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Editorial by Gene Pitts
Owner and editor of the audiophile voice.The RIAA Bit My Napster
Okay, Napster it is in the ropes, reeling from the March 6th Injunction by Federal judge Marilyn Patel that it stop the exchange of digital files of music where the copyright is owned by major record companies. Judge Patel had called the file exchange a "wholesale infringement of copyrights."' However, the horse is still gone, even though the door's locked. Maybe the horse was never there.
Frankly, I think the decision is confused. I think it's about money and to whom the sources of money belong. It's about not understanding what a fair and reasonable use is. It's not about reaching a fair and reasonable understanding about how sale is different than loan or trade when it comes to copyrights. It is a high Romantic notion, one that in great part traces its origins back to La Bohème and Merger, that artists deserve something special in the protection of their rights to their works. Essentially, I'm saying copyrights should be regarded as the same as patent rights, and one should pay attention to the fact that the rights to most of today's music, especially the most popular music, DO NOT belong to the people who wrote it. Did you know, for example, that the rights to The Beatles catalog aren't the surviving three plus Yoko, but rather by Michael Jackson, who merely needs the money?
While I doubt that many people did, it has been possible to copy in the home ever since one could trundle two Edison cylinder machines up to one another and point one horn into the other. And that is well over a century ago. Maybe You know of an infringement lawsuit over that; I don't.
It's like the record firms never heard of libraries about which no publisher of books or magazines ever complained: "They've got 999 library-card holders, so they've got to buy 999 subscriptions to my magazine" Do the record companies complain that the libraries lend out CDs and more than one person listens? Do they seriously contend that libraries cut into the sales of CDs?
Or this about this scenario. Wife comes home with a magazine from the newsstand and her daughter reads an article, after which the Thought-Police come and arrest her for copyright violation.
Or maybe there needs to be "One-Person" and "Three-Person" and "10-Person" and "Unlimited' Listening License for new CDs. Or maybe you need to pay a higher price for the CD if you intend to listen to it more times or years than some other piece of music. I can just hear the opera -guys now: "No, you have to pay a larger Listening License Fee for Puccini than for Wagner." Right but you'll have to pay me to listen to...
In magazine publishing, an industry that dates back to Gutenburg who lived a few hundred years earlier than Edison and Berliner, we're proud of our pass-along readership numbers and actively try to publicize them.
I just had an argument about all this with a guitarist and record producer I know better for his reviewing capabilities. He's written up discs for me for about a quarter century while he helped make records for other folks. Our conversation started out to be about his purchase of a CD burner which he wants to use to make copies of his demo CD-Rs. He says he's losing money because of Napster and that he thought "the record industry was down," particularly in his area. Since I thought I'd seen statistics to the contrary in the newspaper, I checked the Recording Industry Assn. website where i found year-on-year figures ending in June 2000.
The majority of areas the RIAA reports on (cassette, vinyl EP/LP, CD single, cassette single, and vinyl single) are down, but the industry as a whole is up 4.1 per cent. Besides, everything else is dwarfed by the size of CD sales, which grew six per cent in units and almost 10 per cent in dollars. The total dollar value for CDs was thought to be over $5,681 million during the first half of 2000, up from $5,171 for the first half of 1999. The next biggest segment was cassettes which dropped by 37 per cent from $482 million to $303 million.
Under the "statistics ALWAYS lie" category comes DVD growth, which is up a whopping 71 per cent year on year. Maybe I'm missing something but this Johnny-Come-Lately pulled in only $35 million for the first six months of last year versus $23 million in 1999, while units went from 800,000 to 1.4 million. This is about one-third of one per cent of CD sales, and while I will stipulate that their rate of sale is growing, it will be a very long time before they outsell their older brother if those are accurate and hold up.
Other interesting ripples in the digital pond include an agreement among Sony, Universal, and Yahoo (!) to sell, for as-yet undetermined prices, subscriptions which would allow access to songs via streaming from the internet. The announcement said downloaded songs would not initially be transferable to a portable device or onto a CD-R. Another subscription idea surfaced
when EMI, Bertelsmann, and AOL Time Warner announced a similar deal with RealNetworks.Didn't CBS and RCA have subscription-based LP and CD clubs? Wonder what happened to them? Maybe it's just that old marketing ideas never die.
