<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/21/money-talks-in-the-world-of-copyright-legislation-and-thats-a-big-problem-for-ordinary-internet-users/>
"Copyright has always been about money. That’s why the copyright industry
fights so hard to strengthen legal protections, in order to boost its profits.
However, getting detailed information about how much money is involved, and who
receives it, is hard, because there are so many small pieces to the overall
copyright ecosystem. That makes a long post exploring money in the global music
business by Will Page on the
Pivotal Economics site particularly welcome.
One striking chart shows global music streaming revenues rising from negligible
rates in 2005 to $5.5 billion in 2022. This underlines how foolish the music
business was to resist the move to online music – it could probably have made
billions more dollars had it started earlier. Instead, it sued the pioneering
service Napster into the ground in 2001. It was a typically short-sighted move
that impoverished not just the music industry, but society as a whole, for a
reason Lawrence Lessig explains in his book
Free Culture:
When Napster told the district court that it had developed a technology to
block the transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material, the
district court told counsel for Napster 99.4 percent was not good enough.
Napster had to push the infringements ‘down to zero.’
If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing
technologies, not a war on copyright infringement. There is no way to assure
that a p2p [peer-to-peer] system is used 100 percent of the time in
compliance with the law, any more than there is a way to assure that 100
percent of VCRs or 100 percent of Xerox machines or 100 percent of handguns
are used in compliance with the law. Zero tolerance means zero p2p. The
court’s ruling means that we as a society must lose the benefits of p2p,
even for the totally legal and beneficial uses they serve, simply to assure
that there are zero copyright infringements caused by p2p.
It’s good news for the music industry that streaming now brings in $5.5 billion
a year, an increase of $800 million over 2021. But it’s unlikely much of that
boost reached the people who made it possible – the musicians."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
