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.
Does that mean that softare programmers should be compensated PER PROGRAM, rather than salary?
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you--I just thought that was a rather broad statement.
If it's not per song/or copy then there is usually a licensing arrangement. If the creator is compensated by the firm then the company should recoup through sales or use.
In any case it's not free nor should it be.
And you think the musician is the only one who makes his living from the sale of music?
This sounds more like the result of an all-night bongstorming session.
To trot out an analogy I like to use: Most normal folks will sympathize with a businessman who has a shoplifting problem, provide any information they might happen to have about it source, and certainly not engage in shoplifting themselves. However, if the businessman introduces obnoxious security measures (subjecting customers to body-cavity searches, sending goons to sneak into houses to search for stolen goods), most people will say "to hell with you" and even turn their symapthies toward the shoplifters.
That's what's happening to the RIAA's members, and they've brought it on themselves.
And that, boys and girls, is what's really behind the recording industry's push to mandate "copy protection".
Anything that can be heard can be copied with only one generation of analog-to-digital degradation and then digitally re-copied without further signal loss ad infinitum. Thus, the only way "copy protection" can work is by requiring that all playback devices look for some "signature" added to the recording to prove that it came from an "authorized" source. Naturally, the keys/equipment for adding this signature would be available only on industry terms (which would be favorable to the "in" crowd that gets by on silicone and mousse, and punitive to the competing "out" crowd).
The fact that they are in a "tailspin" is evidence that people are not, in fact, buying what the record companies are selling.
Yeah, they blame "piracy", just as Clinton blamed "the vast right-wing conspiracy".
The analogy is this: You want a new Mercedes. You borrow a friend's Mercedes for a few days, run it through your transformigorator, out pops an exact duplicate, and you return your friend's car, just as you borrowed it.
Lower your prices and this goes away ......
Yes, but they make up for it by being easy on the eyes.
If they charged between a quarter and a half-dollar per song and did away with the limitations they've placed on their authorized sites, they'd rake it in hand over fist.
And Daimler-Chrysler, and all the employees and suppliers down the line, are deprived of due income that would otherwise come to them if you had properly bought your Mercedes instead of poaching a free copy.
Why buy what you can get for free? That's not going to have an impact on sales? That's delusional.
If people don't want what the record companies are producing then why are all their songs populating the file-swapping systems? That seems to be a pretty good indication that people do want their product, they just want it for free.
Still, nothing was stolen, and Mercedes is a beggar begging me NOT to copy it. Out of charity, I might -- if I can get this here transformigorator working. Look's like it has some built-in protection that keeps me from operating it. Well, that's what I get for trusting those Raelians.
So you were an anti-music-pirating activist before the RIAA got involved?
The whole notion of "intellectual property" is a flimsy house of cards that will become indefensible eventually. It does not exist in a natural world.
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