I saw the "original' article at
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/03/business/rights04.php [iht.com]
...in case it's not still out there [for free] on the web, I have attached a
copy
of the "printer friendly" version of it (less ads, and all on one page vs.
3).
...due to the particular nature of the subject matter, I would hope that
this
would not cause the publishers to sue [anyone] for copyright violation...
long live the GPL,
--
Mike Schwartz
Glendale AZ
schwartz@acm.org
Mike.L.Schwartz@gmail.com
Does digital file sharing render copyright obsolete? - Print Version - International Herald Tribune
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Does digital file sharing render copyright obsolete?
By Victoria Shannon
Sunday, June 3, 2007
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BRUSSELS:
When the 1980s pop star Robin Gibb writes a song these days, he says he
doesn't think about whether it is copyrighted or licensed - he devotes
himself to his art and lets his handlers see to its legal and financial
well-being.
But when NoobishPineapple, an 18-year-old from Spearfish, South
Dakota, uploads his 36-second rap video about fast food onto YouTube,
he has no staff of assistants to make sure his creation is protected or
paid for - and he probably doesn't care, anyway.
That makes people like David Ferguson, head of the British Academy
of Composers and Authors, nervous about how art will be sustained in
the future. And it is giving people like Lawrence Lessig, founder of
Creative Commons, an opening to promote alternatives to the world's
increasingly maligned copyright systems.
The youth craze for making and posting digitized audio and video on
the Internet - their own creations and those of others, without regard
to ownership or payment - is driving a wedge between the traditional
"commercial" economy and the upstart "sharing" market, analysts say.
Likewise, it is paralyzing and polarizing the groups that are supposed
to make sure writers and composers get the royalties they are due.
At a self-described summit meeting on copyrights in Brussels last
week, the world's major groups representing creative authors - the
collecting societies at "the bottom of the food chain," griped one
executive - vented, fumed and wrung their collective hands about their
future. At the end of the event, Italian authors called for a "strike"
to suspend licensing any form of public performance for a week in June
to call attention to illegal downloading and authors' rights.
In the absence of a wholesale update of royalty systems,
billion-dollar court battles - like the Viacom lawsuit against Google,
which owns the YouTube video-sharing site - will most likely be the
determinant of the value of digital copyrights, analysts say.
"There are an extraordinary number of people who are creating on
their own and doing so for a different reason than money," Lessig, a
lawyer who allies himself with Google in copyright positions, said
during an interview. "Somehow we've got to find a system that ratifies
both kinds of creativity and doesn't try to destroy one in order to
preserve the other."
Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of BT Group, the British phone
company, laid the blame at the feet of the societies, not technology or
authors themselves. "The problems are the institutions," he said. "They
have to change."
In Europe, collecting societies have so far dodged a bullet aimed at
them last year, after the European Commission started antitrust
proceedings against their 150-year-old system of coordinating royalty
payments and redistributing them to authors.
Gibb, part of the successful BeeGees band of "Night Fever" fame,
testified on behalf of author societies at the hearing last summer on
the commission's objections over royalty competitiveness issues. Now,
he is adopting a more formal role; on Friday, he took over as president
of Cisac, the international collecting-rights umbrella organization
that sponsored the meeting.
"I feel strongly that it's a moral right for everybody to get what
they deserve if they write a piece of work," Gibb said during an
interview, "and they have a right to see that it's not used in a way
that they're left out of the loop."
The commission has not closed its investigation. But since Gibb's
intervention and other conversations with many of the 217 societies in
Cisac, Ferguson said, "they are no longer talking about fining us, and
they're not talking about taking money out of the pockets of creators."
But something has to give, most agree. Roger Faxon, chairman and
chief executive of EMI Music Publishing, said the rigidity of European
licensing had crimped digital music sales in Europe.
"We need to loosen it up," he said. "If we don't, we may well go
back to a world in which you need a patron in order to make a living as
a songwriter."
Gerd Leonhard, chief executive of a digital music start-up and
author of "The End of Control," said he believes that the existing
structure has outlived its usefulness, and - at a time when
royalty-payment functions can be automated - he gives the collecting
societies no more than three or five years of life.
