p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- I left school just after I was 14 and I admit my education is a bit sketchy. That’s OK, though. I’m on a couple of lists which have very smart, highly educated people as members who produce amazingly compelling, amazingly complex arguments about why the online music scene has degenerated and what could/should be done about it.

But when you cut through all the erudite rationalising, all the clever explanations, all the learned legal arguments, all the carefully compiled statistics and calculations, it boils down to just this:

The labels are screwing not only their customers, but anyone and everyone around them and associated with them in any way. Period.

How will they make themselves smell nice and start making money from online music lovers?

“Just lower your f**king prices you tossers,” suggests a p2pnet Reader’s Write. “Also produce better music. Not rocket science really.”

Not really. But things become a little difficult if you’ re not really trying to compete in an open market because what you’re really trying to do is totally dominate it.

Shot down in flames

Since 2003, the Big 4 have been trying to bring things under control — their control — by clogging law courts around the world with baseless copyright infringement cases, using legal systems to try to terrorise people into buying corporate ‘product’ and only corporate ‘product,’ taking already hard-pressed police officers away from their proper jobs to chase down music industry allegations of copyright infringement, and so on, ad nauseum.

They’ve used subpoenas to terrorise close to 40,000 innocent men women and children in America but have yet to bring even in one copyright infringement case to a satisfactory, for them, conclusion.

The Big $ crowed about their only victory, a ‘triumph’ centering on Minnesota mother Jammie Thomas. But soon afterwards, the case was shot down in flames and is to be retried.

However, they’ve been able to tout their spurious allegations in a massive, multi-million-dollar PR campaign which has the mainstream media incorrectly reporting thousands of people have been  successfully sued as massive online distributors of corporate-owned digital music files.

They’re also using ’studies’ to create the entirely erroneous impression they’re on top of things.

Legal’ downloads are growing faster than ‘piracy,’ claimed the NPD Group, said a recent p2pnet post, quoting Silicon Alley Insider which said »»»

The recession is not driving music lovers to piracy. Just away from their CD players.

The volume of legal music downloaded in Q3 increased 29% over the same period a year ago. That beats the growth in illegal music downloads over peer-to-peer networks, which rose 23% y/y.

Overall demand for music declined 2% in the third quarter, research group NPD reports.

But, “I’m not sure I entirely see the story here,” Eric Garland, CEO of media measurement company BigChampagne told p2pnet.

In fact, “The rate of growth paid downloads is down dramatically from previous years, as one would expect,” he said, “Because the rate of growth is not really an instructive measure here.”

He went on »»»

When paid downloads increase from ten songs sold to fifty, that’s a 500% increase, but only 40 songs sold.  Yet an increase from selling ten million songs to fifteen million songs is only a 50% increase — but five MILLION in new sales.

Put another way, it is the volume of activity that makes for a real comparison, and in our estimation the volume of P2P music downloads exceeds the paid downloads more than ten to one.

On the other hand, though, NPD’s assessment of the growth rate in P2P far outpaces our own.  We do not observe a 23% increase in P2P music downloads y-o-y.  On the contrary, while there is significant growth in film, TV and elsewhere, music is relatively flat.

Note the the growth rate of iTunes et al has slowed considerably and is expected to continue to do so.

Agreements in principle

They’re getting away with it in the US, Britain and France, but so far, Canadians are still relatively free from Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG depredations.

Will that last?

The Big 4 labels now say they’ll stop harassing ISPs for the identities of the men, women and children their RIAA claims are criminal and thieves because they share music with each other. But only if ISPs act as Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG factotums, doing their dirty work for them.

“Under the new approach, the RIAA will send an e-mail to an ISP when it believes one of the service provider’s customers is downloading music illegally,” explains the CBC.

“Depending on the deal set up with the service provider, customers will receive warnings, possibly followed by a slow-down in their connection speed and ultimately a cancellation of their access.

“The RIAA said it has agreements in principle with some U.S. ISPs, but it didn’t name them. Service providers have in the past been reluctant to act as copyright police, but some are becoming more co-operative with the entertainment industry as they seek to sign more deals for content with those same companies.”

The post goes on that Canadian ISPs have, “The government’s controversial Bill C-61 copyright reform legislation, introduced in the summer, contained a ’safe harbour’ provision that would have let ISPs off the hook for what their customers downloaded. Bill C-61, however, died when the fall election was called.

“Lawsuits against music downloaders have not materialized in Canada to the same level as in the United States. The Canadian Recording Industry Association in 2004 sued 29 unnamed alleged file-sharers but the case was defeated when the Federal Court of Canada ruled that making digital music files available to others for download did not constitute copyright infringement.”

“Some lawyers and internet law experts also argue that a private copying tax on blank media is intended to compensate artists for revenue lost to file-sharing.”

But, the CBC states,  the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) says the levy was never intended to legalize file-sharing.

