The lessons of The Pirate Bay for the RIAA
There’s a great way for the Obama administration to save money and help the music industry finally evolve.
Recently a fifth RIAA lawyer was added to the U.S Justice Department despite the objections of public interest groups, trade pacts and library coalitions.
This would be the RIAA celebrating the fact a federal appeals court has barred a live webcast of the ongoing Joel Tenenbaum trial in a victory for repressing information. After all, if you’ve sued 30,000 people without managing to make the slightest dent in society, then you might be a little embarrased by the public seeing your claims in court.
So here’s the money-saving, music industry-saving answer:
Stop hiring lawyers, and instead start hiring prominent P2P users to implement solutions based on common sense rather than legality and protectionism.
Sounds like madness?
Since the four defendants were found guilty in the The Pirate Bay trial, membership of Sweden’s Pirate Party has shot up – including 3000 new members in the first few hours after the decision.
Over 100,000 people have already signed up, pre-launch, for IPredator, the Pirate Bay’s new service to hide IP addresses from authorities, with the Pirate Bay not logging any data to avoid having anything to turn over to authorities.
A new study from Norway has shown illegal file sharers are more likely to buy music from legitimate sources than other web users.
Not only that, but the illegal file sharers buy 10 times more music than other web users, using iTunes and Amazon.
And this echoes a study by the Canadian Record Industry Association in 2006, with three out of four file sharers buying tracks they’d previously downloaded illegally.
Quoting selectively from Umair Haque on his Harvard Business School blog:
‘No business has a right to profit, sell, or even to produce. All are privileges that society grants businesses.’
‘every time the music industry kills an underground distribution channel, a more efficient one arises in its place. Goodbye mixtapes, hello www. Bye www, hello Napster. Bye Napster, hi BitTorrent. Bye BitTorrent, hi anonymous, ciphered, totally decentralized p2p nets.’
‘Why? By limiting the supply of interaction, the music industry is only ensuring that each interaction becomes more and more efficient. The endgame is a distribution system where every song in the world in the world can be zapped invisibly and anonymously from me to you in a nanosecond.
The point? 21st century economics are radically decentralized. Wars against networks are unwinnable — when orthodox organizations are the ones fighting them. Only networks (or markets and communities, if you’re a long-time reader) can fight other networks.
Want a better music/media/etc. “business model”? The understanding that hierarchies are dominated by networks is the key — and the failure to understand it is exactly why the media industry is so deeply in decay.’
Youtube removes copyrighted audio from videos – killing music promotion
Not only is the Music Industry intent on destroying itself, but it seems intent on taking Youtube with it.
In an utterly bizarre fashion, Youtube appears to be using it’s audio fingerprinting software to remove any audio which infringes copyright, but is leaving the original videos online.
Previously, copyright-infringers were either notified, or had their videos removed entirely. There’s no word on whether this new approach was instituted by Google/Youtube, or whether, as most people presume, it was forced by increased pressure from the music industry.
But as the huge amount of online coverage has pointed out, it’s going to hurt everyone involved:
The music industry was unlikely to be losing sales from the majority of fan videos and could have instituted a decent licencing solution.
Youtube won’t be the place for some of the fantasically popular fan videos built around any copyrighted content – for instance the second most viewed Youtube video of all time.
And users will lose out as millions of videos, and all the work that went into them, suddenly become destroyed.
Just some of the negative coverage:
So it’s already on most of the biggest and most-read blogs, and is spreading like wildfire.
And as always, Gerd Leonhard sums it up perfectly.
Update: Cnet has just revealed that apparently the silent videos are down to users choosing this option when informed of copyright infringement. It’s apparently been in place for a while, but is noticeable now because Youtube’s negotiations with Warners have broken down – and most of the music now muted belongs to the idiots Warners.
We’d still argue that it the users aren’t choosing to have their videos muted – they’re forced to choose between being muted or removed, because the music industry can’t work out that lots of people showing their appreciation of a piece of music might actually be an incredibly good promotional tool for that artist.
There are very few people who can save the record industry from their own idiocy, but unless they start following this chap, this chap, or these chaps, it seems like they’re locked into a race with newspapers for who can destroy their industry first.
Major labels sign up to charge students for music in tuition fees
Tuition fees for U.S. universities could include a small music-royalty free in a model proposed by digital music strategist on behalf of the Warner Music Group (via Wired)
ISPs would collect the micropayments, which would then be given out to copyright holders by an independant non-profit organisation called Choruss. Only Universal is yet to sign up from the four major labels, and the offer is being shopped around U.S universities including Cornell, Columbia and the University of Chicago.
Here’s the interesting bit in the words of Wired:
In return for a university paying fees to Choruss, its students would be able to continue downloading as they have been — bit torrent, Limewire and so on — without fear of legal reprisal. Unlike previous plans that require the use of onerous digital rights management, this one would allow students to download music in the unprotected formats they prefer, using the hardware, software and networks of their choice.
Could this be the long-awaited innovation in the face of extinction? It’s an interesting proposition, and one which presumably accepts DRM-free files will be shared, traded, uploaded etc. And will probably end up in the hands on non-students, who won’t have ever paid any fees?
If so, I’ll be stunned.
I await the first time it launches, and the discovery within a week of some kind of tracking or limitation. If it does turn out to be true, it does prove that anyone can change if they’re heading for a big enough disaster. Repent, ye industry sinners.
(There’s also the small flaw of those students and families complaining that fees intended to pay for an education are now being diverted to an entertainment industry, and the rush of film and media companies to include their own fees.
Plus complaints by those who don’t intend to download any music and resent paying for others.
Plus the eternal question of why on earth music labels deserve to take any of the money in the first place – because in this model, they don’t actually do anything?
Look again:
1. Universities charge students.
2. ISPs collect payment.
3. Organisation collects electronic data and distributes it to copyright holders (Surely the musicians and artists who created the work).
Exactly where in this 3 step plan do we have a need for record companies? Give the non-profit organisation the ability to enforce copyright if a musician wants to, and that’s the music labels gone.