Joe Hall comments on the battle to manage perceptions in the MGM v. Grokster case. This is a worry I’ve had for a while about the pro-P2P forces. On the one hand you have P2P vendors in a race to the bottom for the slimiest advertising, which as David Post points out will likely come back to haunt them, while on the other you have crusaders like Downhill Battle pitching P2P as a weapon in the fight against the corruption of a “pure” creative economy by money (for example the T-shirt slogan “Peer to Peer Kills Pay-For-Play”).

This latter strategy perpetuates the fantasy that creative production is at its best when unsullied by capitalist concerns. See Tyler Cowen’s In Praise of Commercial Culture for a nice evisceration of that notion. In fact, “payola” (pay-to-play) can be a powerful force for driving the development of new creative forms–see Cowen’s discussion of rock and roll and the payola scandals of the 1950s, engineered by record companies who feared the market power of the new music.

I suspect that successful P2P business models will rely heavily on various forms of “pay to play.” P2P advocates ought to be pushing the idea that the potential financial gains through new P2P-enabled business models are greater than the current ones, even without state-enforced IP monopolies, and thus provide better incentives for creative production, rather than suggesting creators don’t need incentives like icky money to create.