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Intellectual Media Property in the 21st century
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Well I recently read an Op-Ed by Bono titled “Ten for the
Next Ten” and one of the points that saw was about the continued contention
that music piracy is hurting the small artist the most and should be tracked in
some way to eliminate the issue. Now I am certainly guilt of downloading a song
or two back several years ago when electronic music distribution sucked and the
only way to get a song was by buying the whole CD. Of course my main problem
with this situation is many artists have one good song on the whole album, the
rest is just waste. It is in these situations where I saw the justification to
download the song. With the continued upgrading of systems link iTunes and
other like it is now possible to download a song at a time and sample the album
to assure a good overall purchase and with this evolution I have stopped
downloading songs from other sources.
I guess my question really is why do people continue to
download these songs from other sources, is it because they don’t have the
money? Are cheap? Want to demo the song? I don’t know, I tend to think that it
is not the smallest of artists that are affected by this; this is because the
majority of the money that is made by most artists that I have known is through
touring and if a large enough personality advertising contracts. If an artist
completes a work and expects to make the most money from the sales of the
record than this just seems like a false assumption.
This same issue is of course true of most media on the
Internet and will continue to be an issue. Is the solution really to track down
the millions of different media elements being stolen everyday? I don’t think
so, the amount of money and privacy lost would never be worth it.
Fundamentally, these artists need to have better contracts with the on-line
media distribution systems which allow them a better share of the profits. In
many cases this would involve significant changes in the way that traditional
music contracts are written with music companies.
Another contention is that TV shows and Movies are going to
be pirated more as bandwidth become plentiful, not this is probably true as a
base comment the question is whether this is bad or not. Should the revenue
stream of a movie be strictly on the DVD or BluRay sales? Or on the ticket
prices to see it in the theater? The way that people generate advertising
income is going to have to change in order for the system to remain as fair as
possible. For example, I don’t mind a Coke product being drank on a TV show as
an advertisement as long as it isn’t a painful distraction.
What do you think, is this an issue? What is the solution?
-sean
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