Key online music sales hearings
p2pnet.net News View:- A Reuters article by Larry LeBlanc discusses upcoming Copyright Board hearings to begin on September 6 to discuss the rates for online music distribution.
For those who think the “music industry” is all one happy family, they should note the animosity between the collective societies who collect royalties for music publishers (The songwriter/etc side of the industry) and the major labels (the recording industry side).
While these hearings will discuss rates to be imposed on all companies who distribute music online, missing from any of the discussion are publishers and labels whose artists use royalty-free licenses for specific online distribution.
My worry is that the incumbents will yet again impose themselves and their outdated business models onto everyone, with CMRRA/SODRAC doing for music distribution in Canada what Access Copyright is doing for the distribution of literary works. Royalty-free distribution models such as Open Access, and licensing models such as Creative Commons should be allowed to co-exist with those creators who choose to seek royalties on all uses of their works.
I believe these will be very important hearings and this may be the beginning of a process that’ll ultimately result in legal clarity for issues such as whether different software configurations used by the sender/receiver used for online music distribution can/should be separated (they are all just bits sent from one computer to another), when this is a communication to the public by telecommunications (vs a private communication), and whether there’s any “distribution” right involved in online “distribution” at all (Distribution previously referred to mechanical copies).
In the past, I attempted to figure out the specifics behind the P2P example in Canadian Peer-to-peer (P2P) legal theories, proposals and questions.
What’s often called ’streaming’ and ‘downloading’ involve similar issues. A purely technical person will see all of these as ‘bits over the network’, with it being up to how the recipient configures their software whether there is a difference between ’streaming’ and ‘downloading’. Contrary to how the legal community has been thinking, this isn’t a question determined by the sender.
The article is old now, but I haven’t seen any more recent cases that have made this any clearer. It may be that these Copyright Board hearings, and the court cases that may result from the possible disagreements with the Copyright Boards decision, will clarify these issues.
Note: As you read this, please remember the Government of Canada has set “clarifying and simplifying the Act” as the last item on the lowest priority for copyright revision, when this should be the first priority and a priority that must be followed in all other revisions.
I obviously believe the Government has its priorities entirely backwards, placing the highly controversial and misread (by the government and some extremist lobby groups) 1996 anti-Internet WIPO treaties as a high priority.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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