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06.11.2007

Fred Von Lohman on Copyright In Universities

Fred Von Lohman's article in the Post chides a group of Congressmen for expecting universities to enforce copyright by fining or expelling students, or by installing filtering software. He urges instead that the university collect monies to pay the music industry for a blanket license for unlimited downloading, as they do for software. At least, it is not a compulsory license. And it seems to be a a reasonably practicable solution at one level. (One practical problem: does the license transfer the rights in the sound recordings only? Or the rights of the composers and such as well? Licenses for music distribution are notoriously hard to obtain because of this fragmentation issue. Set it aside for now).

But note one key element on which the scheme relies--in order to have any incentive to negotiate for a license, the universities and/or their students *must* be under some threat of liability. Withdraw that threat, declare downloading to be legal and legit, and the music studios lost their bargaining power. I am curious as to whether FVL would support this premise. He seems to be on the one hand objecting to the reasonableness of the threats, while supporting a solution that requires some kind of threat as a premise.

Continue reading Fred Von Lohman on Copyright In Universities . . .

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 9:12 AM | Internet , P2P , Universities

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04. 4.2007

The Seven Year Itch

Don Dodge, the VP of Project Development at Napster in 2000, notes that this year is the 7th anniversary of that enterprise, in How Napster changed the world - A look back 7 years later.

"We went from just a million users to over 50 million users in about 7 months time. At the time it was the fastest growing application in the history of the internet.

Unfortunately, this success turned out to be a business disaster:

Napster started out as a free download tool but the goal was to make it into a real business in partnership with the record labels. At first Napster was too small and unknown to get a meeting with the major labels. The record labels, and most of the rest of the world, had never heard of Napster and didn’t know what it was. That changed in a hurry…in fact too fast. Napster went from being an unknown underground technology to the biggest threat the record labels had ever seen, all in the span of less than six months. At this point the record labels wanted us dead.

The story goes on, with lots of interesting fodder, including the problem of institutional adaptation. As Dodge notes with respect to the labels:

Continue reading The Seven Year Itch . . .

posted by James DeLong @ 1:17 PM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation , Media , P2P

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04. 2.2007

There Is a Business Here Somewhere

To continue my oft-expressed admiration for satellite radio, the other day I heard on XM a full version of Sir Arthur Sullivan's 1872 Festival Te Deum.

ArkivMusic (my current go-to site because its index for classical beats Amazon hollow) failed me, as did my back-up Amazon one-click, so I queried XM VOX for a disc number. (Another reason why everyone should be subscribing to satellite radio is the speed and courtesy with which such emails are answered.)

Continue reading There Is a Business Here Somewhere . . .

posted by James DeLong @ 8:00 AM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation , P2P

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03.22.2007

Why the RIAA lawsuits are good for the big guys and the little guys of the music industry

A Wall Street Journal article this week chronicled the continuing decline in sales of CDs, which dropped 20 percent in the first quarter of 2007 relative to a year ago. A big part of this recent decline is certainly due to the closing of about 800 music stores, including 89 former Tower Records stores, over the course of 2006. There’s also little doubt that the root cause of both those closings and the overall decline in music sales is illegal music downloading; for more on the details of just how much of an effect downloading has on music sales, see Stan Liebowitz’s page.

Continue reading Why the RIAA lawsuits are good for the big guys and the little guys of the music industry . . .

posted by Dan Britton @ 11:13 AM | P2P

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03.21.2007

The Music Crisis

WSJ Online today makes available the headline WSJ story "Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply."

For example:

One week, "American Idol" runner-up Chris Daughtry's rock band sold just 65,000 copies of its chart-topping album; another week, the "Dreamgirls" movie soundtrack sold a mere 60,000. As recently as 2005, there were many weeks when such tallies wouldn't have been enough to crack the top 30 sellers. In prior years, it wasn't uncommon for a No. 1 record to sell 500,000 or 600,000 copies a week.

Since music is as popular as ever, it seems logical to conclude that the biggest change is the rise of free-riding:

Meanwhile, one billion songs a month are traded on illegal file-sharing networks, according to BigChampagne LLC

The key point is that this is not the music companies' crisis -- this is a crisis for everyone. If there is no compensation for artists from creating work, or compensation for others who find and filter the art, and rcord, package, and distribute it, then the music will not be produced.

YOU, personally, will return to an 18th century state in which your total musical experience will consist of hearing your cousin Betsy play a reed flute, except of course for the music graciously sponsored by the modern equivalent of 18th century aristocrats who want to sell advertising to your eyeballs.

Unfortunately, you will take me with you. So bring on the DRM, and the secondary legal liabilty, and the bots roaming the Internet looking for copyright infringement, because I don't like the reed flute.

posted by James DeLong @ 10:10 AM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation , P2P

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03.20.2007

Filesharing Risks

Last week, the USPTO released its final report on Filesharing Programs and "Technological Features to Induce Users to Share" (Nov. 2006), authored by Thomas Sydnor, John Knight, and Lee A. Hollaar.

The report got some press, but not a lot, and its implications are important, so it is worth some excerpts:

From the Introduction, by USPTO Director Jon Dudas:

This report analyzes five popular filesharing programs to determine whether they have contained, or do contain, “features” that can cause users of these programs to share files inadvertently. It concludes that these programs have deployed at least five such “features,” and that distributors of these programs continued to deploy such features after their propensity to cause users to share files inadvertently was, or should have been, known. It concludes that further investigation would be warranted to determine whether any distributors who deployed these features intended for them to trick users into sharing files unintentionally.

