Shroud waving has always been as much of a ritual in the TV industry as cocaine and adultery. So Stephen Garrett’s recent bleat on behalf of British programme makers lobbying for tighter copyright legislation is as traditional as it is predictable. What is worth noting, however, is the breathtaking sophistry employed.
TV types have followed the lead given by their music industry counterparts in pointing the finger at ISPs as the latest scapegoat in the Canutian struggle by copyright industries to preserve the disintegrating regime of rights. Garrett begins his argument with a false analogy of neighbours stealing electricity from one another. In one house live Garrett and his respectable copyright-holding chums. Two doors down the road live an unspeakable family who have discovered a way of tapping into Garrett’s electricity supply by hacking into a cable which runs between the two houses through the house in between (home of the ISPs). In this example, the rights holders are appealing in vain to the ISPs to stop their neighbours using their electricity without paying for it.
The analogy is as mistaken as it is inelegant. Copyrighted works are just not like electricity. First, the marginal cost of supplying Stephen Garrett’s TV shows, once the show has been produced and broadcast to one household, is low, and effectively zero. Crucially, TV shows do not exhibit the key characteristic of rivalry, so that the ability of one household to receive and watch a show on TV is not affected by the fact that one household, or a million households, are doing so at the same moment. On the other hand electricity, as any physics textbook might confirm, is absolutely subject to rivalry: once a kilowatt of electricity has been consumed – that is converted into heat, light, or any other form of energy – it is no longer available to that consumer or any other.
So the cost of making a TV show remains unchanged whether one person or a million watch it; and whether those people pay to watch it or not. Where Stephen Garrett might have done better to direct his argument is to be honest enough to acknowledge that the entirely artificial and context-specific conditions in which his industry developed in the 20th century are now changing. Those conditions ensured that his TV shows were, if not rival, then excludable. Initially, excludability was simply a function of the limitations of broadcast spectrum and the high cost of receiving equipment.
Over time, in the UK, a complex broadcasting ecology was created by successive governments in which the BBC was funded by an enforced tax (the licence fee), and commercial broadcasters generated revenues by delivering mass audiences to advertisers. Over the past couple of decades, conditional access technologies have allowed for new, purer mechanisms of excludability in the form of subscription and pay-per-view. Such mechanisms have, conversely, ended the older problems of scarcity so that audiences and programme makers can engage via hundreds of channels rather than the handful possible via free-to-air terrestrial broadcasting. As I said before, shroud waving is nothing new in the TV business, and Garrett’s predecessors in the 1980s and 1990s were equally shrill in their denunciation of these changes.
There is no question that the revenues which allow a FTA broadcaster like ITV or Channel 4 to invest in high cost domestic production are under threat. A whole raft of technological, economic and demographic changes make the future of that kind of investment deeply uncertain. But the downloading of TV shows by filesharers is only one, minor part of that much bigger, much more worrying, picture. Furthermore, what makes Stephen Garrett’s argument particularly unconvincing, ultimately, is that the examples he provides (shows like Spooks, Hustle and Life on Mars), are those least under threat, for the simple reason that they are all broadcast by the BBC and therefore funded by the licence fee. As any of the BBC’s commercial rivals will point out, the BBC thus enjoys the most secure long term funding base in the UK broadcasting industry. For someone who is doing very nicely out of the licence fee, Stephen Garrett does his peers a disservice by crying wolf over filesharing.
Filed under: Media economics , bbc, channel 4, copyright, filesharing, hustle, itv, kudos, life on mars, spooks, stephen garrett, television
