[LINK] Music industry backs down on piracy

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Jan Whitaker
> Sent: Monday, 6 June 2011 4:19 PM
> To: link at anu.edu.au
> Subject: [LINK] Music industry backs down on piracy
> 
> 
> The Age today:
> 
> Music and film industries split over pirates
> 
>   Asher Moses
>   June 6, 2011 - 12:46PM
> [other stories at the site: Piracy: are we being conned?
> [Music piracy war: are the labels wasting their time?
> [Ruling may force ISPs to cut off pirates]
> 
> The music industry has backflipped on its long-held demands that 
> repeat music pirates be disconnected from the internet as a new UN 
> report declares such a policy would be a breach of human rights and 
> international law.
> 
> But film studios, represented by the Australian Federation Against 
> Copyright Theft (AFACT), are still backing the controversial 
> measures, arguing protection of intellectual property is a human 
> right. It has released research saying film piracy costs the 
> Australian economy $1.37 billion a year.
> 
It's a shame that the research report was based on data from the
disgraced and thoroughly discredited report from the French Tera Group
paid for by Bascap, that dare to call themselves economists.

Discredited by moi with such scintillating titles as:

Statistical Anomalies in Reports Originating in the EU
Tera Rebuttal Response 1 - File Sharing = Convenience & Availability 
Tera Rebuttal Response 3 - The Accuracy of Data 
Tera Rebuttal 4 - The Search for the missing Jobs. 
The Tera Report Response 5 - 1+1=-6 or How Much can you BUY an Economist
for?

...and others, e.g.: PWC:

Quote/
Global spending via online and wireless channels reached $19 billion in
2005 and will increase to $67 billion by 2010
The global entertainment and media (E&M) industry has entered a solid
growth phase and will increase at a 6.6 percent compound annual growth
rate (CAGR) to reach $1.8 trillion in 2010
"Virtually every segment of the entertainment and media industry is
shifting from physical distribution to digital distribution of content,"
said Wayne Jackson, global leader of PricewaterhouseCoopers'
Entertainment & Media Practice. "As this shift continues, we see more
revenue opportunities for entertainment and media companies. So while
physical distribution of content is declining, that decline will be
offset somewhat by digital distribution, which is driving and creating
new growth opportunities."
Source: PWC Global entertainment and media outlook
/Quote

What the French universities have obviously left out of the
Economics-101 syllabus is a pre-requisite for economists to be able to
read and not to sell out their addition and substraction skills for 30
pieces of silver.

One has to wonder why organisations keep banging the same old piracy
bell.

Is it because industry organisations have to justify their members
annual dues and since the advent of Internet, physical piracy (and the
profit motive associated with physical piracy) has almost been
eliminated ?

Would it because the companies themselves (e.g.: The Co-Chairman of
BASCAP [1] is also the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Vivendi that
has made a profit for the last 10 years) [2] need to claim that piracy
is whittling away at their profits to be able to ask for larger
Christmas executive bonuses for "vanquishing the Somalian hoards"
boarding their digital content vaults ?

            HA!

References:
============
[1]	The Tera Report and its Commissioners BASCAP
(http://kovtr.com/wordpress/?p=363)
[2]	The Tera Report Response 7 Vivendi as a Case Study of Music
Piracy (http://kovtr.com/wordpress/?p=339)

The above titles can be found by googling the title with the added
domain kovtr.com.


TomK