It would seem that the government is about to amend copyright laws, so that it will be legal to “format shift” recorded music that you have legally bought to a different format. For instance, people will now be able to legally copy the music on a CD to their PC, or perhaps to an iPod or the music player of a mobile phone.
Ignoring for the moment the absurdity of the idea that government and a bunch of lobbyist lawyers could actually lead anyone anywhere, I am struck by the thought that the people such an amendment might have been most helpful to in 1997 were those in the music industry itself, which spent the best part of another decade attempting to preserve their existing business model of reselling people the same music over and over again every time there was a technology change. (As late as 2003, I heard an interview in which one such person stated that if the rampant piracy problem could not be solved, then the internet would simply have to be closed down. Alas, I didn’t preserve the details for posterity).
If the music industry had actually been willing to acknowledge that there was a complete paradigm shift underway a little earlier, then it might have done slightly less badly out of it. Or at least, it might have managed to avoid becoming Steve Jobs’ bitch, as ultimately happened.
Although another way of looking at it is that the industry managed somehow to find a fate that it actually deserved.
Here is what I had to say about it over a decade ago.
I have, as some regulars in these parts know, been ambivalent about whether IP is a good idea or not. But there can be little doubt that some of the forms of copyright (and for that matter, patents) are absurd, and rather than encourage enterprise and innovation, do the exact opposite. They also seem to jar with some other, basic applications of private property rights as classical liberals would conceive them.
Unfortunately, debates on IP, as shown on this blog, are incredibly complicated. It is one of those issues like the rights of children that I don’t see an easy resolution to.
I am not ambivalent about whether, in the main, IP is a good thing or not (it is), but I do agree that some forms of it are indeed absurd and counterproductive. Prohibiting “format shift” is one such, as are all laws which are both stupid and unenforceable. But I’m not surprised that it has taken this long to address the issue: we all know that government is a lagging indicator of societal change.
People were buying albums on vinyl and recording them onto cassettes to play in the car in the seventies. The technology was primitive but surely it amounted to the same thing? So the government is reacting promptly, well in about forty years, to changing technology.
About bloody time. Its been a deliberate tactic of the industry to try and get people to pay multiple times for the same product.
There is still (in Oz) the rotten practice of charging businesses which use music to pay a general fee for “copyright”.
Eg: A lady friend of mine runs a small ballet/dance studio for kids. She has about 30 or so students and (last I checked) pays about $12000 a year to play music at her dance studio.
Doesnt matter if she plays only out of copyright “classics” or contemporary pop, she pays to use the music.
If she holds a concert she pays another fee for using music.
Hairdressers are also supposed to pay if they have a radio on.
Its a lovely abuse of copyright that rakes in millions without selling a single product.