Open standard ‘a worthy goal’
Corporate music industry giants are uniting to snow The Public at Large.
‘Legitimate downloading’ [read corporate music store sales] and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) sue ‘em all campaign against alleged copyright breakers are making a major impact on file sharing, they claim.
Slyck’s p2p network file share stats don’t suggest this is the case, however. Yesterday, they were: FastTrack, 3,770,372; eDonkey, 1,807,454; iMesh, 1,201,591; Overnet, 1,032,192; MP2P, 250,114; DirectConnect, 225,975; Gnutella, 206,979; Ares, 59,602; and Filetopia, 4,097.
In the meanwhile, “Most companies don’t want one standard to dominate, and they are working toward an open standard. That includes Sony, Apple and Nokia,” says Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony’s US operations and head of the company’s film and main music units.
Quoted in a Reuters story here, “working out an open standard over the next six months will be a very worthy goal and a priority,” he says.
Earlier in the story, “It’s clear that the impact of piracy is diminished by legitimate downloading. It also seems that lawsuits have made an impact,” he says.
“My expectation is that Sony Music will be profitable in our fiscal year (to end-March), although it’s too early to know for sure.”
Too early indeed.
“Sony’s music sales contracted 8.9 percent in the quarter to end-September,” the reports goes on. “Stringer said the sharp decline appeared to be leveling off, but he could not yet say if the industry’s music sales were now flat or still falling very slightly.
“Stringer’s comments follow a study published on Thursday which appeared to show that anti-piracy campaigns by the big music publishers had dented Internet piracy levels worldwide.”
The ’study’ he’s referring to is, no doubt, yesterday’s IFPI report.
But Sony, which said in December it planned to join its music unit with that of Bertelsmann’s BMG music division, cautioned that piracy had not ended, Reuters states.
“The situation has improved, but it hasn’t gone away,” said Stringer, adding that the next battle was already shaping up.
“Everybody in the electronics and music industry is very nervous, especially about piracy of movies, which is the talk of the town here in Davos,” he said, referring to what Reuters describes as “the annual huddle in this Swiss ski resort to discuss burning issues and clinch deals”.
Protection of digital films and music on the Web was one of the many topics discussed and according to Stringer, industry “players,” including Sony, are going their own way – “building Internet music stores, protecting their music with their own software, and making it available on their own devices”.
But, “Ultimately consumers should be able to play a song or film that they purchased on any system or device,” he says in the story. “You can’t count on the fact that all consumers will have a Sony TV or an Apple computer. So, it has to be opened up.”
The alternative was to wait for one distribution system to win the digital battle and become a de facto standard, putting that company in control of how consumers watch movies and listen to music. [Our emphasis]
But, he said, the entertainment industry is worried Microsoft might win that battle.
No kidding.
