Quoting the Crisis

19/11/2009

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It’s interesting too that, overall, industry revenues have grown in the period - though admittedly not by much - which arguably adds strength to the notion that, when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much ‘the music industry’ has suffered from the growth in illegal file-sharing, what it perhaps should be saying is how much the record labels have suffered.

For other people in the industry, not least artists, the future arguably holds more promise.

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Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? — Times Labs Blog

Quote posted at 09:01

18/11/2009

“ An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. […] This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most people realise. „

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? — Times Labs Blog

Quote posted at 23:08

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We are in the midst of a revolution in the way that knowledge and culture are created, accessed and transformed. Citizens, artists and consumers are no longer powerless and isolated in the face of the content-providing industries: now individuals across many different spheres collaborate, participate and decide. Digital technology has bridged the gap, allowing ideas and knowledge to flow. It has done away with many of the geographic and technological barriers to sharing. It has provided new educational tools and stimulated new possibilities for forms of social, economic and political organisation. This revolution is comparable to the far reaching changes brought about as a result of the printing press.

In spite of these transformations, the entertainment industry, most communications service providers governments and international bodies still base the sources of their advantages and profits on control of content and tools and on managing scarcity. This leads to restrictions on citizens’ rights to education, access to information, culture, science and technology; freedom of expression; inviolability of communications and privacy. They put the protection of private interests above the public interest, holding back the development of society in general.

Today’s institutions, industries, structures or conventions will not survive into the future unless they adapt to these changes. Some, however, will alter and refine their methods in response to the new realities. And we need to take account of this.

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Introduction of the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge (Complete Version) @ FCForum

Quote posted at 21:08

15/11/2009

“ Any cheap, inaccurate enforcement scheme will face this dilemma: it can be accurate, or it can be fair, but it can’t be both. The better is works, the more unfair it gets. It can never reach the high-compliance, low-enforcement equilibrium that should be the goal of every enforcement strategy. „

Ed Felten in Targeted Copyright Enforcement vs. Inaccurate Enforcement | Freedom to Tinker

Quote posted at 15:03

28/10/2009

“ Conservatives used the Tragedy of the Commons to argue for property rights, and that efficiency was achieved as people were thrown off the commons…What Ostrom has demonstrated is the existence of social control mechanisms that regulate the use of the commons without having to resort to property rights. „

The Victory of the Commons (via azspot)

Quote posted at 18:58

20/10/2009

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Much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available.

We do not believe that disconnecting end users is in the slightest bit consistent with policies that attempt to promote eGovernment, and we recommend that this approach to dealing with illegal file-sharing should not be further considered.

We think that it is inappropriate to make policy choices in the UK when policy options are still to be agreed by the EU Commission and EU Parliament in their negotiations over the ‘Telecoms Package’. We recommend that the government terminate their current policy-making process, and restart it with a new consultation once the EU has made its decisions.

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The All Party Parliamentary Communications Group, quoted by Robert Andrews in MPs Urge Govt To Drop Disconnections, Blame Entertainment Business | paidContent:UK

Quote posted at 21:06

14/10/2009

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Dear Copyright Alliance,

We, the undersigned, are just a few of the more than 304 million people living, working, and consuming across the United States. Our support allows you to bring significant cultural and economic value to our society and helps you to contribute $1.52 trillion to the nation’s GDP (oh, yeah, and we’re responsible for that other $12.32 trillion, too). Yet the value of our support is increasingly under threat as you attempt to extend the rights we’ve granted you to unjustifiable levels.

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Beginning of the answer to the Copyright Alliance letter, by an anonymous reader in a comment to William Patry’s Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: We Are Copyright Alliance, Hear Us Roar [read in full]

Quote posted at 15:02

“ We also need a much shorter term of protection; I think the 56 years in the 1909 Act was quite enough. Life plus 70 makes a farce of copyright: there is no author on the face of the earth who would have refused to create under a life plus 50 regime because that regime was, allegedly, too short. „

William Patry, in an answer to a reader comment on Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: We Are Copyright Alliance, Hear Us Roar

Quote posted at 11:01

13/10/2009

“ In my prior blog I would occasionally write about the buffoonery of the Copyright Alliance, a laughably, tragically inept DC front organization for large corporate copyright owners portraying itself as the voice of individual artists. You know, the individual performing artists that the RIAA sought to deprive of their termination of transfer rights when the RIAA snuck in, in the dead of the night with no hearing, no bill, or no notice, legislation to convert them into employees for hire. You know, the artists whom the RIAA sought to deprive of bankruptcy protection. You know, the artists the MPAA has successfully prevented from gaining audiovisual performance rights in WIPO treaty negotiations. You know, those artists. „

William Patry in Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: We Are Copyright Alliance, Hear Us Roar

Quote posted at 23:08

“ So here is my plea, President Obama and Vice President Biden: throw the Alliance’s letters in the trash where they belong, and demand that we have effective copyright laws: not slogans, not inside the beltway bunkum, but instead change in our copyright laws we can believe in. Copyright laws that further creativity and innovation not smother them. „

William Patry in Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: We Are Copyright Alliance, Hear Us Roar

Quote posted at 17:04

“ Governments, market forces, publishers, and traditional academic libraries can influence, but are not able to stop, the international movement of distributed information. „

Law and Contemporary Problems: Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource, 66 Law & Contemp. Probs. 111 (WinterSpring 2003)

Quote posted at 15:03

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Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success.

But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

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Op-Ed Columnist - Paul Krugman - Bits, Bands and Books, Paying for Creativity in a Digital World - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Quote posted at 13:02

12/10/2009

“ Information that used to be “free” is now increasingly being privatized, monitored, encrypted, and restricted. The enclosure is caused by the conflicts and contradictions between intellectual property laws and the expanded capacities of new technologies.3 It leads to speculation that the records of scholarly communication, the foundations of an informed, democratic society, may be at risk. „

Law and Contemporary Problems: Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource, 66 Law & Contemp. Probs. 111 (WinterSpring 2003)

Quote posted at 16:07

21/09/2009

“ In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more? „

Post-Medium Publishing (via neekolas)