Providence Journal
01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, July 12, 2005
If history is any precedent, the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision clearing the way for the music industry to sue the pants off Grokster and StreamCast (and any other file-sharing service that promotes copyright infringement) will not really have much of a long-term effect on the illegal downloading of music.
For a while, the music industry will applaud the court's decision, which reasonably said that services that deliberately permit illegal behavior (and copyright infringement is, let's not forget, illegal) should be held accountable. Lawsuits will, of course, follow. And services that have been a little reckless in promoting their product as a way to illegally share copyrighted material (the mistake that Grokster and StreamCast made, in the court's eyes) will shut down or be shut down.
Yet just as after Napster was defused, dozens of clones took its place with new legal precautions, now, in the wake of MGM v. Grokster, it seems unlikely that the file-sharing parade will stop. Rather, new companies will simply be more careful about how they describe and market their services, so as not to run afoul of the new legal standard. Or they'll just move their headquarters to, say, Pacific islands where U.S. laws don't apply, and nobody can track them down anyway.
The strange thing is that for all the industry complaints that relentless and evil file sharing threatens to destroy the very companies that so selflessly gave us the joys of the Backstreet Boys and Shakira, the music industry is actually making out quite well these days. Last year, the recorded-music market grew 5.7 percent from the year before, to $38 billion, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers's recently released Global Entertainment and Media Outlook. The report also predicts that the global media industry (including entertainment) is expected to grow 7.3 percent annually for the next five years.
Why the projected growth? According to the report, the spread of technology: ever more online digital distribution of content. But such technology cuts two ways. It lets the music industry reach people around the world and makes content easy to buy; it also makes it easy to copy stuff illegally. According to the music industry's own estimates, one in every three compact disks sold around the world (about 1.2 billion) is now a pirated copy, which reportedly costs the music industry $4.6 billion a year.
Although we condemn such rampant copyright infringement, it also seems, in today's world, increasingly impossible to stop. Essentially, technology is overrunning copyright law as we know it.
Sure, entertainment companies will continue to sue to fight piracy, because copyright royalties and hence enforcement are important parts of their business model. But such a model is becoming obsolete.
We suspect that music and movies will always find a way to get made, simply because there are so many people who are passionate about making them. But how they make their money will have to be frequently revised, to meet the realities of modern technology -- and associated crime.
http://www.projo.com/opinion/editorials/content/projo_20050712_12edgr.ok.402b7da.html
No comments:
Post a Comment