Let us refresh our memories and take a look at what actually happened during and just before the past 8 years:

1. First, the explosive rise of computer and console gaming. This competitive ‘third element’ has appeared in the entertainment landscape, beaten both music and movies to the curb and taken a huge cut out of the music industry’s revenues. Consumers don’t have infinitely-deep pockets, and billions of ‘recreation dollars’ that used to go almost exclusively to music, are now going into gaming.

2. International trade agreements have allowed consumers to buy their music across borders, rather than accepting local prices on music based on the ‘relative wealth’ of nations, rather than the actual value of the product.

3. New forms of distributable media, most notably MP3s but also CDs, have become mainstream. These new media don’t degrade over time and rarely break at all, making music rebuys a thing of the past, and allowing the second-hand market for music to thrive and expand – both of which take a cut out of the music industry’s former revenues.

4. Radical technological innovation has taken place in the field of music creation, processing, mixing, and mastering. Recording hardware, CD burners, music software, and media encoders have evolved to the point where most artists can actually afford decent-quality equipment to do their own recording and producing. Furthermore, this has fostered literally thousands of smaller, specialized studios that are challenging the ‘Big 4′ with lower prices, better terms for artists, genre-specific expertise, etc. Successful artists can now leave the big labels and start their own recording outfits on relatively modest budgets. Naturally, super stars like The Beatles or Frank Sinatra have always had this option, but the recent technological advances have lowered the bar drastically. This development is depriving the ‘Big 4′ of many of their former cash cows, who now use the major labels for their advertising and distribution infrastructure alone.

5. The World Wide Web has become an omnipresent force in the world, allowing cheap, end-to-end distribution of digital music, increasingly cutting out the corporate music distributors, who deal in trucks and CD covers, rather than bytes and bandwidth. With iTunes leading the way (very successfully ‘competing with free’, I might add), billions of songs are now purchased digitally rather than physically, no longer necessitating the big labels’ distribution networks.

6. The total number of radio stations, music television networks and other ’streaming’ sources of music has grown exponentially, giving music fans a huge selection of free (and legal) music options. Satellite radio, DAB, and internet radio broadcasts have made it trivial for consumers to simply tune into a channel broadcasting the exact sub-genre of music that they feel like listening to (they can even have a stream created for them dynamically, e.g. on Pandora), making the *purchase* of music entirely optional for the casual listener.

7. A massive selection of entertainment alternatives (home computing, console gaming, mobile devices, etc.) have appeared in the home, effectively marginalizing music as an activity. 15-20 years ago, youths would regularly visit each other just to listen to music together; today, that is virtually unthinkable without some form of activity involved, such as playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band, or dancing at a concert.

8. And finally, the music industry itself has embraced the opportunities of digital media, at last letting consumers buy *single* tracks at a time rather than forcing entire albums full of ‘fillers’ on them. Looking at the RIAA’s own sales figures for the past 10 years, there is a *direct* correlation between the break-off in album sales and the introduction and increase in single track digital sales. Looking at the actual numbers, it is abundantly clear that the vast majority of consumers never wanted to buy full albums in the first place, but were merely forced to by the lack of affordable single-track media. Now that the digital revolution has arrived, countless millions of 16-track album sales are being turned into 1- or 2-track sales, *decimating* the former revenues on music. THIS is the real reason why the music industry is hurting.

In other words: The “it’s common sense” argument that the music industry is peddling in their attempt to tie the declining revenues to piracy, simply doesn’t hold. It is not as clear-cut as the industry believes; the true reason for the decline is something they are still unwilling to face, but will have to face sooner or later:

The fact is that the music industry’s revenues have been artificially inflated for decades because of limited consumer options. The last 15 years of innovation have lifted those limitations, effectively leaving the music industry with an obsolete, defective business model of monopolized production technology, forced album bundling, and almost nonexistent competition in the realm of home entertainment. What is happening now – the decline of music profits and the piracy witch hunt by the music industry – is merely the panicked struggle of a dying business model, a complacent industry’s refusal to accept its diminishing role in a digital world. The pirates are not the reason, and the decline is the not the disease. It is the cure.

This is a guest post by Jens Roland. Jens is a computer scientist by training, but a technology forecaster by trade. He has worked at international think tanks as a consultant and researcher in emerging technologies and has written more than 300 articles and a book on the subject.

