[wordup] Music industry sounds like a broken record

[Adam Shand]

Finally!  A decent article about copyright.  Thank god.

Adam.

Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10588650&pnum=03

Adam Gifford: Music industry sounds like a broken record
Aug 05, 2009
By Adam Gifford

The music industry is attempting to copyright digital music in the  
same way it controlled records and CDs. Photo / Martin Sykes
Compute

There's only a couple of days left to make submissions on proposed  
legislation governing how copyright affects your internet use.
It follows last year's debacle, in which former culture and heritage  
minister Judith Tizard and departmental officials used a supplementary  
order paper to jam a new section into the Copyright Act stuffed with  
provisions a select committee had already rejected. According to  
technology law specialist Rick Shera, the regime would have been even  
worse than that in the United States, where record industry enforcers  
are winning millions of dollars in damages against hapless downloaders.

Shera says the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires actual  
knowledge of infringement rather than the "reason to believe" in the  
New Zealand Act, and penalties for people making false or misleading  
takedown notices.

That's important, because as Judge David Harvey pointed out in a  
submission to the Telecommunications Carriers Forum, 30 per cent of  
New Zealand copyright litigation fails because of a failure to prove  
ownership of copyright, or due to the copyright in question not being  
governed by New Zealand law.

The new section 92A was not implemented because of public uproar, and  
officials were instructed to try again. At issue was wording which  
would have required internet service providers to cut off the accounts  
of customers suspected of downloading copyrighted material.

On one side are the rights holders, the music and film industries. On  
the other the ISPs. The two sides have been unable to come up with a  
voluntary code of practice on how section 92A would operate.

There are also other parties whose interests aren't being properly  
considered by the proposals - artists, who want to reach an audience  
and get fair recompense for their efforts, and the audience, which  
wants a constant diet of new sensation at a reasonable price in a  
convenient format.

The Ministry of Economic Development says its aim is "to provide a  
fair and efficient process for rights-holders to deal with repeat  
copyright infringement in the digital environment". Its current  
proposal is for an escalating process.

When a rights holder considers its copyright has been breached, it  
would send an infringement notice to the ISP to be forwarded to the  
subscriber. If the infringement continues, they will be sent a cease  
and desist notice, again via their ISP.

If they still won't stop, the rights holder can go to the Copyright  
Tribunal to demand their identity, and then force them into mediation.

The problem with all this is there is a huge amount of effort going in  
to fix a broken business model.

The recording and film industries are structured around distribution  
of physical items - getting bits of shellac or vinyl or plastic into  
shops, celluloid into cinemas.

Their responses to the digitisation of their output has been to fight  
to retain their old privileges, rather than embrace the new medium. As  
a result they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant, apart  
from resorting to barratry. Peer-to-peer distribution of music and  
films is inevitable, despite their efforts to criminalise anyone who  
goes near a download site.

In the case of music, rather than working out how they could give  
customers a satisfactory online shopping experience, the industry left  
the door open for a computer manufacturer, Apple, to work out how to  
monetise internet music distribution as a by-product of its need to  
sell hardware.

The rights holders claim to be acting on behalf of the artists, but  
this has never been the case with the industry, so why should it be so  
now?

It's artists who have been embracing and experimenting with internet  
distribution models. In Britain, the Featured Artists Coalition,  
including Billy Bragg, Tom Jones, Annie Lennox, Nick Mason from Pink  
Floyd, Radiohead and many others, is arguing for a complete overhaul  
of the rights regime to give a better deal for artists.

The internet has been a boon for music. A new report by Will Page, the  
chief economist for UK-based royalty collecting group PRS for Music,  
found that while spending on recorded music is down 6 per cent since  
2007, concert ticket sales have grown by 13 per cent and total  
industry revenue is up 4.7 per cent.

Peer-to-peer distribution is exposing people to a wider range of  
music. Older artists are finding new interest and new audiences, and  
are able to cash in through playing live or by releasing new or  
archival recordings.

Page points to the ecosystem around music, an ecosystem that record  
companies have fought because they see it as threatening their  
disproportionate control of an artist's revenue stream.

The internet threatens established business models. Let's face it,  
you're reading this in one. But the Government isn't proposing to  
shore up newspaper revenues through selective gatekeeping.

Rather than create restrictive codes which will diminish New  
Zealanders' ability to benefit from the internet, this is an area  
where the Government should stand back and let the market work.