[LINK] Is copyright dead? [WAS: Special Report: The Future Of File Sharing]

[Chris Gilbey]

Further to Lea¹s comment:

<<The argument that musicians (authors, photographers, etc - pick your
favourite) should be big so they can be invested in, or musicians
should be big so they can lead a rockstar lifestyle leaves me quite
cold.>>

I think the point is that the organizations that are predominantly arguing
against P2P are the enterprises whose continuing wealth depends precisely
upon reinforcing the meme of ³rockstar lifestile is good². The record
companies and music publishing companies don¹t care about the ³art for art¹s
sake² musicians. They care only about controlling the right to replicate
works. In that regard they have what I believe is a misguided understanding
of what technology has wrought.

They will not entertain the idea of working with government to introduce a
scheme to provide for a levy on recordable media, even though this would
mean that, if such a regulation came into being, they would get paid for
every device sold with memory on board ­ surely a huge windfall. It would
mean that they would have to do some new kinds of accounting ­ and they
would at that point in time, also have to deal with measuring what people
actually consume. Tom K and I have been doing a lot of work in this area and
have found some fascinating things (when we have enough data, we will be
putting it out into the public domain). It would also mean that a lot of
artists, producers, and writers who probably don¹t get paid at the moment,
would end up getting paid.

I think that P2P is an enormously important technological breakthrough that
can not be stopped. If it can¹t be stopped, it needs to be worked with.

Regards

Chris Gilbey