Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed

by Alexis Ohanian

  “We had the audience. There was no way the record couldn’t be sold.”

  Needless to say things got a bit awkward when the Chambers Brothers found themselves back at Columbia Records headquarters accepting their gold record (the one Lester held up in the viral photo)—the record they earned in spite of all the “support” their production company had given them.

  Despite the Chambers Brothers’ success, their label didn’t show them a lot of love, to say the least. According to Lester, “We never got promoted once. Columbia Records sent us to do a promotional tour… they said you are to go and sing at this mall, or this store, and give records away. That was the way they promoted us.”

  That’s right: the same industry whose leadership was “astounded at the entitlement that people felt to get their music for free”16 was literally giving away records back in 1966. And they did little to promote the group’s appearances at these record-giveaway events. Despite that, Lester and his brothers slowly kept getting recognition. “We had top ten, top three, all over the world.”

  Lester doesn’t mince words about the experience. “In my mind, the record companies are the worst sharecroppers in the world.” (Lester and his brothers grew up in rural Mississippi in the 1940s.)

  Even after everything that’s happened to him, he’s got two good reasons to be optimistic, one timely and the other timeless.

  “You don’t really need a record company anymore. You don’t really need a distributor anymore.” You’d think Lester Chambers was onstage pitching his music startup at a tech conference. Then a serious expression comes over his face. This is not going to be about “synergy.”

  “My son, Michael Dylan, said, ‘Dad, don’t worry. I’m never gonna leave you. I’ll always stay by your side.’ He slept on the floor with me…. Every father in the world should have a son like I have.”

  Even with a daunting list of illnesses and a life of hardship in the music industry, Lester is not a beaten man—far from it. It’s clear that his son is a big part of that.

  When I tell Lester about Kickstarter and the idea of crowdfunding his own album, his eyes light up. His fans old and new would be able to fund his project by preordering digital downloads, or signed CDs, or even autographed cowbells. There wouldn’t be any labels or record company contracts. Just an artist getting paid by for his work by his fans. After all, isn’t that what Professor Taplin said he wanted, too?

  Looking back on it, Lester says the record labels were always the thing getting between artists and their fans. I asked him what the opportunity to have a direct connection with his fans through the Internet meant to him. “Oh, God, you just don’t know. I’m wide open. Call me. E-mail me. I’ll get back to you—promise. It’s so great to be able to communicate with your audience worldwide.”

  By connecting with his fans through the Internet, Lester won’t have to give any of his profits to middlemen. And he won’t have to ask anyone’s permission.

  Internet Rights and the Wrongs of the Music Industry

  A decade ago, Cary Sherman, head of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), was asked if the RIAA was now obsolete, thanks to the advent of digital distribution. “We have no problem with a music industry that is more diversified, that gives new opportunities for new labels and new artists,” he said.17 To his credit, Sherman has reached the acceptance stage regarding the inevitability of the Internet era. He goes on: “This is not about maintaining control; it’s about being fair in regards to the ability of people to get paid for their work.”

  Lester clearly disagrees. Fortunately, we can take the matter into our own hands and launch our own online campaign called Lester’s Time Has Come Today, and we launched it on December 10, 2012. The first week was slow, and we’d only raised $10,000 of Lester’s budgeted $39,000 goal, which would cover the entire production of the album, payment for band members, and fulfillment of the various rewards, such as T-shirts and even signed cowbells. Turns out I’d forgotten to upload the trailer to YouTube: I’d only uploaded it to Kickstarter, where it couldn’t be as easily shared. My bad. As soon as my foolishness was corrected, we raised more than $18,000 in a single day as the video blazed around the social web. This buzz triggered attention from bloggers, who covered the story, which eventually connected us to a writer at CNN, who wanted to write an article for the website. We still had five thousand dollars to go when that story hit the front page of CNN.com and stayed there for most of Christmas Eve—Dylan and Lester grinning for all the world to see.

  The next morning father and son were interviewed on the CNN show Starting Point. Boom. That put us over the top. Way over.

  When the project ended, we’d nearly doubled our goal, and Lester had $61,084—minus a few percentage points in fees to Kickstarter and credit card companies—to make his record and reward his fans. And this time, it was all going to belong to him. It made me so proud to finally say, “Lester, your time has come today.”

