preservation, since a human being is meant for inquiry about the Absolute Truth. Nothing else should be the goal of one’s works.” (verse and purport here) .

Let’s also be clear that what is going on is not a “creation” of wealth, but a redistribution and more specifically a concentration.

One of the standard arguments of course is that by selling copies and not contributing to the original “content creators”, one detracts from the sustainability of production of new material. “How will the artists live?” (like no-one did music or art before there was money in it). In the second letter I received, it was alleged that two well-known Hare Krishna music and digital media producers (artists) “have quit doing digital media due to the brothers’ bootlegging”. One would hope that they were doing it for a little more than the money, and also weren’t just cheesed off about “lost potential profits” (a favorite in litigation) and so we would tend to think that as a result of the brothers’ activities the economics became unsustainable for them, and they had to get a day job.

OK, so now we leave the rarified atmosphere of ethical and philosophical abstractions and land with jackboots firmly on the ground: Wake up - the technologies that gave rise to the old economic model have been superseded. Do you really think you can stop everyone from bootlegging? It’s not like the brothers have any specialized equipment to do it. If not them, then anyone else, take your pick. The economics of the situation have changed, and I think it’s potentially a good thing. Everybody is having to investigate new business models.

Here are a few suggestions from my grab bag of possibilities. I can’t solve this problem, but I can give some ideas based on what I see going on in the world:

Sell the product for whatever they sell it for, and incorporate a system whereby people can donate more through Paypal or similar after they get it.

Streamline the delivery pipeline - allow people to do an online download and a credit card payment.

Drop the price and go for more sales.

Do the whole thing for free as an offering and simply rely on Krishna

These are just a few suggestions. Basically you will have to do something, because the bootlegging is not going away. There has to be a revolution in the business model. I will talk more about that as promised in another article.

In the Vedic civilization and until recently musicians and artists were maintained by Kings and wealthy people. Brahmanas, or spiritual intellectuals, lived simply on charity. Certainly switching to a “charitable contribution” model would be challenging. Just give people the product and let them pay as they like. There could be a suggested donation.

It’s kinda funny, because a labourer does ten hours work and he gets paid for ten hours work. An artist or musician does ten hours work and he wants to get paid for ten years. That’s the expectation that has been created by the whole copyright-based monopoly model.

I think that copyright does have its place, especially for protecting the integrity and availability of works. For example, while there have been attempts to copyright and enforce copyright on books and other things related to the Hare Krishna movement, I don’t think that it should be done to stop the proliferation; however it’s ok to use it to stop people from changing the philosophical conclusions of the books, as they are authoritative translations with realized commentaries, not to be taken lightly. The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) is a legal license that allows proliferation and also contains contingency for “invariant sections” which may not be modified.

I also think that while copyrighting still exists it is wise to defensively copyright material to prevent others from doing so. This is similar to the approach that Red Hat has adopted to software patents. It’s a defensive measure, not an offensive measure to artificially monopolize a market.

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I sympathize with the discomfort that these Krishna artists are feeling. Unfortunately, however, simply wishing that it would go away is not going to work. Times are changing.