———————————————————————-
DATA: Net value of shipped music, in billion dollars

1991 7.83
1992 9.02
1993 10.0
1994 12.1
1995 12.3
1996 12.5
1997 12.2
1998 13.7
1999 14.6
2000 14.3
2001 13.7
2002 12.6
2003 11.9
2004 12.3
2005 12.3
2006 11.8
2007 10.4

(source: RIAA’s annual reports)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

File-sharing will continue to grow.

Okay, this is a no-brainer. Torrent sites like the Pirate Bay have been showing huge growth rates every single year, and there is no reason to assume that 2009 will be any different. Except maybe for the fact that the global economic crisis will continue to force consumers to spend less. And what’s an easy way to save some dough? Exactly, free music, movies and TV shows. File sharing is going to get a big recession bump in 2009.

One of the biggest torrent sites will close down.

Just don’t ask me which one. Rights holders will continue to put pressure on site admins and their hosting providers in 2009, just as they did in 2008, and at least one well-known name will fold under this pressure. For a few days it will look like the file sharing world is going to end, but then it will be business as usual again.

The RIAA’s new three-strikes policy will fail.

The music industry announced just two weeks ago that it will stop its mass lawsuit campaign and instead cooperate with ISPs to punish file sharers. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time about “agreements in principle” with an unspecified number of unnamed ISPs that “may cut off” net access for repeat offenders. Or not, one should add. ISPs don’t like to lose customers over a few traded songs, which is why a similar deal in the UK still doesn’t include any enforcement measures half a year after it was struck. The same will happen in the US. In fact, some smaller ISPs might even get a boost by promising that they won’t disconnect customers over P2P.

P4P will actually work.

The somewhat controversial technology that aims to mitigate the effect of P2P transfers on ISPs’ networks has proven to work pretty well in field tests, but those were limited to a single video file provided by personal file sharing start-up Pando. 2009 will bring us some first mass-scale implementations, and I suspect that some of you will start to use P4P-assisted file transfers without even noticing, which is how good infrastructure technology should work.

We will all become socialists.

The uproar was huge when Warner Music first expressed support for a flat fee for legal P2P music sharing in the spring of 2008. Techcrunch called the idea extortion, others warned of socialism, big government and an unfair music tax. Then the global financial markets hit rock bottom, countries like the US started to nationalize banks left and right, and people warmed up to the fact that government intervention and taxation aren’t always bad things. This will continue in 09.

We’ll see billions of tax payer’s money spent on infrastructure projects and governments taking stakes in major industries. In a way, we will all become socialists, if only to wait out the end of the crisis. And in the process, we will warm up to the idea of collective licensing. Now, it’s unclear whether the record labels will actually come through and start first blanket licensing trials by the end of the year, but I predict that consumers will be ready for it. Because really, who will object to five bucks a month in light of billions spend on bailouts?

Janko Roettgers is a Los Angeles-based journalist. He is also the editor of P2P Blog.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

That was only the start of his Republican career. A year later, Bainwol was appointed Chief of Staff to Mary Bono, who was one of the biggest supporters of the (Sonny Bono) Copyright Term Extension Act. Mary Bono later married the son of Connie Mack. Both are still are active Republicans, and received generous donations from Bainwol recently.

They were not the only ones Bainwol donated to. OpenSecrets reveals that he has also supported John McCain to the tune of $2300, the maximum amount he is allowed to donate. MPAA CEO Dan Glickman, on the other hand, has more sympathy for the Democrats, as he donated $5000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign.

While the RIAA CEO is supporting McCain, most people from P2P companies support the Democratic candidate, Barrrack Obama. As P2P-blog points out, Limewire, Joost and Pando employees donated generously to Obama, and so did BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen. This makes sense, as Obama seems to have the most reasonable ideas when it comes to copyright, privacy and net-neutrality.

Earlier this year the US Pirate Party endorsed Obama. Andrew Norton, a spokesperson for the US Pirate Party told TorrentFreak at the time: “We stand solidly behind Mr. Obama, as he is the only candidate that seems to realize that personal privacy is a right, not a privilege, and believes that copyright is, as the constitution defines, for progress, rather than profit.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Later she reflected on her rant, sometimes contradicting her earlier claims such as her millionaire status. So, considering the dismal status of torrents of her work, she needed another way to cash in.

Enter Kerchoonz.com. From what we can gather, it aims to be an online jukebox, mixed in with a music download service, maybe something like Jamendo. Ms Gregg’s husband, music producer Ian Morrow, explained the service to the BBC, saying “If you’re a musician you’ll upload your music to the site. Anyone plays it, you get paid. Anyone downloads it, you get paid. That’s it, simple. Everything’s free for the user.”

