Andy Ho of The Straits Times says that the new music piracy law is fair play. (Reproduced below for discussion because the article will disappear from their site soon)
What do YOU think?
Here are some other possible reasons I can think of to account for the music industry's decline:
1. Competition with other forms of entertainment
2. Poor quality product
3. Insistence on sticking to an out-of-date CD format when people are listening to music differently and just want to get per-song downloads
4. High prices and making consumers buy an entire album when only one song is good
5. Suing their own customers instead of winning them over
6. Making legit customers pissed off with pain-in-the-ass Copy-Control CDs that cannot work in all audio devices and cannot be easily ripped into mp3 players like the iPod.
7. No viable alternative for users who want paid downloads (until iTunes came along)
8. Sales have not declined, shipments have, because retailers are now ordering what they think they need, and not eating the overrun
9. Britney Spears
Excerpt:
Oct 29, 2004
New music piracy law is fair play
By Andy Ho
THE Singapore Parliament last week sought to amend the Copyright Act to align it with American law as part of Singapore's obligations under its bilateral free trade pact with the United States.
Many of the proposed provisions cover the illegal downloading of music, no surprise since the Recording Industry Association of America is an aggressive trade group that has influenced recent changes to US copyright law.
Under the amendments, unauthorised downloading of a 'commercial scale' will be deemed a criminal act. Several lawyers, this newspaper reported, criticised this as being unclear and unhelpful. In fact, the proposed changes make good law.
Here are some other interesting links that explore filesharing, copyright and music sales decline:
File-sharing has no impact on CD sales, says research
Kazaa and co ‘not cause of music biz woes’, say Profs
CEA: It's time for music industry to quit singing the blues
RIAA accounting practices a leading cause of declining music sales
Piracy not the burning issue in CD sales slide: ARIA
Nielsen Rating System At Odds With RIAA's Claim Of "Lost Sales
Internet File Sharing: The Evidence So Far and What It Means for the Future
Oct 29, 2004
New music piracy law is fair play
By Andy Ho
THE Singapore Parliament last week sought to amend the Copyright Act to align it with American law as part of Singapore's obligations under its bilateral free trade pact with the United States.
Many of the proposed provisions cover the illegal downloading of music, no surprise since the Recording Industry Association of America is an aggressive trade group that has influenced recent changes to US copyright law.
Under the amendments, unauthorised downloading of a 'commercial scale' will be deemed a criminal act. Several lawyers, this newspaper reported, criticised this as being unclear and unhelpful. In fact, the proposed changes make good law.
Why do I say this?
Recent technological advances have caused the music industry to lose revenues to serious piracy. Three developments in particular stand out: MP3 audio compression, high-speed Internet connections, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file transfer systems like Napster.
MP3 is software that enables an audio file from a CD to be compressed in size ten-fold, while retaining its audio quality. The small file size makes for reasonably fast online distribution. Many people have put up websites where MP3 files can be downloaded for free.
Next, combine MP3s with high-speed Internet connections and downloading gets faster.
Finally, P2P appeared in the form of a software programme called Napster.
Prior to P2P, getting or offering MP3 files was done on websites put up by others (which actually reside on some Internet Service Providers' servers somewhere in the world). You used a search engine like Yahoo to find a site where MP3 files were available for download - but this was not always fast enough.
Napster, when it appeared in 1999, however, enabled users to search for music not on websites but on the hard drives of other Internet users as long as they were logged in to Napster's server. Suddenly, remote computers all over the world were transformed into one big file-sharing (in other words, piracy) network.
By using a search word like an artist's name or a song title, you located your desired file on a Napster server which then directed you to some hard disk around the world that held the song and was connected to the Napster server. You then started your download.
What makes P2P even greater is that if the hard disk you are accessing suddenly ends its Internet connection, your download continues at another hard disk with the same song at exactly where it left off, without any interruption.
Yes, US courts were able, under their Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), to switch Napster off because the software and database were housed in a mainframe. But up popped another P2P software called Gnutella that was not on a mainframe.
Without a central database, the courts cannot turn it off. Instead. Gnutella is just a piece of Windows-based software distributed over the Internet. When installed and activated, it searches for others which also have the software installed on their hard disks and returns a list of where a requested song is available. Then you just download it if you want to.
The result is a virtual library, a network of millions of hard disks hosting billions of audio files. Free music is suddenly everywhere on an unprecedented scale. To add to their attraction, even newer P2P programmes allow users to remain anonymous, so copyright owners may not be able to identify infringing users.
The industry that got Napster to shut down can now do little against its successors that are virtual networks - besides Gnutella, there are KaZaA, Grokster, LimeWire and more. So why not just shut the networks down?
First, if you disconnect some computers, the others will just reconnect to each other. That is, the network will just reconstitute itself. It is well-nigh impossible to shut the service down without changing the basic way in which the Internet operates.
