SAI - Michael Arrington on Copyright: Wrong!
From: Silicon Alley Insider
by Hank Williams
Michael Arrington's position on copyright seems to be that people are going to steal, no one should do anything about it, and that copyright based businesses are going to die and that's not bad.
In January, Michael wrote:
Personally, I think a new era of free recorded music and paid live performances is a very good thing. Recorded music will become a marketing tool to get people to pay for concerts and merchandise. Overall the music industry will be smaller in terms of revenue. But the artists who are driven to create their art will continue to do so, and many will make a very good living from it.
First, if music goes down, so will every other form of copyrighted
material including ultimately books, movies, TV, etc. What we will be
saying is in the Internet era, copyright doesn't matter. And this is
good?
Second, there is no evidence *at all* that free music on
the Internet is an effective (i.e. successful career building)
marketing tool. There have been no blockbuster successes that have come
from, for example Garageband
availability. I don't think you could even count more than a handful --
if that -- internet-based artists making a living from music. I believe
several of the American Idol contestants have been on indie music
Internet sites, but you cannot attribute their success to the Internet.
Third,
if the recorded music industry goes down, concert sales will not grow
-- they will shrink. This is because the money that goes into creating
concert demand (all from record label marketing) will disappear. People
*will* see fewer concerts and they will cost less money because of
reduced demand. So not only will the recorded music business disappear,
but so will the much of the live music business. So there will be no
"live music windfall" to share. Revenue in live music will shrink
substantially from where it is today.
In a continuation of the theme, today Mike writes:
My position is that it’s bad to criminalize natural behavior. And watching a clip of The Office, whether it’s legally on Hulu or illegally on YouTube is natural behavior. The only question is whether or not people are getting sued, or going to jail, for doing it.
There are several problems with the above statement. The first is that no one is criminalizing the viewer. In all p2p cases and in the YouTube case, the entity being criminalized or sued is not the viewer but the "facilitator". This means the person who posted or makes available the content, or the service itself. I do not believe there has ever been a case of someone being charged with anything for receiving, watching or listening to pirated content. So on the face if it, this is misleading.
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