The main question then, is where the money will come from. Currently, they have a £250,000 investment from the Scottish Co-investment Fund. While this can fund the website initially, with a free end-user model it’s going to be incredible hard to gain any revenue. Advertising will be the only alternative, so until the site becomes popular, it will hemorrhage money. It doesn’t help that the site promises “no adverts attached!!!” which simply means that the site will be smothered in pop-ups and sponsored links. The payouts will probably be minuscule as well, so anyone expecting this to be a major source of revenue will be left unhappy.

Of course, over-exaggeration is nothing new for Gregg and Morrow. They claim they got the idea for the site after the release of Gregg’s album, “Woman at Work”. In an interview with the BBC, they claimed it had over 250,000 downloads. Our own research shows the upper limit to be more like 10,000 and the current activity of the torrents supports that. The name (Kerchoonz) appears to be derived from the word Gregg used whenever she talked about the Pirate Bay making money , kerching.

Another point to ponder is that while they claim there will be no DRM, watermarking will be used. One of the press releases for the site states “Kerchoonz tracks downloads and streams through a combination of the ISRC and play counts by utilizing unique coding and encryption within the application.” With this approach there could be privacy and profiling concerns, as with all watermarking.

Will the project succeed? At this stage it seems extremely unlikely, as there are already better services out there and any proposed rewards are likely to be extremely small. The recommendation and similarity aspects of both Pandora and last.fm have been the key to their success, letting people discover new artists. As to whether Kerchoonz will have it, who knows?

Right now, they are collecting emails and names, and a link to their privacy policy, but no actual policy. It’s polish like that that will make this public funded website go all the way…. to titsup.com. In the end, it sparks the phrase “Ave! Bossa nova, similis bossa seneca!” in that the only difference between Kerchoonz and The Pirate Bay, is that with Kerchoonz, you have a much smaller audience, but with some distant hope of getting some money back.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

We first introduced BitLet back in July 2007.

BitLet is a web-based Java applet which makes it possible to download .torrent files on a computer that doesn’t have a BitTorrent client installed, which is fantastic for people who either can’t, or don’t know how to, install additional software. The site isn’t just clear and functional, it’s incredibly easy to use too – simply enter the url of the .torrent file you wish to use and sit back and wait for your chosen material to download.

In recognition of this innovative site, the editors over at CNET Webware.com have chosen BitLet to be a finalist in the Webware 100 Awards 2008. This is quite an achievement considering the heavyweights who came out on top in 2007, such as Bebo, Gmail, MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube. BitLet is nominated in the Security and Utility division.

For the 2008 contest, a total of 4,600 Web 2.0 services were nominated by Webware readers and from these, a lucky 300 finalists were selected, including BitLet, of course.

Other BitTorrent related services were also nominated. BitTorrent.com itself was nominated along with Pando, and the Firefox based AllPeers. Sadly, AllPeers bit the dust so will no longer be included.

Alessandro and Daniele of BitLet told TorrentFreak: “We are really proud of this achievement. Being chosen as one of the finalists is a huge acknowledgment for an application like BitLet. When we started to develop the applet we wanted to support BitTorrent content distribution by creating an extremely simple tool to allow anyone to download files with just one click. We may not have achieved that precise objective (yet :P) but Webware’s nomination, in addition to the good feedback we receive from our users, encourages us to keep working on new features and improving the existing ones.”

Indeed, BitLet has been evolving since its introduction, adding features such as the BitLet ‘Upload‘ section which adds torrent creation to the service, the music streaming feature which is also used by Mininova, and the ‘bookmarklet‘ which allows the user to inject a direct download link into torrent search engines.

BitLet’s features add up to one of the most innovative BitTorrent related services, and a worthy addition to the Webware 100 finalists list.

If you’d like to vote for BitLet -30 million BitTorrent users voting should do the job- you can do so right up until March 31, by clicking here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The report is based on data supplied by BigChampagne and PC Pitstop. BigChampagne is a company that tracks online media, it also provides provides Billboard online music charts. PC Pitstop gathers data by “inspecting” the computers of users that try their free online virus / spyware scanners. The data used in this report are collected from Windows registry and table entries of 1.5 million PC’s through these online diagnostic tests performed by PC Pitstop.

The results. The percentages in the table indicate the install base of the P2P applications:

In the report we further read that the once almighty “Kazaa family” is now only installed on 1.3% PCs. Newcomers like FrostWire and Pando are included in the report for the fist time with a 0.2% and 0.3% install rate respectively.

