Opinion: Old rules don't apply to a new industry.If you think that Apple's food fight with the music industry over digital distribution of music through its
iTunes store seems like an isolated tiff over pricing, you're wrong. The battle is yet another skirmish in a war that affects all of us who publish digital content.
The fight began with an opening salvo by Warner Brothers, who raised the specter that the music industry might have to cut Apple off from distribution if it doesn't start raising the price of music sold through the service.
Understandably, Apple responded with some harsh words, blasting the music industry as "greedy" for wanting to raise its prices and blow the iTunes .99 cents business model. Apple CEO Jobs also responded by pointing out that price hikes merely encourage piracy.
While the jury's still out on whether lower prices reduce music piracy, there is some solid academic research that shows that file sharing does not reduce record sales (available here in PDF form), a finding not exactly welcomed by the music biz.
Of course, a spate of recent court victories such as the Grokster decision have put the fear of litigation into just about any company that might potentially "facilitate" piracy, prompting such actions as LimeWire's recent addition of "piracy-protection filters."
The government has also been actively pursuing copyright scofflaws, recently charging eight defendants with copyright infringement for leaking "Revenge of the Sith" to the Net before its official release. Clearly, the heat's on.
For a long time, various content-providing businesses have been battling with the public over the "piracy" issue, using lawsuits, public service announcements (including some pretty wacky ones in Japan), Web sites, heavy duty (and onerous) DRM (Digital Rights Management) techniques, and heavy lobbying of Congress to get its point across: Piracy bad. Big profits good.
Of course, every move has provoked a countermove, by everyone from digital rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation to hackers taking matters into their own hands and breaking copy protection schemes soon after they came out (such as these recent cracks of the PSP 2.0 firmware and proprietary Windows Media Player formats.
Understandably, actions like these drive the media industry nuts, prompting some to issue some pretty weird statements about who should have access to media and who shouldn't.
DRM experts debate the limits of interoperability. Click here to read more.
This spy vs. spy-like war doesn't appear to be going away any time soon, and the sides don't seem to be getting any closer to a compromise. DRM roadblocks are thrown up and hackers take them down. Pricing schemes are manipulated to encourage or discourage CD sales. Authorities move in and arrest violators, and those who don't want to get caught move offshore.
And since nobody seems to agree who should control the Internet, those who want to break laws can always hide out somewhere. Controlling digital content seems to be an issue that nobody can really control.
And it is. Let's face it: We're past moral arguments over what's "fair" or "right" when it comes to the sale and distribution of digital content. "Piracy" seems wrong to many fair-minded folk, yet others can very easily make the argument that CDs are overpriced because of the structure of the music biz.
That consumers who pay for content should have the right to use it as they see fit (for their own personal use) without having to feel like criminals if they want to have copies in … say … their cars and their iPods. That broadcasters should have the ability to make a buck with their content, while consumers should be able to watch what they want when they want where they want without draconian recording restrictions.
There's some validity to all these arguments, but the bottom line is that when content moved from traces on a page or grooves on a disc to ones and zeroes, the ability to control the copying and distribution of that content declined to nearly zero. The fights that we witness now are merely the last gasps of analog industries resisting that fact, a point that I made in a previous article.
The online publishing industry is at a crossroads, especially as more and more of us move to rich media and broadband-friendly content. Innovation requires new thinking and new ways of doing business, especially in an industry that we're all still figuring out.
The decisions that get made about corporate control of content may seem isolated to Warner vs. Apple and irrelevant to you and your business down in the trenches until you stop and realize that at some time in the near future you might need to use some copyrighted audio or video in your new site and won't be able to afford the toll to use it (or may be unwilling or unable to implement the necessary DRM to allow its usage).
That's when it gets kind of scary.
Right now, the Web is primarily a text-and-image-based medium, not unlike (from a content standpoint) print. Luckily, hundreds of years of print law have resulted in some fairly sane laws that allow us to operate in a reasonable fashion.
Unfortunately, the laws regulating the fair usage of time-based media (video and audio in particular) aren't so sane, and the decisions being made by the courts regarding that media aren't too sane, either. It's time we looked at the long term and paid more attention to the media war before it's too late.
Sanity now.
Sean Carton is dean of the School of Design & Media at Philadelphia University and director of research and development at Carton Donofrio Partners.
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