From the Report's conclusion:

Continue reading Filesharing Risks . . .

posted by James DeLong @ 12:05 PM | P2P

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02.21.2007

Universities and a Moral Compass

One of the most important activities that can be done to promote artists and copyright is to lean on institutions of higher learning to do what needs to be done to combat piracy. Today's universities provide students with blazing-fast Internet access and massive storage space, often taxpayer-funded. Study after study has shown university networks to be piracy hot spots. In the past there was a peculiar desire among some officials to look the other way; perhaps these individuals didn't want to be The Man suppressing students that they remembered from their halcyon college days. But in recent years -- with prodding from the creative community and Congress -- universities are becoming more responsible.

Much work remains to be done, though, as this AP story by Ted Bridis shows. (It is an otherwise excellent story, but for some reason misspells the first name of RIAA's Cary Sherman; I know Ted knows better so I'm assuming it was an editorial error.) Universities must be responsible for their own networks and in overseeing the behavior of their students for two reasons, one economic and the other social. The first is obvious -- piracy harms creators financially. The second should be equally obvious. If students use a university's high-speed network to amass unauthorized content, and there are no repercussions, they have to assume that on some level the behavior is sanctioned by the university; after all, the university owns the network and would stop such behavior if it thought it important. As a result, the lesson the university teaches its students is that theft is okay. (Let's keep in mind that many are already learning that in class, when a professor hands out photocopies of entire books, complete with copyright page, and clearly hasn't obtained the permission of the publisher.) Purdue, mentioned in Ted's story, seems not to grasp either reason.

If you're young and haven't fully developed a moral compass, and your entire life has involved ever more spectacular technology, it's natural to assume that because something is technically possible, it is in fact okay, or "fair." That is not always true, but not everyone learns that lesson independently. Sometimes they need a hand. Higher education should be about more than the lessons in one's classes; it's a time where adolescents become adults. The values they carry out of that institution of higher learning will remain with them their entire lives. We need to remain vigilant and ensure that universities are teaching the right values through their own actions, through respect for creators and their property.

ADDENDUM 11:48 am: AP has fixed the spelling of Cary Sherman's name. Not through a correction, just by changing it online. Oh, this modern world we live in, where mistakes can disappear from the record!

posted by Patrick Ross @ 11:38 AM | Academia , P2P

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02. 8.2007

My Business Model Makes Angels Sing, Your Business Model Hates Consumers

CNET today ran an editorial by a guy trying to drum up business for his little company, although the author never owned up to his angle in the piece. Here the opening from Les Ottolenghi, CEO of Intent MediaWorks:

Once media-hungry consumers get a taste of free music, video and games through file sharing, there's no turning back. File sharing offers consumers the complete package: rich media delivered directly to their computers, phones and e-mail addresses at no charge. Why would anyone want to return to a linear distribution system that requires more effort, more money and more limitations?

And there's this:

Entertainment companies looking for a way to monetize their content need to stop chasing the consumer dollar. That ship has sailed. As consumers become more comfortable morally and technologically about file sharing, they will be less and less willing to part with their cash for content.

Yet he also makes this dubious claim, based on his other assertions:

The good news for the industry is that a huge fan base with a potential for extraordinary profit has emerged.

My first question was this: What the heck is this guy smoking and could it possibly be legal? My second question was this: Is he on to something?

Continue reading My Business Model Makes Angels Sing, Your Business Model Hates Consumers . . .

posted by Patrick Ross @ 12:07 PM | DRM & Watermarks, etc. , Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation , P2P , Theft of Service

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02. 6.2007

Digitized Beatles?

Music fans have been waiting for this for years (although I own a fair number of Beatles CDs, so they were already digitized for that format). Paul Resnikoff, editor of Digital Music News, suspects that digitizing the Beatles library for download services would have been impactful a few years ago, but that it's less of an issue now when all those CD versions are floating around on P2P networks. Here's his conclusion:

The issue highlights a much bigger problem. The well-worn statistic - and not-so-secret secret about iPod - is that most consumers only buy a handful of tracks from the iTunes Store. Different numbers have been thrown around, though most consumers grab a dozen or two tracks, at most. The rest of the typical iPod collection - thousands of songs - are ripped from CDs, swapped over file-sharing networks, or obtained from one-to-one sharing protocols like IM.
It's a tough reality for major labels and anyone else attempting to capture revenues from digital music sales - online or over-the-air. Years later, the iTunes Store has mostly become a shiny storefront, while the real action has been happening out back, in the alley. And against that backdrop, a successful Beatles licensing play would be mostly symbolic. Sure, "Beatles Go Digital" articles would persist for weeks, and cocktail conversations would have some fresh material. But years into an accelerating digital revolution, the event would mostly be unimportant.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 7:34 AM | P2P

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12.13.2006

Free Download Sites as a Fraud on Consumers

Following up on Solveig's post on the recent class action law suit brought against Kazaa for consumer fraud, I am certain that I once saw a complaint about the same practices that was filed with the FTC, I think by the RIAA. Obviously, nothing ever happened with it, but -- speaking as a former Assistant Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection -- I thought it made a slam dunk case. I would have told my staff to go get 'em so we could rack up an easy win for our "accomplishment" sheets.

Thus, I think the plaintiffs win this one. But they might be helped out if someone started a legal defense fund, so I suggest the RIAA do this. After all, the RIAA does not like suing individuals, even if it must do so to keep the system from collapsing. It would far rather that no one used the illicit P2P sites because these had big notices on them pointing all the risks and traps involved.

So I think RIAA should help out the plaintiffs. Maybe even intervene -- "yes, we collected money from the plaintiffs, but we did it reluctantly and we would like to help them get it back from the people who are really responsible."

posted by James DeLong @ 12:50 PM | P2P

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12.13.2006

There's No Such Thing as a Free Download

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 10:48 AM | P2P

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11.10.2006

Suspicions Confirmed!

posted by James DeLong @ 12:35 PM | P2P

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10.30.2006

Digital Water Marking