As said before, the usability of these figures are doubtful. Here are a few concerns. First of all, install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it. So the report can’t say much about the popularity of a filesharing network or application. They do not make these claims, but the way the data is presented is a bit misleading, to say the least.

For example, uTorrent is by far the most used BitTorrent client. Over 50% of the peers in an average BitTorrent swarm use uTorrent. It could be that uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline are installed on almost an equal number of PCs, but that the BitTorrent mainline client is hardly ever used. For instance, novices may start with the mainline client, but move on to better BitTorrent clients later on.

Another remarkable point is the uTorrent data collection for this report. uTorrent doesn’t install itself, and even the installer doesn’t use the Windows registry. So how did they come up with these statistics on uTorrent then?

It is also funny to see mIRC in the top 10 of most installed filesharing application because it is so much more than this. Most people I know use mIRC for other purposes than sharing files.

The concerns raised here show that “power” is not always in numbers. They might have collected data from millions of users, but is this really valuable if you have no idea if they actually use the application? A survey among 10.000 users where you actually ask if, and how often they use these applications is probably more useful.

And on a final note, people who want to read the report, but don’t want to pay $195 might want to try Google’s backdoor. Doubtful statistics, doubtful security.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

We will try to explain these two seemingly contradicting facts, and list three factors that may help us understand what’s going on…

Artists sell more albums thanks to piracy
Several studies have shown that most artists actually profit from unauthorized sharing of files. They sell more albums because people have the opportunity to download songs and entire albums for free. A study by Blackburn (2004), a PhD student from Harvard, found that the 75% of the artist actually profit from piracy. Blackburn reports that the most popular artist (top 25%) sell less records. However, the remaining 75% of all artists actually profit from filesharing. The same pattern was found by Pedersen (2006, see graph), who analyzed the change in royalties paid by the Nordisk Copyright Bureau between 2001 and 2005.

But why do these artists sell more? Well, there are a couple of possible explanations.

LPs, CDs, DVDs and MP3s
The increased album sales in the late 90’s may very well have been caused, at least in part, by the shift from cassettes and LPs to CDs (and not just piracy!). CD players were getting more and more popular and a lot of people were exchanging their LP collections for CD collections. After 2000, CDs were not that special anymore, and the number of albums sold normalized (see graph below). It’s also likely that the decline in CD sales was influenced by the increased popularity of DVDs and MP3s.

This argument is also mentioned in a research paper by Hong (2004):

The results indicate that transition from LPs to CDs might describe the increase in music sales during the 1990’s.

And in a report from Pedersen (2006):

the period 1995-2000 represents a truly unique situation in the modern history of Danish record sales and 10 million units sold in 2004 is more likely a return to regular conditions than a sign of crisis.

This graph plots the number of albums sold in Denmark, and shows that the decline in sales after 2000 is not that special, but the uprise in the late 90’s is (Source: Pedersen, 2006).

The Internet is changing the way people experience music
Like we mentioned before, the Internet opened up a ton of possibilities for people to discover new artists and music. Not only illegal downloads, but also legal downloads, or paid downloads with the possibility to preview songs make it easier to discover new artists.

Social communities, and music services like Last.fm and Pandora also play a big role in the evolution of our music experience. Before the Internet, people had only a few possibilities to discover new music. Friends, radio stations and record stores are three of them, where the last two are in part sponsored by the marketing campaigns of the music industry. Today people are less dependent on what the music industry is campaigning for.

Wait a minute… the music industry and the RIAA always say that they are losing huge amounts of money because of filesharing. Isn’t this true?
Well, the fact is that there are less albums sold in total compared to some of the years when album sales were booming. However, it is hard to attribute this decline in sales to piracy (alone). From the research that has been done on this topic we can conclude that the effect of piracy on the music industry’s lost income lies somewhere between 0 and 30% (of the decline in sales, not of the sales in total). Pollock (2006) gives a comprehensive overview of these studies and concludes:

The basic result is that online illegal file-sharing probably has some negative impact on traditional sales but the effect is appears to be quite small. The size of this effect is debated, and ranges from 0 to 100% of the sales decline in recent years, but a figure of between 0 and 30% would be a reasonable consensus value (i.e. that file-sharing accounted for 0-30% of the decline in sales not a 0-30% decline in sales). At the same time there is still substantial disagreement in the literature with the most impressive paper to date (Oberholzer and Strumpf 2005) estimating no impact from file-sharing.

