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Internet Piracy- The Way forward

Posted by PhilipE on Jan 26, 2009 at 16:58

Internet Piracy and illegal downloads has been endlessly discussed and argued yet the industry remains in permanent state of perpetual indecision. Granted, there have been numerous initiatives and new ideas, but there has been a distinct lack of consequence and willingness to follow them through. On the one hand, the music industry has called this mess upon themselves in that it was far too slow to react and adapt to the digital world. New business models and accessibility to legal downloads still remains wanting and it took a technology company, whose core business was not music, to break the of legarthic state of the recording industry. Yet Illegal download sites have learnt how to cater for the digital consumer far better than the music industry. The industry initially countered the problem by prosecuting offenders and locking legitimate music into DRMS- making illegal downloads, that can be played every where even more appealing. However we now seem to be having a turning point. Scanning the news over the last few weeks has shown some astonishing developments; The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) decided to drop their strategy of bringing offenders to court, and the days of DRMs seem to be coming to an end with Apple’s announcement that it will be dropping DRMS on millions of songs on iTunes. Also, the UK government announced that it has no plans to introduce regulation that would force ISPs to terminate the service of internet pirates.

So what next? Fact is that the industry needs to find a way to secure an income. I.e. using online advertising as a source of income as My Music decided to do. But there are also other ambitious and bold projects, the Isle of Man for example, a lonely rainy outpost somewhere in the Irish sea, has come up with a solution, in which it wants to introduce a type of “pirate tax” (officially called a fee) to all broadband subscribers- in return its 80.000 population would be able to download unlimited amounts of music. This is certainly a radical approach but not necessarily a new idea. However is this a model that can be copied in 80 million Germany? Unlikely, as it would only be a matter of time before consumer rights organisations begin to question why everyone needs to pay for those downloading illegally. There are however less controversial initiatives, such as the Warner/Chappell Music’s Pan European Digital Licensing Initiative (PEDL). The PEDL is an important first step in the right direction in that it acknowledges the digital world as a significant distributor of music, it forces a increased transparent way of managing these digital rights and leads up to de facto pan-European, one stop shop, licence and will therefore facilitate new innovative legitimate business models and ensure enumeration for artists and labels.

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