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6th Nov 09
Oriol MiralbellNever before freedom was so threatened in Internet like now. The European Parliament has refused to legislate letting this decision to the country members individually, in punish or not (with no need to follow judiciary procedures) file downloaders in their country. Besides that this is a strange decission (borders are easily broken in Internet). it is the recognition that Europe has not a clear policy on how to deal with freedom in the web. Though we could also identify a consequence. If the European Parliament refuses to act in this isssue it may be because they don’t consider it as a subject that fits in their competencies. Commerce and consumer protection are fundamentals comnpetencies of the European authorities. Thus, we could understand that Europe does not see this as an issue that affects commercial or consumer regulation. So we are back to a no man’s land’s legislation. Who is competent in this issue?
Meawhile, some countries, like Spain are punishing in advance all the people who buy any CD, DVD (even if users don’t copy any other file than their ownes) and the electronic equipments to work with them, with a “canon” that goes to the agencies in charge for defending authorship.
This irrational behaviour of governments like tha Spanish one, is the consequence of the lobbying of the record companies and media producers and distruibutors, that are refusing to accept that market rules have changed. After decades of controling the market, these big conmpanies like SONY, Universal, etc., are affraid that people now can decide how they want the market to function. Not from upside down, but with bottom-up decisions.
But let’s see what this new scenario has cuased. In most places, there have never been so many concerts like now, and this is thanks to the power of Internet in spreading music more effectively than ever before. There are more movie makers in the world now and more films viewed (from short cheap-produced videos to megaproduction from Hollywood) produced than ever before and this happens thanks to the new technological paradigm and the power of Internet spreading all these videos.
We can imagine on who is losing and who wins. The majority of the people win, because knowledge is shared and distributed, fostering, at th same time indicidual and public initiatives that make innovation possible and help creativity to become more visible than ever. Only these few business man, loose their privilege of beeing the ones who could control the market, fixing prices, and censoring all those musicians and other artists that were not submissive enough.
From the business side, the growth of art industry is also an indicator that this market is healthy and is creating wealth and giving opportunities to many people to work and earn money. Though this is a better distributed business. With less concentration of benefits and more facilities for new players to enter the market. So, what governments are trying to legislate is not protecting authors’s rights but protecting a model that doesn’t work anymore.
There’s a perverse strategy that music and film companies are using in this regard. They pretend to compare file sharing with stealing cds or dvds. This strategy goes parallel to a campaign to convince, first the authors that they got stolen, and second to governments, drawing a false picture that says that this is a crime and it has to be prosecuted.
I call this a perverse strategy because it places a completely new way of communicating under the law of old ways of commeerce. But even so, their strategy is fake and corrupt, because they’ve never prooved that there’s a direct consequence on the decision of people to stop buying cds and dvds with file sharing. In fact there is not s direct relation between these two facts. The growth of the music business in Internet has not stopped file sharing, thus we can see rather a direct cuase of these changes in the first rule of commerce: “value for money”. Cds and DVDs don’t provide to the customers enough value foe the money they have to pay.
Could we imagine a campaign like this sixty years ago, where record companies could have started a cmpaign against broadasters because they were pushing people out from buying vinil records? Obviously not, and for two main reasons: first, because music producers had not such control over the market, and second because they saw an oportunity rather than a threat in broadcasting music over the radios.
Why do these companies do not see in Internet an opportunity as they saw it decades ago. Just because the Internet is giving much more power to the consumer than ever before, and they are reluctant to become more flexible and invest money in new strategies.
Though we all know that companies like iTunes or Spotify, two major succesful services of music on the Internet, have reached agreements with the biggest music producers. Music cpmanies have more than one strategy: supporting the emergence of new markets in Internet and lobbying to force governments to prosecute file sharing.
In my opinion they want to get rid of their stocks gaining time for it, while they know that the present situation has no turn back. Music or video file sharing cannot be a crime or cause dammage to any author, because it is a social action. I’m convinced that this idea will prevail because it has been the grounding philosophy of Internet and the engine that has made of this networking tool the global miracle of the last decade. What cosnumers will be reasy to pay is “value for money”. IN music, as in other industries, Internet has cuased de-intermediation and re-intermediation, and this is the oaradigm that companies have to gace to find their opportunity.
It ’s true that Internet has pushed many people to change their jobs, and many companies to change their strategies. The same as in earlier times did the steam engine . The only difference is that this changes have occurred globally and in a much shorter lap of time.
