CRIA v Geist, Kapica and Knopf
p2pnet.net news views:- “Just because someone has downloaded a song doesn’t mean that they otherwise would have bought that song.”
That statement in a nutshell adequately punctures the specious EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US) argument for suing their own customers in a campaign (which has no hope of succeeding) to ‘persuade’ them to buy ‘product’.
The quote in the intro comes from Dr Michael Geist (top left), Canada research chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, in a CTV story centering on the Big 4 music cartel’s latest comments on its efforts to hang online music lovers for the corporate music industry failure to find an acceptable (to it) way to cash in on p2p downloads.
“According to the CRIA, ‘Digital music sales, estimated at about 6 percent of the Canadian market in 2006, are falling far short of replacing lost CD and DVD sales’,” p2pnet said in a post quoting CRIA claims, yesterday. The CRIA goes on, “Such declines have forced Canada’s music industry to reduce its workforce by approximately half since 1999.”
Canada’s music workforce? Canadian-controlled companies, “reported having more full-time staff in 2003, with 681 in 2003 compared to 578 in 2000,” says the recent Canadian Heritage Music Industry Profile.
“On the other hand, ‘Foreign-controlled firms saw the number of full-time staff decrease 20.5% from 2,013 in 2000 to 1,600 in 2003′.”
CRIA stands for Canadian Recording Industry Association, but given that none of its owners has a significant presence in Canada, it would more properly be called Canadian Recording Industry Association of America, as we and others have often observed.
As Geist blogs in an item which includes mention of the CRIA press release, there’s:
- No mention of the tens of millions of dollars collected through the private copying levy that arguably covers those P2P downloads
- No mention of the most recent Canadian Heritage Music Industry Profile which focused on the growth of sales of Canadian artists since 2001
- No mention of the Canadian Heritage sponsored study that distinguishes between the health of the music industry and CD sales while placing much of the blame on the industry itself
- No mention that Canadian digital music sales growth was double the rate in the U.S. last year
- No mention that Canada has more online music stores than the US when measured on a per capita basis
- No mention that the CRIA member strategy of relying on DRM is being quickly abandoned
- No mention of the changes at the retail level that even the Wall Street Journal points to as a critical reason for sales declines.
Henderson (top right) called CTV.ca to counter Geist’s math, it says, with Henderson stating, “In terms of the size of the digital market place, per capita, the market is four times bigger in the US. In Canada when people think about music, they don’t think ‘buy music’, they think ‘take it’.”
CTV goes on:
[The] CRIA notes that digital music sales are estimated to make up only about six per cent of the Canadian market in 2006 and that per capita digital music sales in the U.S. are nearly four times those in Canada.
They say digital music sales in Canada haven’t grown nearly enough to offset the almost 50 per cent drop in annual CD sales since 1999.
Geist responds that is because the industry is going through a shift; music lovers are downloading music song-by-song from the Web, and are not as interested as going to a store to buy a CD.
“There is a move to a singles market again, which is becoming the dominant sales model, so of course it’s going to be difficult to compensate for that,” he says.
“But if the only approach to this is to scream to government for them to intervene with more protection, then the industry really is in trouble.”
Says Jack Kaipca (bottom left) in the Globe and Mail, “I’m tired of going after the Canadian Recording Industry Association for its campaign against sharing of music files. Although I support most industries’ approach to copyright, the CRIA’s hidebound position is reprehensible.
“A CRIA press release issued today reports that ‘Canada’s music sales [fell] 35 per cent in the first quarter’ of the year, and that the decline is ‘the largest year-over-year decrease in Canada since the advent of widespread unauthorized file-swapping in 1999.’
“I appreciate the use of the word ‘unauthorized’ in the headline – the CRIA has been saying for the past year that it is illegal in Canada, which it isn’t. Itââ¬â¢s a legal problem, but it’s not illegal.”
Pointing out the headline to the CRIAA release is “disingenuous” (the CRIA doesn’t mean music sales fell: “it says more correctly later in the release that ’sales of CDs, music DVDs and other ‘physical’ music formats fell,” not music sales over all) Kapica continues:
The press release goes on to say that the 35-per-cent decline ‘comes on top of an almost unbroken string of declines since the widespread advent of unauthorized file-swapping in 1999 and the proliferation of CD and music DVD counterfeiting in recent years. Digital music sales, estimated at about 6 per cent of the Canadian market in 2006, are falling far short of replacing lost CD and DVD sales.’
