A Copyfighter’s Musings

UPDATE: Here are my notes.

Tomorrow night, I’ll be at “Adapting to the Beat: The Music Industry in Flux,” a panel discussion featuring GartnerG2’s Mike McGuire and FMC’s Walter McDonough among many others.  As long as what’s said there is not confidential, expect some notes up here. Watch this space for more.

Filed by Derek Slater at 8:38 pm under General news
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So, I was going through my Winthrop House mail yesterday and came upon an email, subject: “iTunes – another plea!” At first, I thought someone had run into the Win2k crash bug. On the contrary, the program was working well – perhaps too well from the RIAA’s perspective.  The email urged everyone to share their files via iTunes streaming so that we would have one, gigantic Winthrop House music collection.

And, of course, the plea ended with an assertion that this is “completely legal.” Not so fast.  Looks like a public performance webcast to me.  Apparently, similar threads on many other campus mailists have generated more discussion of the legality.

In any case, let me ask a somewhat targeted question: is this a public or private activity? That is, does this fit the copynorm “share with friends, not strangers”? We’re all part of one campus residence, but I haven’t met any of the people streaming songs.

Filed by Derek Slater at 8:32 pm under General news
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One thing I was thinking about when writing my most recent post on PSU/Napster was LAMP – not LAMP exactly, because it’s a limited service, a legal kluge (see this nice post here), created for somewhat different reasons than PSU/Napster – but rather the concept of blanket licensing for students’ music access.  For reasons obvious to those who frequent this blog, that has some appeal to me.  LAMP excited me because it provided a model for what other companies and schools could experiment with, even though this implementation was far from perfect. So, any strict absolutism about what the university must do in all possible circumstances doesn’t really comport with my intuitions.

I am still wary of universities getting over-involved in providing music access, but, as I indicated in my latest post, some instances would be cause for less concern.  PSU/Napster troubles me because it is so woefully inadequate and so removed from the university’s mission and similar types of university provided services.  If the former were less true and the school were much more necessary to coordinate the purchase (which may be the case with CL-style blanket licensing), perhaps it’d be a different story. In the case of LAMP, the school already had the blanket license and the cable network setup for other reasons; it was a shorter jump to create the service.

Filed by Derek Slater at 8:17 pm under General news
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That’s what Donna’s asking. Putting aside arguments that would apply equally to RIAA or MPAA suits, here are a couple unique reasons why MPAA suits might not make sense:

Beyond Valenti’s rhetoric, I don’t think even the MPAA would argue that, today, they’re being immensely harmed by downloads.  They worry that they’ll end up suffering like some say the record industry is, but the urgency is somewhat limited.

With that in mind, why doesn’t the MPAA continue to leach off of the RIAA’s suits?  It’s unlikely that people will discern a difference between sharing music and movies – if they get the message from the RIAA, it will solve the MPAA’s problems.  (And, if the RIAA’s lawsuits do not succeed, then the MPAA will have a much stronger case when appealing to Congress.)

Moreover, the MPAA hasn’t even begun to tap into the downloads market.  Movielink is a joke compared to what the RIAA’s offering right now.  Given that quality problems are more substantial for P2P movie downloads, a legit service might be able to sufficiently curb file-sharing.

Finally, I would assume that most movie sharers do not share that many movies.  To share a large collection of movies would take a lot of hard drive space (and possibly personal time and energy if the sharer did the movie rips).  If the MPAA wants a substantial number of suits, they won’t be able to hone in on egregious offenders like the RIAA has.  That could create serious PR problems.

Filed by Derek Slater at 7:29 pm under General news
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