One of the things we can be pretty sure of is that the music industry is starting to lose control over their customers. A great deal of their income was generated by overly promoted albums and artists. It are those artists and albums that suffer the most from piracy. It gets harder and harder for the music industry to market artists to the top position of the charts now the customers heva all kinds of alternative ways to discover new music.

In conclusion we could say that music is more alive than ever before, that piracy is a tool to build a fanbase, and that the times when the music industry could dictate what we were listening to are over.

And that’s a good thing…

Sources:

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Dr Michael Geist has become a power in Canada and much further afield when it comes to matters centering on Net issues in particular, and free speech and the freedom of the Net in general.

Born and raised in Toronto and the proud father of “three great kids” (7, 5, and 2), he’s the University of Ottawa’s Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, a position he’s held since 2003. Before going to U of O seven years ago, he was at a long list of law schools including Columbia Law School in New York, Dalhouse Law School in Halifax, Canada, Cambridge University in England, and Kobe University in Japan, where he was doing graduate work and some teaching.

His editorial output is prolific. He produces numerous professional publications and writes for Canada’s Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen, and England’s BBC, and p2pnet is proud to regularly run his columns. He’s also on the director and advisory boards of several internet and IT law organizations including the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the dot-ca administrative agency, the Canadian IT Law Association, and Watchfire.

The former chair of a global Internet jurisdiction project for the American Bar Association and International Chamber of Commerce, Geist is regularly quoted in the national and international media on internet law issues and has appeared before government committees on e-commerce policy.

Obviously, with a work-load such as that and three lively children, he doesn’t have much in the way of free time but when he does, he’s a big sports fan who, although he’s an Ottawa Senators season ticket holder, is also a “a die-hard Toronto Maple Leafs hockey fan”. And when he gets the chance, he takes in “a fair amount of music” on his iPod, “in addition to a growing list of podcasts.”

One of his favourite bands is Green Day, and he’s also a Springsteen fan.

“I really like Pandora for listening to new stuff,” he says. “I buy music on Apple iTunes and also download occasional stuff. Frankly, most of my P2P downloading tends to be torrents of video files of recent lectures or other video content.”

BitTorrent is his application of choice for downloads.

Do you think Canada will ever be in the same situation as the US where even young children will become CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) victims? – we asked him in the Q&A below.

“I hope not,” he says.

p2pnet: You’ve become a virtual spokesman for copyright common sense not only in Canada, but in other parts of the world. Is this something you deliberately set out to achieve?

Geist: No, not at all. My focus has traditionally been on Internet issues and I’m very active on privacy, spam, Internet governance issues. The growing attention to copyright merely reflects its critical importance to the Internet and to creativity and culture more generally.

p2pnet: Does the role sit well with you?

Geist: I think there are a lot of people who do great work in this area. I’m fortunate to have some platforms to speak out and educate – such as a regular newspaper column and my blog. These are issues that have not gained significant awareness in the past and I’m happy to help change that.

p2pnet: How much real influence do you think the entertainment and software industries have over decisions made in Ottawa and elsewhere?

Geist: Enormous influence – they’re clearly one of, if not the single most successful lobbying concern worldwide as their influence extends internationally, nationally, and even at the local levels. In Ottawa, I think that policy makers are genuinely interested in hearing all perspectives. Once their work turns into a bill, however, we’ll see the power of the lobby come to the fore.

p2pnet: Do you think they have undue influence? If so, should it be curbed, and can it be?

Geist: They certainly have far more resources than any other stakeholder group. I think it is essential that other stakeholders – particularly those who represent the public interest – receive active support so that their views are heard.

In the US, there are many groups (EFF, CDT, Public Knowledge, ACLU, EPIC, IP Justice, etc) that work in the area.

We don’t have nearly that kind of support in Canada as I think CIPPIC, the public interest technology law clinic that I helped establish at the University of Ottawa, is one of the only similar groups in Canada.

p2pnet: Is it acceptable for elected politicians to accept benefits from the entertainment and software industries, and to so obviously (and actively) represent their interests against those of their constituents?

Geist: No. That issue sat at the heart of my very public fight with former MP Sarmite Bulte. These are tough issues and I think it is critical that the process be both fair and seen to be fair. When you have MPs in decision making positions, they shouldn’t be seen to be aligning themselves with any single stakeholder group. It was for that reason that I proposed the copyright pledge. It didn’t say that politicians couldn’t take money from lobby groups – only that they couldn’t take the cash and then directly influence policy by sitting as Minister, Parliamentary Secretary, or on the relevant House of Commons committee.

p2pnet: Have you ever been approached to work with, or for, any of the entertainment or software companies?