  The industry of art, like other industries, is dramatically changing, thanks to the open Internet. For some time, only a few fortunate individuals who had wealthy patrons were able to produce art. But today, the social web has made it possible for any artist with a good idea and an Internet connection to create, publicize, and monetize his art. As power shifts from incumbents trying to preserve outdated business models to newly empowered artists, it’s bound to make former gatekeepers uncomfortable, even scared. That’s usually a positive sign. We’ll be able to enjoy the work of comedians, cartoonists, and musicians who otherwise would’ve come and gone without ever sharing their genius with the world. And the best part is that everything I’ve mentioned so far has happened only during the last decade. It’s just the beginning. Where will we discover the next Zach Anner? Where will the next Zach Weinersmith find an audience for his art? Where will the next Lester Chambers get his due? My money is on the open Internet.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mr. Ohanian Goes to Washington

  It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

  Winston Churchill

  It was supposed to be a vacation. And not just a normal vacation—a once-in-a-lifetime birthday surprise for my girlfriend, Sabriya. A week and change at a rented house in the West Indies with me and her closest friends. I don’t take many (any?) vacations, but this was going to be something special. I’d been surreptitiously planning it for almost a year. Somehow, I’d managed to keep the part about her friends a secret until we were on the plane, which we boarded last to ensure that she’d see all her friends at once, waving from their seats, as we all sang “Happy Birthday” to her. I even coaxed the flight attendants to sing along over the PA.1

  At that moment, standing in the aisle of our JetBlue plane, I was just happy to see her crying tears of joy as she realized she wasn’t going to be stuck with just me during her week in paradise—she’d also be with other people who loved her. It turned out to be a good thing they were there, too, because halfway into that trip I’d get an e-mail about another, decidedly less sexy trip I’d be taking when I got back. Rather than relaxing with my girlfriend on the beach, I’d be thinking about Washington, DC, the House of Representatives, and the written and oral testimony I was scheduled to deliver a few days later.

  How the House of Representatives Ruined My Vacation

  Let me wind back just a moment. Recall that just five months earlier I’d found myself suddenly unemployed (remember the end of chapter 4?). Without a startup to run or cute mascots to draw, I focused on a number of projects involving my social enterprise, Breadpig.

  Then, on November 6, 2011, I got an e-mail from Christina Xu, one of my co-workers at Breadpig. The subject of the e-mail was two pieces of pending legislation—SOPA and PIPA—and a day of protests that some of Christina’s friends were organizing online. The date of the protests, which they were calling Internet Censorship Day, struck me. It was November 16, which would have been my mom’s fifty-eighth birth
day.

  Before that day, I’d never had an interest in politics. I always believed I could do more to make the world suck less in the private sector, which is why I’ve never left it. In the Internet industry, we’re used to ideas winning just because they’re better. On an open Internet, where all links are created equal, as you know, you win by building something people want. And as you’ve seen throughout this book, it doesn’t matter if it’s a nonprofit or a for-profit or a music album or a travel show—the rule applies everywhere online.

  SOPA and PIPA threatened to change all that. The result of intense2 lobbying by the entertainment industry, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) were so technically stupid that they could have been written only by K Street consultants and pitched as a bipartisan solution to a nonexistent problem so that the members of one of the least productive Congresses in history3 could claim at least some kind of accomplishment during their reelection campaigns. It would have been a nice little holiday show of cooperation that would have ruined the Internet under the guise of protecting copyright. Quite an awful stocking stuffer from Congress.

  These bills were marketed as a solution to Internet piracy, but in fact they wouldn’t have curbed piracy. Rather, they would’ve only curbed First Amendment rights online while simultaneously stifling American job growth. But don’t take my word for it—ask renowned constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who wrote an open letter to Congress denouncing SOPA for its First Amendment violations:4

  Although SOPA’s supporters have described the bill as directed at “foreign rogue websites,” the definitions in the bill are not in fact limited to foreign sites or to sites engaged in egregious piracy. SOPA will lead to the silencing of a vast swath of fully protected speech and to the shutdown of sites that have not themselves violated any copyright or trademark laws.

  That’s a pretty serious violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition of prior restraint—that is, prohibition of censorship—according to Tribe. Basically, it means that private parties (e.g., entertainment megaliths) would have had the ability to shut down businesses that American companies—for example, advertisers and credit card providers—conduct with alleged “pirate” websites simply by filing a notice, without prior notification and without a judicial hearing. Once again: that means that SOPA would have delegated the power to suppress First Amendment rights to private corporations.

  What that means in practice is that American website owners, founders like me and Steve, would have needed a lot more than just a laptop and an Internet connection to get started and be competitive. Steve and I would’ve needed a team of lawyers and people policing reddit 24-7. Basically, we would have needed to have been a giant entertainment company. Not only is this extremely anticompetitive, it’s also extremely anti-innovative. Tribe again lays out why this would have been so awful for anyone trying to build a social media platform or run any website with user-generated content, even a blog that allows user comments. If this bill had become law, you could’ve thrown out every single previous chapter in this book. If this bill had been law back in 2005, when I graduated from UVA, there’d have been no book to write. Here’s Tribe again:

  SOPA provides that a complaining party can file a notice alleging that it is harmed by the activities occurring on the site “or portion thereof.” Conceivably, an entire website containing tens of thousands of pages could be targeted if only a single page were accused of infringement. Such an approach would create severe practical problems for sites with substantial user-generated content, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and for blogs that allow users to post videos, photos, and other materials.

  Furthermore, SOPA defined a “domestic Internet site” as having a “domestic domain name” and a “foreign Internet site” as “not a domestic Internet site.” The absurdity of this becomes pretty clear when one realizes how many US Internet companies use nondomestic domain names—even reddit uses the Italian “redd.it” as our URL shortener. Under SOPA, that would have made reddit a “foreign Internet site.”