For the life of me, I don’t know why this is a problem for the CRIA. The sales of digitally encoded music have skyrocketed since 1999. Sales of iPods are staggering, and credited with the stunning profits Apple Inc. reported yesterday evening. The world, in short, is moving to digital music, whether the recording industry likes it or not. It’s simply a matter of consumer demand; the market is speaking, and the recording industry isn’t listening.
So I believe the CRIA when it claims that the fall of ‘physical’ record sales is because of the traffic in digital music files, but not when the industry says it’s entirely because of piracy. Does the CRIA want us to believe that the legitimate sales of music via Puretracks in Canada and iTunes in the United States has had a negligible effect on the recording industry?
Since 1999, the recording industry has been fighting a rearguard action against digital music, suing wretched end users in the United States while losing its fight with a much bigger rival, Apple’s Steve Jobs, who flatly refused to change the pricing structure on iTunes as the US recording industry demanded.
If the industry had been a little more flexible in its position, it would have jumped on the digital bandwagon eight years ago instead of trying to bomb it into oblivion with legal improvised explosive devices.
I do, however, agree on one issue with the CRIA when it wants the ‘federal government to update the Copyright Act to protect artists and other creators of intellectual property from the unauthorized dissemination of their work on the Internet.’
A revision of the Canadian act is necessary. But the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the most draconian such legislation in the world, has not been effective enough to silence the CRIA’s fellow US organization, the Recording Industry Association of America, which is still fuming over digital file-sharing.
Yes, Canada will eventually revise the copyright act. But before it does that, the country needs to address itself to much more important issues than the profits of four giant multinationals who have refused to move with the times.
Nor are Kapica and Geist the only commentators to take the CRIA to task.
Says Canadian copyright expert Howard Knopf (bottom right):
Personally, I’m not neutral. I always favour accuracy and sound legal analysis. On the issue of Canada’s comparative compliance with international law, the following point must be made:
Henderson says that ‘In fact, Canada stands alone among its leading trading partners as having failed to meet its commitments under the World Intellectual Property Organization treaties.’ [Knopf's emphasis.]
That is a recurrent CRIA canard that has been repeated too long and too often. The fact is that Canada has not breached any international legal obligations or commitments under these treaties for the simple reason that Canada has never ratified them. Nor has Canada made any binding legal commitment to ratify them. As I’ve said many times, signing a treaty is to ratification like dating is to marriage. The latter does not necessarily follow from the former.
Unless and until we do ratify these treaties, it’s time to stop talking about failing to meet non-existent ‘commitments’.
One point that both Michael and Graham both fail to mention in this exchange is that there is, indeed, one very conspicuous example of a G8 country that has seriously breached international legal copyright obligations, as adjudicated by the WTO and still flouts international copyright law by failing to pass legislation to protect the rights of composers and authors to be paid when their music is played, for example, in countless bars and restaurants.
That is the USA – which has been found by the WTO to have violated the WTO TRIPS agreement and its incorporated Berne Convention provisions. I’m quite sure that China is aware of the irony of the American’s position on copyright law.
As I said on February 14, 2007:
The most flagrant adjudicated flouter of international copyright law is the USA. The WTO has long ago finally concluded that the USA fails to provide royalties for performing rights in many instances as a result of s. 110 of its Copyright Act. This is the most serious copyright dispute to date in the WTO and the USA is clearly unwilling or unable to do anything about coming into compliance. It has bought its way out of this violation with a paltry payment fixed by arbitration of about Euro 1,219,900 per year – a fraction of what the royalties ought to be.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
CTV – Canada’s CD sales tumble in first quarter, April 27, 2007
p2pnet – Canadian music tale of woe, April 27, 2007
Geist blogs – World Intellectual Property Day, April 27, 2007
Globe and Mail – For the record, April 27, 2007
Howard Knopf – The Continuing CRIA Copyright Canard, April 26, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by governBryan Adams slams Net radio hikement restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the endSurvey: How Did Copyright Infringement Become Equated with Robbery? (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
April 29th, 2007 at 7:51 am
No matter what you say a song is someone else’s property and like any other product in digital format whether it’s a script, program, book, movie or a song, should be paid for. Otherwise, it’s stealing.
April 29th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
infringment.
saying it over and over again still does not make it so, but your still an idiot