Geist: I talk with many groups and companies all the time. While we may disagree on certain issues, the complexity of copyright is such that your opponent on one issue, may be your ally on another.

p2pnet: Are you able to sit down and have a reasoned, and reasonable, discussion on copyright and other related issues with the people who make the corporate decisions?

Geist: I am. There are some people who don’t want to talk, but they’re in the minority.

p2pnet: Is it acceptable for the purely commercial labels, studios and software houses to so easily use, and be an integral part of, police and other agency raids and enforcement operations the industries themselves usually initiate?

Geist: I think true commercial piracy – the sort where commercial operations churn out infringing software or DVDs for sale and profit – is obviously wrong and the law should be used to stop such activities.

p2pnet: Is copyright ‘crime’ a crime at all?

Geist: I think it’s fair to say that the commercial piracy described above is a crime. I don’t think that the non-commercial copying that we see on P2P networks falls into that category, however.

p2pnet: Would you agree that if the software and entertainment companies were to use p2p technologies for handling and distribution, a reduction both in counterfeiting and duplicating and in costs associated with physical product would follow?

Geist: I think P2P represents a tremendous commercial opportunity for those groups. I think it has the potential to reduce distribution costs. I’m not sure that it would have an impact on commercial counterfeiting.

p2pnet: Should the cartels be allowed to have a definite presence in schools and universities via their so-called ‘educational’ programs?

Geist: I think it’s up to the schools to ensure that their students gain a balanced perspective on these issues. Educators wouldn’t tolerate commercial messaging in other areas and shouldn’t here either.

It’s essential that educators take that role seriously by educating their students on the full range of copyright issues including their user rights to use works without prior permission.

p2pnet: Do you believe people who share files with each other online are ‘thieves’ and ‘criminals’ as the CRIA, et al, claim?

Geist: No.

p2pnet: Is file sharing really “devastating” (to quote the CRIA claim) the music industry and its various elements ?

Geist: I don’t believe so. I’m sure it has some impact, but it’s hard to know precisely what that impact is as there’s some evidence that the impact is positive, not negative.

Regardless, the decline in sales that the major labels have experienced in recent years is almost certainly about a host of issues that have little to do with P2P, including more consumer entertainment choices, pricing, changes in the retail distribution of music, the decline of radio, and the releases being brought to market.

p2pnet: Do you think the wholesale price of between 60 and 80 cents for a single Big Four digital file is fair?

Geist: I don’t know. In an open market, the market would set the price. Obviously people like NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer are skeptical that the market is truly functioning appropriately without unlawful and anti-competitive interference.

p2pnet: Does a download equal a lost sale?

Geist: No. I don’t think anybody would argue that it does. Even the Copyright Board of Canada has valued a downloaded song as a lesser value that the CD version for purposes of the private copying levy.

p2pnet: Are file sharers and counterfeiters equally and jointly responsible for entertainmment and software industry downturns, as the CRIA and other trade-cum-PR units suggest repeatedly?

Geist: I don’t think file sharers and counterfeiters should be equated – there is a significant difference between the two.

As for industry downturns, I’m not sure that those industries are making those claims. For example, the video game software industry is enjoying enormous growth, while the movie industry is experiencing terrific revenues from DVD sales and other new licensing opportunities.

p2pnet: Should parents he held responsible under the law for something their children may, or may not, have done?

Geist: Well, certainly not for something their children didn’t do.

The better question is whether we should hold anyone liable to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for P2P activity. I think not – statutory damages provisions should be amended to address this misuse of the law.

p2pnet: Do you agree that blogs and bloggers are replacing the traditional media as disseminators of news and information?

Geist: I’m not sure they’re replacing traditional media, but they are obviously having an enormous impact on the dissemination of news, opinion, and information. I think blogs often provide more timely, more informed analysis that you will find in the mainstream media and thus either replace or complement MSM coverage.

I also think that we’re seeing a growing convergence between the two – newspapers are starting to look a lot like blogs – take the redesign of the Globe and Mail as an example.

p2pnet: Do you think they’re having, or will have, an influence on what the labels, studios and software makers do?

Geist: I think bloggers are having an influence on all aspects of society, including public policy and corporate decision making.

p2pnet: Do you think Canada will ever be in the same situation as the US where even young children will become CRIA victims?

Geist: I hope not.

I’m hopeful that Canada can develop a model that benefits all stakeholders and does not resort to damaging litigation that serves no one’s best interests.

p2pnet

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.