Software piracy strikes me as something most appropriately cast as a civil offense. Like physical theft, it allows the 'thief' to freely obtain something they would not otherwise have had without paying. But with physical theft, there is a risk of physical violence or damage. With piracy, there is not. So, while I can understand certain aspects of a physical theft to incur criminal charges, I think piracy is less deserving of a criminal label. Without trying to make a judgment about the pros and cons of piracy for an industry (because there appear to be both), I simply want to suggest that music piracy is very low on the list of things that I want my government to be involved in.
The RIAA/MPAA are co-opting the government into spending taxpayer dollars to enforce the recording industry's licensing policies. It's a crafty but regressive strategy that seems unlikely to be successful in the long term.
"The planned release of a blockbuster motion picture should be acknowledged as an event that attracts the focused efforts of copyright thieves... Enforcement agencies (notably within DOJ and DHS) should plan a similarly focused preventive and responsive strategy. An interagency task force should work with industry to ... react swiftly with enforcement actions where necessary."
Looks like the movie and music industry thinks that file sharing is a threat to society along the lines of terrorism.
Making outlandish requests in order to get a better deal is an old practice but even with that taken into account this is ... disturbing. I'd rather live in a world with no commercial content at all.
It would seem to me, that to the hollywood mind, nothing would seem more outrageous and more insane than letting go of control over the distribution mechanism of movies and media.
However, it would seem that moviemakers who embrace no control would be a greater threat than the renegade filesharers.
They would probably already found a business model that embrace p2p. All it take is for a ruthless media entrepreneur to wreck creative destruction over the existing order of Hollywood.
I'm trying to brainstorm what a model that embraced p2p would look like in the context of the movie industry. For music, it means concert ticket prices have gone way up. To some extent, I think the same effect can be seen in movie ticket prices (though production budgets have skyrocketed for blockbuster movies over time and this also affects movie ticket prices). I paid $17 to go see Avatar in IMAX!
I think the music industry can get by w/ higher and higher concert prices because each concert/venue is a separate,unique product and people don't mind paying for a band they really like. In the movie industry, although there is a small subset of moviegoers who will go see the same movie 6 times in the theater, the product is completely consistent through each viewing so after a certain point of price hikes, I think less and less people will attend movies in the theater.
The eff wrote an essay on how to deal with music piracy.
They basically said that although artists need to be fairly compensated that piracy is not going to disappear. They also think that government interference should be minimized and that fans will always be better at distribution.
Their suggestion is voluntary collective licensing. Basically artists join licensing organizations and fans pay money to the organization to get the right to legally download music. Artists don't have to join, but non-member artists would be faced with the tough task of collecting money from infringing fans.
They also suggest compulsory licensing for property that owners refuse to license at any cost. They note that the government has done this in other cases. Compulsory licensing was enforced with radio, internet radio, cable/satellite tv, and player pianos.
The RIAA/MPAA are co-opting the government into spending taxpayer dollars to enforce the recording industry's licensing policies. It's a crafty but regressive strategy that seems unlikely to be successful in the long term.