Digital media will force the entertainment industry to rethink current business models and perhaps usher in a special tax to compensate artists deprived of revenue from Internet media distribution, according to panelists at a conference Thursday.
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and research firm Gartner assembled a group of legal, media and technology experts to discuss potential scenarios for overhauling the media and entertainment industries to accommodate rapid changes in technology.
Attendees at the conference, held at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., posed a number of scenarios to achieve the goal of extending consumer access to media through digital devices while respecting the copyrights of content creators and publishers. Talk focused primarily on the highly visible and controversial practice of downloading music over the Internet, but it touched on all types of electronic media.
Overall, attendees agreed that the entertainment industry has been slow to develop viable business models for the Internet. Meanwhile, unauthorized distribution of content on file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus has become commonplace.