  Think that’s dumb? It gets worse: plenty of foreign-run websites use “domestic” domain names like.com, which, according to SOPA, would qualify them as domestic Internet sites even if they’re run from Albania.

  Despite lots of crowing to the contrary, these weren’t minor concerns that might’ve been smoothed out after the bills were implemented. As Tribe says:

  It is a blunderbuss rather than a properly limited response, and its stiff penalties would significantly endanger legitimate websites and services. Its constitutional defects are not marginal ones that could readily be trimmed in the process of applying and enforcing it in particular cases. Rather, its very existence would dramatically chill protected speech by undermining the openness and free exchange of information at the heart of the Internet. It should not be enacted by Congress.

  The bills demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the Internet. You’d think with the $94 million the entertainment industry spent lobbying Congress that year the lobbyists they hired could’ve taken the time to google how the Internet works. Instead, Congress and the entertainment industry were poised to pass legislation that threatened not only my livelihood but also the health and future of innovation in America. So on November 17,5 I joined a diverse group of Internet experts in Washington, DC—folks like Micah Schaffer, who was one of the first hires at YouTube and responsible for handling copyright enforcement, and Christian Dawson, who ran ServInt, an Internet service provider in Virginia. We were all there, in suits, for a series of meetings with congressional representatives, led by Michael Petricone of Consumer Electronics Association.

  Good Thing I Knew How to Tie a Tie

  When we got to Capitol Hill to make our case, no one in Washington thought we had a chance. I loved those odds. Five of us in business attire visited one office after another, meeting staff and sometimes the senator or representative him-or herself. Each visit followed a similar pattern: after being greeted and welcomed into the meeting room, we were given a few minutes each to speak our minds as we went around the table. I had about 240 seconds to make an impact.

  The night before, I’d asked /r/technology, a subreddit for fans of—you guessed it—technology, what I should focus on. Should I talk about how my entrepreneurial story couldn’t have happened if SOPA and/or PIPA were enacted into law, or should I talk about how these laws could be used as an excuse for censorship?

  A redditor with the handle fangolo got right to the point: “Say ‘job killing’ at least three times. Seriously.”

  Another, StoicBuddha, who claims to be a former congressional staffer, elaborated:

  So in order to convince them, you have to frame the debate in terms of how SOPA affects those two things [entrepreneurship and censorship]. Posting news clips of themselves helps them demonstrate to their constituents what a good job they’re doing. Pointing [out]how this would be breaking the law takes the debate out of technical and legal mumbo jumbo and frame[s] it in a way that they can directly relate [to]. The more examples like this you can provide, the better. Given the choice between standing up against censorship and getting reelected, they’ll choose the latter every time.

  The decision was obvious. I had the benefit of a few hundred thousand people reading and voting on suggestions, enabling me to craft the perfect pitch with the help of the ultimate “focus group.” I took this feedback to heart and rehearsed, getting my elevator pitch as concise as possible, just as if I were pitching to investors back in my previous life as a founder.

  This time, though, the stakes were far higher—being turned down for funding isn’t the end of a startup (it’s just part of the life). But if either of these bills had passed the House or Senate, it would’ve stopped countless would-be founders from pursuing their dreams and would’ve robbed the rest of us of all the great things they might’ve brought into the world.

  So with sweaty palms I told my story. I explained how Steve Huffman and I started with less
money than it takes to buy a new Ford Focus and built a company that made us millionaires two years later and founders of one of the world’s most popular websites five years later. We were fortunate enough to live the American dream online, and that simply couldn’t have happened in a world with SOPA or PIPA in it.

  In nearly every case, that got their attention.

  As we left the Hill, we knew there was much more work left to be done, but we had reason to be a little more optimistic. By day’s end, Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), one of the legislators we met, signed on to a statement against the PROTECT IP Act, saying, “We take seriously the alarm expressed by the nation’s leading investors in new online startups who say the proposal will dampen interest in financing the new ideas and businesses of tomorrow.”

  Bring In the Nerds

  I almost didn’t make it to the last meeting, which was with a Republican representative from Utah, Jason Chaffetz, but I’m glad I did. He admitted up front that he wasn’t a technologist, but also that he was very interested in understanding our technological arguments against the legislation. He was attentive as we went around the table, and he listened to each of us as we brought our different perspectives to bear on our common argument. Before I knew it, the meeting had ended, and we were all posing for a photo.

  Our visit to Mr. Chaffetz’s office paid off, because he proved to be one of the few rational voices in the House Judiciary Committee meeting that debated the issue:6

  We’re going to do surgery on the Internet and we haven’t had a doctor in the room to tell us how we’re going to change these organs. We’re basically gonna reconfigure the Internet and how it’s gonna work without bringing in the nerds…. I worry that we did not take the time to have a hearing to truly understand what it is we’re doing.