In an account of the Pirate Bay trials by Dagens Nyheter, Peter Althin, Peter Sundes lawyer asks IFPI’s chairman and CEO John Kennedy whether Kennedy really claims that everyone who illegally downloaded a record would have bought it if it wasn’t available at sites like Pirate Bay. Kennedy answers yes to this question.
I can’t understand this strategy. Wouldn’t it be wise to at least stay within the boundaries of reason? A kid with 150GB of music on his or her hard drive (not uncommon today) would have to pay over $30000 to buy this music at retail price. Is it reasonable to assume that they would have spent this much of their weekly allowance on CDs?
I rest my case.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Walter,
I agree with you on this issue (music). I see that you write a lot about this in your blogs. In my opinion however, the issue is already (or almost) solved. Music is already provided in various forms over the internet and, yes music was created before the existence of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). I agree that the current internet music services (e.g. itunes which seems obsolete and indeed is very hypocrite) could be improved but that is not so much an intellectual property issue. Is it? Correct me if I am wrong but has not the industry more or less reluctantly agreed to alternative ways of providing music (streaming, tunerec, youtube etc.)…
In my opinion the field that deserves more attention is how movies and pictures from movies are provided on the internet. The need for strong economic incentives in this field seems to be much more important. I mean, do you think that for example Harry Potter, all the episodes of the Simpsons or other movies/TV shows that require significant investment would have been made without the protection of IPR?
I see a threat here. An imminent threat to the existence of movie theatres or even in the long run to multimillion movie/TV productions where movies are made available cheaply or for free on the internet in connection to their release or shortly thereafter.
This need for an economic incentive in the form of IPR should of course be put into contrast with the need to use movies as a basis for creativity (e.g. I make a collage of film IPR protected sequences and sounds in order to create a new piece of art or to get a message across to other people). What do we do in these cases? Should we allow people to use just bits and pieces from movies in order to create something new? Where do we draw the line here? “Hey you may use max. 20 secs from a movie but not more, then you have to pay”, does not really seem to be a solution to me. I think these issues are more relevant and tougher to tackle than the downloading of music.
What do you think?
/ Anders
Hi! Good to see you on the blog!
Of course you are right about all these things, and no, I’m not sure any of the works you mentioned would have been made were it not for IPR. But not because I think IPR has stopped much downloading, but because without IPR copied and cheaper DVDs, for instance, would have been sold side by side with originals in the mainstream channels, diminishing these important, though fading, revenue streams.
But this is really not my point. My point is to be pragmatic about the facts in this situation. There is simply no way to stop piracy by legislation, because there is no way to effectively enforce such legislation. If we would somehow manage to control every bit of communication (undesirable, but theoretically possible) an encrypted file sharing service would pop up within weeks. If we then ban encrypted services on networks (which would also ruin secure transactions of other sorts) an encrypted file sharing service disguising itself as something else would emerge. All we would accomplish would be to make the internet less functional, create excellent terrorist technology and create a whole class of criminals (undermining morale in the process). The new IPRED-law is a distinct and very unfortunate move in this direction.
It’s like trying to legislate against wind, and what I’m saying is that it’s better to focus on innovating and building sail boats.
Looking forward to visiting you soon!