But besides the interactions between artists, companies and broadcasters, the royalty collections occasionally extend to users directly. Michael Petricone, from the Consumer Electronics Association was brandishing a new toy for XM radio, one that allows users to locally record songs off XM. He compared it to “taping songs off the radio 10 years ago.” That might work if listeners had to sit at the ready, finger on record to catch their favorite song. But this thing lets you pre-program the songs you want recorded, and as soon as they go out over one of the hundred station, it gets it for you. And that makes the other boys upset.
It’s these kinds of devices that have been mightily protested as copyright violations by all of the royalty groups and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) alike. And so the debate over what is individual fair use begins – can we copy music for our own use exclusively? Broadcast from device to device within our own homes? Or will these, like most new technologies, fall within the gray areas of royalty laws? The answers are still being decided.
After Party
Questions upon questions were the rule for the day. And as always, the party after any conference was where a lot of the real discussion happens – people have a chance to put away their notebooks, grab a beer, and start sorting through what they actually THINK about what was said. I was lucky enough to encounter Michael Bracy, policy director for the Future of Music Coalition. He had been the moderator for the Net Neutrality panel, and helped answer some of my questions.
And there were many of them, of course. But one that I couldn’t shake was: “why are we even asking these questions?”
Not that issues of policy and neutrality and copyright are unimportant. But some of the basic understanding of what the Internet is and how it is used by people of a certain age seemed to be lacking. Downloads are downloads, streams are streams, music should be available instantaneously and through a huge variety of sources. What was the problem?
The accord we came to was that, in about a decade, half of the issues we discussed simply wouldn’t be issues at all.
Not that anyone would actually reach a sensible conclusion. It may just end as the generation that will be stepping up and taking control is one that has the Internet as a central part of their life. They accept the “new media” as simply “media”, and current media as archaic.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
super job Claire, thanks so much!
2 - bliffle
Why struggle to enforce old monopolistic business models? Let them die, and then form new business models.
The whole concept of copyrights has been so abused that it no longer serves a useful purpose.