Releases 2008 Digital Music Report which says, among other things, that govts and ISPs must begin to “take responsibility” and protect creative content.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry(IFPI) released its annual Digital Music Report yesterday and it paints a somber picture of an industry still in crisis mode. It says that the music industry’s revenue from digital music sales rose some 40% over the past year, but the growth is still failing to cover losses from the collapse of international physical CD sales.
Record company revenues from digital sales are estimated at approximately $2.9 billion USD in 2007 – up from $2.1 billion USD in 2006 and up from $380 million USD in 2004. The digital share of the total music market has risen from only 2% in 2004 to around 15% in 2007. In the US, digital sales account for nearly 30% of the music market and in South Korea they account for over 60% of the market. Globally, the digital market is split roughly 50:50 between online and mobile sales.
The United States remains the leader in digital music sales worldwide, with online and mobile accounting for some 30% of the total digital music market. It also is the most significant market for subscription-based services such as Napster and Rhapsody.
The IFPI did note however, that the increase in legitimate music sales did not come close to offsetting the billions of dollars being lost to music piracy, with illegal downloads outnumbering the number of tracks sold by a factor of 20-to-1. What it didn’t note though is that not every illegal download would otherwise translate into a legal one. A consumer may be willing to download the latest album from say Britney Spears for instance if it was free, but if asked to shell out $15 bucks I’m sure most would refuse.
This is important because the IFPI is working overtime to get ISPs to begin filtering copyrighted content that is illegally shared on the internet. In fact, it lists this as its top priority for 2008. It praises the recent French model whereby govt, ISPs, and copyright holders teamed up to form a content filtering super trifecta that targets copyright infringers and disconnects their Internet accounts.
Fortunately for us here in the United States this ISP filtering proposal probably won’t be allowed to happen thanks to a 1998 federal law that ISPs ironically spent millions on lobbying fees to pass. The law ensures that ISPs can’t be held liable for content carried over their network, but it requires them to make no “selection of the material” nor make any “modification of its content.”
Booyah!
(a) Transitory Digital Network Communications.—
A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider’s transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, or by reason of the intermediate and transient storage of that material in the course of such transmitting, routing, or providing connections, if—
- (1) the transmission of the material was initiated by or at the direction of a person other than the service provider;
- (2) the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider;
- (3) the service provider does not select the recipients of the material except as an automatic response to the request of another person;
- (4) no copy of the material made by the service provider in the course of such intermediate or transient storage is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and no such copy is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer period than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections; and
- (5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.
So surely an international body doesn’t plan on amending US federal laws does it? They’ve already pissed off students, grandmothers, mothers, and fathers, you name it, but would they really want to take on constitutionalists and neoconservatives? I hope not.
The report goes on to take its usual potshots at P2P and file-sharing services, though an interesting new approach is to lament how it is “choking bandwidth.”
“Illegal P2P file-sharing may have helped drive broadband subscriptions in the past, yet today these activities, particularly in respect of movies, are hogging bandwidth,” it reads. “Independent estimates suggest up to 80 per cent of internet traffic is generated by P2P file distribution, the vast bulk of which is unauthorised use of copyrighted music and movies.”
This is utter BS. P2P and file-sharing services STILL drive broadband subscriptions and are perhaps the only real reason to have them in the first place. If it wasn’t for the desire to download and share movies and music then DSL or dial-up would do just fine for web browsing and “YouTubing.” If P2P and file-sharing services were to somehow be magically blocked this very moment then how many of you would honestly keep your current internet connection package? I know I wouldn’t keep paying $50 bucks a month for a 1.2MB/s DL speed when all I’d have left is streaming video, pics, and news. How about you?
The last real thing to comment on from the report is how it surprisingly claims that legal music download sites have a better selection of music than illegal ones. It used Limewire to examine the availability of 70 different artists and unsurprisingly enough found “…a large number of duplicates and misleading file names on the P2P networks, as well as many files that were not available to download.” Really? Misleading file names on Limewire? I can’t believe it. I’m sure their heads would’ve exploded if they did an actual test and used a decent private BitTorrent tracker site like Waffles.fm or What.cd to make a comparison.
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- IFPI: P2P Does Not Increase Music Sales
- Music Sales Strong Despite Digital Piracy
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Bullocks at least 50% of all traffic is spam bots for email and hacker bots trying to find open systems not to mention overhead from dead owner zombies regularly checking in to their IRC hotel.