In an uncharacteristic bit of theater, the Social Science Research Council has released a new report on Media Piracy in Emerging Economies with a Consumers Dilemma. Come from a higher-income country? No free report for you!

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From the Social Science Research Council Blog:

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Not  unexpectedly, our Consumers Dilemma license for the report has generated some controversy.  To recap, the CD license creates different paths to acquiring the report: first, we have an IP address geolocator that sends visitors from high income countries toward an $8 paywall when they download the report;  all other resolvable IP addresses get free access.

Criticism so far has taken two general forms:

1)  That we are being unfair in constraining access in high-income countries by setting an $8 pay wall.  This  divides further into what I’ll call a ‘CC left’ position, which thinks the report should be Creative Commons-licensed (and therefore free to everyone), and a ‘Grumpy Right’ position which appears to just resent being asked to pay $8 when others are getting it for free.

2) The view that the license is cheap theater unworthy of the scientific purpose of the study.  Since this complaint is underspecified so far, I’ll assume it includes 1 but is mostly about the commercial reader license, which gets read as juvenile sticking it to the man.

Maybe some clarification is in order here. The reader is faced with a dilemma: pay the legal price, acquire it through pirate channels, or don’t bother with it.  In most of the countries we’ve studied in this report, the results of this calculation with respect to DVDs, music, and software are strikingly consistent.  Media goods are highly desired, exorbitantly priced with respect to local incomes, and freely available through pirate channels.   High rates of piracy and tiny legal markets are the result. We’ve written 400+ pages about this dysfunctional form of globalization and its causes.

The resulting consumers dilemma is a ubiquitous experience in medium and low-income countries but one that confronts the American or European reader much less frequently and with much less intensity.  The global market is made for those consumers.  It is priced and distributed for them. 

The Consumers Dilemma license is a way of reversing that equation and, in the most minor ways,  requiring an explicit engagement with it.  Among the surreal aspects, that simple choice can subject you to crushing civil and criminal penalties, but you can rest easy knowing that only very rare, arbitrary examples will be made (and none in our case).  Now that’s theater.  Our license has a theatrical side, to be sure, but it also stays true to the experiences  documented in the report.  Those experiences–the personal choices and the market and price structure that informs them–are the report’s primary subject.

(* Go here if the resolution of your dilemma is to pay the $8 for the report).