March 13, 2000 New Thinking:
Free music
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March 13, 2000
Free music
By Gerry McGovern
I’ve been a big music fan most of my life. I’d have to say that I’ve bought my fair share of bootlegs and have, on occasion, bootlegged a concert of a favorite band. I would be lying if I said I never borrowed an album and taped it or taped an album of mine for a friend.
I didn’t and don’t see anything too wrong with the above. The music industry has made a hell of a lot of money out of me over the years. For every album I might have copied, I purchased at least ten.
The easier it is for something to be copied the more it will be copied and the less people will perceive it to be ‘wrong’ to copy it.
Napster is a piece of software that allows people to easily copy and share digitized songs. By all accounts, there are a lot of kids around the world right now using Napster to copy and share an incredible amount of music. Most of them, it would seem, don’t see anything wrong in what they’re doing.
"There's an incredible disconnect out there between what is normal behavior in the physical world versus the online world," Carey Sherman, general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America told The New York Times recently. "There are people who think nothing of downloading entire CD collections on Napster who wouldn't dream of shoplifting from Tower Records.”
Everybody has to get paid for the work that they do, otherwise we’ll have very little music being made. But what’s the answer? Sue all students and young people? “One of the fastest ways to turn potential customers off is to say they're all a bunch of thieves," a copyright expert at UC-Berkeley told The New York Times. "You start hating your customers and your customers are going to start hating you back, and that doesn't bode well for your ability to attract them to buy more stuff from you. It makes them more inclined to infringe rather than buy."
The ability to easily copy is a major challenge for producers of digital products. And we’re not just talking about music copying. The American National Law Journal has recently reported that students are increasingly selling lecture notes to private companies. Just who owns the copyright to these notes? The student? The lecturer? The university? The Software and Information Industry Association has estimated that almost 50 percent of the software on students computers is copied rather than bought.
If practically every young person who has access to the Internet sees copying as a perfectly normal thing to do, then companies need to find new ways of making money out of digital things. Because there’s no point in suing everyone under twenty five. I remember reading once that while it is impossible to track how many times something has been copied, it is much easier to track how many times it has been used.
It would look like the music industry is quickly embracing the idea of pay-per-listen. Whatever strategy it takes, it knows it has to move fast. “Even piracy, that’s hands-down a copyright infringement, can in certain instances speed up the process of legitimate market development,” Strauss Zelnick, president of BMG Entertainment told ABC News last week, “We’re moving quickly, we need to move even more quickly.” That’s for sure.
Gerry McGovern
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If practically every young person who has access to the Internet sees copying as a perfectly normal thing to do, then companies need to find new ways of making money out of digital things.
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