Posted on 01/19/2003 7:18:43 PM PST by Leroy S. Mort
CANNES, France (Reuters) - A top music executive said on Saturday that telecommunications companies and Internet service providers (ISPs) will be asked to pay up for giving their customers access to free song-swapping sites.
The music industry is in a tailspin with global sales of CDs expected to fall six percent in 2003, its fourth consecutive annual decline. A major culprit, industry watchers say, is online piracy.
Now, the industry wants to hit the problem at its source -- Internet service providers.
"We will hold ISPs more accountable," said Hillary Rosen, chairman and CEO the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), in her keynote speech at the Midem music conference on the French Riviera.
"Let's face it. They know there's a lot of demand for broadband simply because of the availability (of file-sharing)," Rosen said.
As broadband access in homes has increased across the Western world, so has the activity on file-sharing services.
IMPOSSIBLE TO ENFORCE
The RIAA is a powerful trade body that has taken a number of file-swapping services, including the now defunct Napster, to court in an effort to shut them down.
Rosen suggested one possible scenario for recouping lost sales from online piracy would be to impose a type of fee on ISPs that could be passed on to their customers who frequent these file-swapping services.
Mario Mariani, senior vice president of media and access at Tiscali, Europe's third largest ISP, dismissed the notion, calling it impossible to enforce.
"The peer-to-peer sites are impossible to fight. In any given network, peer-to-peer traffic is between 30 and 60 percent of total traffic. We technically cannot control such traffic," he said.
Rosen's other suggestions for fighting online piracy were more conciliatory.
She urged the major music labels, which include Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI, Universal Music and Bertelsmann's BMG, to ease licensing restrictions, develop digital copyright protections for music, and invest more in promoting subscription download services.
Pressplay and MusicNet, the online services backed by the majors, plus independent legitimate services such as Britain's Wippit.com, sounded somewhat optimistic about their longterm chances to derail free services such as Kazaa and Morpheus.
But they also acknowledged they cannot compete with the "free" players until the labels clear up the licensing morass that keeps new songs from being distributed online for a fee.
LEGAL STEP
Officials from Pressplay and MusicNet, which are in their second year in operation, declined to disclose how many customers they have.
"We haven't really started yet," said Alan McGlade, CEO of MusicNet, when asked about his subscriber base.
Michael Bebel, CEO of Pressplay, said his customers tally is in the tens of thousands. He added that the firm, backed by Universal and Sony, could expand into Canada in the first half of the year, its second market after the U.S. He didn't have a timeframe for Europe.
Meanwhile, Kazaa and Morpheus claim tens of millions of registered users who download a wide variety of tracks for free.
Rosen hailed a recent U.S. court decision which ruled that Kazaa, operated by Australian-based technology firm Sharman Networks, could be tried in America, as an important legal step to halting the activities of file-sharing services.
"It's clear to me these companies are profiting to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. They must be held accountable," Rosen said.
I hear people say that all the time, but it's demonstrably false. The record companies are putting out what people are buying. It's just a sad commentary that the majority of the music buying public's taste runs toward pre-fab pap.
I'm still waiting on the RIAA to explain why the viewership for the music industry awards shows is falling through the floor despite the addition of every "popular" music act to the program.
I don't understand how intellectual property, songs and songwriters, books and authors, programmers and software are supposed to survive if they don't receive royalties. The vast majority barely receive anything as it is.
I don't understand the attititude that music or software and the like should be free. A flat ISP charge would solve the problem and make the leeches who want free "stuff" pay.
You want a free version of Microsoft Office 2002 or Dragonball Z. or the latest tune fron Coldplay!?
Pay for it!!!!
What a concept!
What an ego! What makes her think she or the RIAA has the power to make the ISPs do anything at all? Sue 'em! That's her answer for every woe the RIAA has. Just sue everybody...customers included.
the label formula is broken. the more big hat soap opera stars and fat boy hip hopera rap they throw out there the worse it gets. a couple of young independent bands might eventually sweep the net and put more of these music mafia out of business eventually.
In that light, why should I have to pay an additional fee to my Internet Service Provider?
I also don't use MS Office applications save what I have on my work laptop (fully licensed). For anything at home, I use OpenOffice, freeware for the Linux platform.
Blow on that duck call, boy.
A lot of old "garage" music is actually better than the crap churned out by the RIAA.
garage technology is improving so much that the uncle has the technology to compete with the biggest studios with the best cocaine. great songwriters don't need anything more than the uncle to get cd's out there that sound better than anything elton john or garth brooks ever did.
Lighten up big guy....
more farts in the wind; the economics of the net are that label bureaucracy is no longer in "demand." the economics and technology of recording is that the studios are not needed to support the better artists. the economics of entertainment is shifting away from central control. it was fun while it lasted, but it ain't about executive dining anymore. freedom is again crushing bureaucracy.
Many of the great masterworks were commissioned, not created by some mysterious need for self expression.
Once one person purchases a single copy (whether it's through Sony Music or from the creators own home web site) of the item they should be able to distribute it world wide without compensation to the creator?
You have no problem with this?
Of course, most of the CD's I buy now are from small independent labels, it would be interesting to see how the sales of small independent labels has been doing since file swapping started.
I think the major labels have missed the boat and are stuck in their old ways. The solution to their problem is quite simple, put out a better variety of music artists, reduce the cost of CD's to something reasonable like the costs old LP's and tapes from days gone by, and embrace the p2p technology to promote your artists, set up your own network and charge a monthly fee.
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