“CRIA president Graham Henderson said it is not OK for a person to walk into a store, physically steal a CD, make copies of it and then have those copies considered legal.

“File-sharing of digital copies is the same thing, he asserted.”

‘File sharing lowers the price and allows an apparently large pool of individuals to enjoy music.’

Like so many (C)RIAA/Henderson statements, the assertion that sharing a tune is exactly the same as stealing a CD off a store shelf is total rubbish.

With sharing, no money changes hands, no one has been deprived of something he or she used to own and it’ s never been even vaguely proven that a file shared equals a sale lost.

In fact, “file sharing probably increases aggregate welfare,” conclude Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School who, with Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in their milestone The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales.

“Shifts from sales to downloads are simply transfers between firms and consumers. And while we have argued that file sharing imposes little dynamic cost in terms of future production, it has considerably increased the consumption of recorded music. File sharing lowers the price and allows an apparently large pool of individuals to enjoy music. The sheer magnitude of this ctivity, the billions of tracks which are downloaded each year, suggests the added social welfare from file sharing is likely to be quite high.”

The CBC goes on »»»

Henderson said the CRIA has had a policy of not suing downloaders since he took the group’s reins four years ago, despite people such as Barenaked Ladies frontman Steven Page warning that it was considering doing so. The CRIA has instead focused on getting copyright law straightened out so that it would be clear what people could and couldn’t do with their music, he said.

[Ottawa law professor Michael] Geist said the industry group has avoided lawsuits because of the negative publicity the 2004 case attracted. He also said that moves to involve ISPs as copyright cops in several countries have been hugely controversial and could backfire on both the industry and the service providers.

“It’s viewed by many as a draconian step and we’ve seen push back against it in many countries,” he said. “The ISPs that do that risk a serious backlash from their customers.”

Henderson applauded the RIAA’s move toward negotiating with ISPs and would like to do the same in Canada, but said the copyright situation needs to be sorted out first.

“Then we could give Canadians a fair chance to obey the law because, as I’ve said many, many times, I believe Canadians are fundamentally law abiding,” he said. “The problem in Canada is we don’t have laws to abide by. People are confused.”

The Conservatives promised to reintroduce copyright reform legislation as part of their election platform, but those plans were put on hold with the eruption of parliamentary turmoil in November. Although the CRIA praised Bill C-61 for its tough stance against file-sharing, the legislation was widely opposed by numerous other industry groups as being too heavily skewed toward copyright owners.

Geist said the only way the music industry can combat file-sharing is to provide a compelling legal alternative.

“The industry chose to sue rather than innovate,” he said. “They’re starting to come around, but it’s pretty late in the game.”

‘The last three CDs I purchased were crap’

In comment post to the CBC story,  “We now live in an information age, where technology is aimed at making the dissemination of that information faster and easier than previously possible,” says Imcyncial. “Anyone or any organization trying to control that flow is fighting a losing battle. They may have short-term wins, but the outcome will still be the same. In this particular case, even if the music industry gains control over ISPs, sooner or later, people will find other ways to share files.”

“The last three CDs I purchased were crap,” says Kikapu. “If I had downloaded them first to listen to them I would not have been duped into buying them. Next time , I’m auditioning the material first and if I like it, I’m buying as I always do. The record industry dropped the ball on quality control long before it got confused about how to market to the internet generation.

And, “Oh boy, here we go again,” says BobbyBee, adding »»»

When will the RIAA and the CRIA realize that music sales aren’t down because of very debatable ‘downloading figures’. Music sales are plummeting because people like me would rather like to ignore ‘produced’ product and go for a more homegrown or independent flavour.

And even for more ‘mainstream’ bands I try to purchase directly from their websites as I really like the idea of the money going directly to the band and not some recording company leeches. Myself, I like a physical product so I still prefer purchasing an actual product as opposed to a download from iTunes.

There are other reasons sales are down as well. When I buy a CD the first thing I do is rip it to my computer in either OGG or FLAC format. The cd then goes into a shelving unit never to be touched again. Remember vinyl or cassette.For various reason you’d have to replace your albums or cassettes periodically after heavy use. Those types of sales all but disappeared with the advent of CD’s and archival storage.

And with the advent of the internet you are no longer limited to only purchasing bands that the record companies decide are this month’s flavour. And computer technology has advanced to the point that any band can ‘mass’ produce their own CD’s completely with labeling and packaging and sell it direct either online or at a concert or festival and make a hell of a lot more money than if they let the record company leeches do the same on their behalf.

And look at Youtube, bands no longer need the big labels for advertising or merchandising.

No, the RIAA and the CRIA need government levies and subsidies to survive as they are a very failed and flawed business model. Kinda reminds me of the Big 3 automakers.

Well, that’s the end of my rant.

Stay tuned

Jon Newton – p2pnet

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P, RIAA News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 4470 times