Second, even if you could, it would not be a good idea because it would condemn all of us to a less-efficient mechanism for sharing digital files. It is not all about music. Right now, an author can make his copyrighted material available to the public free and do so at little dollar cost to himself.
For example, renowned anthropologist Michael Sahlins is making some of his works available free oncreativecommons.org while MIT and Rice University have made some of their instructional materials available in the same way. Even Microsoft has disseminated software over such networks.
Then there is the BBC's plan to digitise its television archive and make it accessible for private non-commercial use at no charge. This will be possible only because using P2P networks reduces the project's costs. Hardware alone for even a partial archive would have cost too much. Instead, downloaders will just burn those files onto DVDs themselves to create their own copies at their own costs.
Thus shutting down P2P is no solution. What is needed is an equitable law.
As Ms Liew Woon Yin, director-general of the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, makes clear, the new law is not meant to target home users who download one or two copies, only those who do it deliberately and flagrantly in large volumes.
So, download free music judiciously. In other words, use it fairly.
When it comes to free music, two fantasies exist. One is that information (read music) wants to be free. Apparently created somewhere by someone, it then circulates freely to everyone, so who needs copyright? The other fantasy is where record company executives dream about immaculate control over every digital copy of music.
Fair use, however, is about limiting both fantasies. Contrary to claims that we won't know what fair use is until a case is prosecuted, US jurisprudence (which would set precedents for Singapore) clearly requires a fact-intensive, case-by-case examination that balances four factors.
First, is use for-profit or non-profit, and is use adaptative or purely reproductive copying?
Second, is the original creative and imaginative or merely informational and functional, such as telephone directories or various systems of bookkeeping.
Third, how much is copied?
Finally, will copying affect the potential market of the original?
For example, in a case brought before US courts in 2000, record companies showed that after Napster was introduced in 1999, students at highly-wired colleges bought 12-13 per cent fewer CDs even as CD sales rose by 18 per cent in the US as a whole. So the courts shut Napster down.
In another case, the US recording industry began going after 261 individuals in September last year, including a 12-year old girl who had thousands of songs on her hard disk. The publicity alone was enough to cause a 40-per cent drop in KaZaA traffic immediately, so there was a salutary educational effect with a minimum of legal activity.
But this enforcement against individuals will probably not continue because there are millions of them and because the global nature of the Internet creates jurisdictional problems.
KaZaA litigation, for example, has involved Estonian developers, a Dutch company, and Australian business executives in a Vanuatu-registered firm.
Moreover, going after all users is potentially courting a publicity disaster. True, it was reported last February that 25 undergraduates had been fined by their universities, but not the music companies.
In fact, a person sampling and downloading music for his own enjoyment is not what the industry is after, primarily. The real digital stakes lie in getting those who facilitate infringement by others by offering their entire MP3 inventory for uploading, say on KaZaA. When you offer something for upload, you are engaging in the act of distribution, which is the record companies' bread-and-butter.
So why write an expansive law? The answer is because copyright law has had to, historically, play catch-up with technology. Imagine how pre-Xerox laws must have been unsuitable once reprographic technology became widely available to the public.
More recent is the DMCA US copyright law, a reading of which shows that it only applies to data found on ISP servers because in 1998, that's where MP3s resided. They weren't on the users' own hard drives but now they are, with P2P.
So we really don't want to freeze anything. To write hard and fast rules based on current technology would be unwise. Rather, escape valves will allow courts to adjust protection in the light of new realities.
Apart from legal recourse, are there other solutions?
Yes, one is using technology to make music so cheap it is not worth copying. In April last year, Apple Computer unveiled a new online music service, the iTunes Music Store. It offers low-priced music downloads from five major record labels.
For US$0.99 ($1.66) you can put a song on up to three computers, any number of iPods, and you may burn 10 copies on CD. For most people, these are more than enough. Yes, if you want the 11th copy, you could reorder, which seems reasonable to most people.
Though Asian fans won't have iTunes until next year, a small local company, Soundbuzz, does offer music to users in Singapore, Hong Kong, India and Australia. At $1.99 per song downloaded to iPods or other playback devices, it is already selling 100,000 songs every month.
So technology like iTunes is allowing limited copying while the industry is accepting a certain norm about sharing and then reinforcing it by being willing to provide content. We have seen this before. There are classroom guidelines on photocopying, for example, that have become accepted as the upper limits. They tell people 'thus far and no further' and people now abide by it.
Deals like these will get a new generation to try a legitimate service, enjoy it - no guilt, no recriminations - adopt it and, later, use it when they have more cash.
With iTunes, KaZaA just seems immoral. Yes, there are some who want everything free all the time but most people just observe what others do, decide what's fair, then realign their expectations with the alternatives around.
This is good news for the industry. Other technological solutions we can't imagine now might be in the offing too. Thus, all in all, it makes good sense to have an expansive law.
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