Sharpe's Opinion
Friday, 30th Jan, 2009
Liberal Conspiracy:
Unfortunately, Digital Britain seems to limit its view to the perspectives of Internet service providers and record companies, balancing the wishes of ISPs to be seen as ‘mere conduits’ and the recording industry’s desire for a legal clampdown on individual alleged rights infringers.
We should be concerned that the voice of consumers and citizens is being marginalised in this stand-off. For instance, there is no suggestion that consumers and citizens should be represented on the report’s proposed copyright ‘Rights Agency’. Without the voices of consumer and civil liberties groups, such an agency could easily be dominated by industry concerns at the expense of our rights. Consumers would be very likely to get a bad deal as the recording industry tries to cling to existing business models.
What an innovative idea – that the consumers might have something to do with the legislation on copyright… Anyway, I’ve argued this case before: the battle is lost, the record companies will die. It’s up to the artists and the content producers to find new ways of exploiting their own content – they don’t need the record companies any more. Look at Maddonna, look at Trent Reznor, look at Jonathan Coulton, and look at my last post on this topic
Comments
I don’t have a problem with companies and artists who seek to protect their intellectual property. My problem is that while the vast majority of people are honest and will pay for quality music, the record industry concentrates on treating everybody like a thief. The RIAA were trying, for instance, to get a cut of the price of every iPod sold – because “they’re all full of stolen music”.
The vast majority of people who illegally download content would not have bought it in the first place. The success of services like the iTunes Music Store and the Amazon MP3 Store proves that most people are willing to pay for good content, even when there is a free alternative. Most people who illegally download music and films are either students or hoarders. Students don’t have the money to buy loads of CDs and DVDs and would have just gone without or borrowed from friends; hoarders aren’t really interested in the content – they just want to have stuff for free. Both of these groups tend to be technologically capable and are perfectly capable of circumventing any copy protection put in place.
In other words, the only people that copy protection affects are the honest users. The people who bought music from the MSN Music Store and then had all their licences pulled for instance. Or the people who bought music off the iTunes Store and found (thanks to the insistance of the record companies that all the music be copy protected) that it wouldn’t play on their non-iPod MP3 player.
I’m sorry, but I have no sympathy for an industry which seeks to distrust all its customers and would make its honest customers jump through hoops which the dishonest ones can quite easily sidestep.
Not the same thing at all. The PRS are about broadcast rights, not album sales, and they also pay money directly to the artists, they’re nothing to do with the record companies.
When I wrote the bit about the PRS I very deliberately clarified that the right to distribute the recording is entirely separate to the right to broadcast/perform it. Now, as I may have mentioned, if I ruled the world then the PRS would only deal with radio and television broadcasts, not with people playing the music in their offices. But I don’t rule the world, and as it stands, them’s the rules.
As for copyright theft, my point is that the record industry, like the software industry, seeks to punish everybody for the actions of the few, and that the few who cause the problem are the ones best equipped to escape the punishment. I’m not talking about the law, I’m talking about the reality.
If “consumers” and “civil liberties” people want to breach copyright, they should start a campaign to change the law, not find cleverer and cleverer ways to justify breaking it.
The ISPs are mere conduits, the infringers are the distributor and the downloader.
You are right, artists don’t really need the record companies to distribute any more.
Blue Eyes
January 30, 2009 at 2:41 pm