Everyone seemed to have their own new way of going forward. After
the European Commission's move against the collecting societies, EMI
set up Celas, a one-stop shop for pan-European licensing of online and
mobile service rights.
"In many ways it is an experiment, an attempt to find a different approach to try to solve the problem," Faxon said.
In Britain, meanwhile, Ferguson and Gibb are starting a cooperative
record label called Academy Recordings that is designed from the ground
up for the music writers. Ferguson said Academy had already struck
deals with Apple's iTunes and the British start-up We7, the
ad-supported British music download service backed by the rock artist
Peter Gabriel.
Its first release will include members of the British music writers
group like Gibb, Gabriel and the Pretenders. Like others before him,
Ferguson envisions "a brand new digital business model."
The more, the merrier, some say. "We can't rely on knowing which
business model is the one that is going to work," said Larry Kenswil,
executive vice president of business strategy for Universal Music. "As
content owners, we're obligated to try everything."
Joe Mohen, chairman and founder of SpiralFrog, which aims to start
its advertising-supported free digital music store by the end of the
summer, urged radical action, saying he had to cut deals with 38,000
music publishers in the United States alone.
"For new companies starting up, it is impossible to license country
by country," he said. "If legitimate businesses are forced to do that,
they're never going to be able to compete with the pirates. There's got
to be some sort of pan-European licensing, and frankly global licensing
is the preferred way."
Lessig, whose Creative Commons alternative licenses have been almost
as abhorrent as online music theft to the societies, has nevertheless
gained a grass-roots following as well as limited adoption by companies
like Microsoft and the BBC. The licenses let the author determine
whether to apply commercial rights and how much. They are available in
34 countries and were applied an estimated 145 million times last year.
Many collecting societies in Australia, Finland, France, Germany,
Luxembourg, Spain, Taiwan and the Netherlands manage authors' rights
for them, so individuals cannot apply a Creative Commons license.
Lessig, a Stanford University law professor who is on a teaching
fellowship at the American University in Berlin, said he hoped to
announce a breakthrough agreement with a collecting society at the time
of a Creative Commons conference in Croatia on June 15.
The author groups themselves are obviously conflicted, trying to
balance supporting the audio and visual arts and making sure their
creators get a portion of the royalty pie, when no one knows what the
pie will look like.
Last year, more than half of all music acquired by consumers was
unpaid, according to NPD Group, a market research company. Social
"sharing" of CDs by friends accounted for 37 percent of all music
consumption, NPD said.
"The CD is dying at a rate that is predictable at this point,"
Kenswil said. "It will someday level off into a niche market the way
vinyl has. In five years, it will be of very little consequence.
"The problem is there is no physical medium to replace it. It's digital, but digital is in its infancy."
And many of those who would abolish copyrights in the digital age
also are young, influenced by Internet social movements like free
software code, blogging and file-sharing.
"A lot of people under 30 are 'can't pay, won't pay,' " Mohen said.
"Many of them have never purchased a CD, and many never will. They have
more time than they have money."
Ferguson can imagine the music distribution business disrupted so
much in a few years that the entire world's catalog of music may be
prepackaged and prepaid on some kind of key chain sold at gas stations.
But he does not see the end of authors' rights groups.
"We're still going to need to license the hairdresser, the
restaurant, the small radio station, national broadcasters," he said,
noting that digital downloading may well represent an unsustainable
business bubble.
But Alex Callier, songwriter and bass player with Hooverphonic, the
Belgian pop band, bemoans the focus on business models and digital
sleights of hand around "user-generated content."
"It used to be you had to know how to play the guitar and have some
talent to make it in the music business," he said. "Some of the mystery
and magic is gone."
Gibb, who said he never thought of his work as "intellectual
property" but rather the result of an overwhelming need to write and
perform, nonetheless was hopeful. "We're chipping away at the stone,"
he said.
Peter Jenner, chairman of the International Music Managers Forum,
suggested a different approach. "I'd lock all the societies in a room
until they get their act together," he said.
Notes:
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