I’ve been very interested in the trends surrounding the music industry the last few months. A great article in Wired covers the current state of affairs very nicely. Snippet:

To leap the hurdles posed by digital technology, the industry must find a way to make money selling downloaded music on a per-track basis, allow in-store CD burning, slash recording costs with cheap software and hardware, and change artists’ contracts to reflect the new economic reality. Doing any one of these will be next to impossible. Doing all of them would be one of the more amazing turnarounds in business history.

While these systemic challenges continue to press the labels, a few more articles provide context. In Canadians Burned By Blank-CD Levy, the writer tells us that more than 40 countries add a fee to the price of blank CDs, to “compensate musicians and music publishing companies” for music swapping. In Canada, this means you can legally copy a friend’s CD.

But if that seems like a method that works, consider: the levy will increase tenfold if the 2003 proposal is approved, and to this day not a single cent has been distributed from the fund. (Not to mention people who buy CD-Rs without using them for music; some surveys put this number at half of all CD-R purchasers.)

Back in the States, the RIAA was successful in its bid to force an ISP to give up a file trader’s name without a court order. Yet another example of the terrible law we call the Digital Millennium Copryight Act: stripped of any burden of due process, large companies can now move to identify anyone they wish to interrogate.

Come to think of it, what do they plan to send to that KaZaA user, anyway? A cease-and-desist letter? An invoice, as has been used to some success in Denmark? Wasn’t it always said/assumed that the companies would never go after consumers directly? The recording industry’s announcement of their plan to hold ISPs more accountable seems more their style: levy invisible, mandatory fees indirectly on the consumer to preserve their business models.

Perhaps someday the average consumer will get so sick of it all that (s)he will look for a clear, reasonable copyright policy that doesn’t assume every Internet user is a criminal.

I’m not holding my breath.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 2003 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Law & Politics.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.