// M36: Technology, culture, law & economics.

Music Industry

Apple itunes and the iPod, back in 2001 apple had the iPod which was largely thought of cute and nice but not likely to catch on. Jobs went to Universal one of the companies that control music distribution and had a meeting about the iTunes store for liscensing. Universal saw it as a easy experiment and agreed, as soon as apple released iTunes for PC the iTunes store exploded as it was opened up to 95% of computer owners. 2006 apple had 76% of the download market and the distribution of legal online downloads went mostly through apple rather than the big distribution channels of old. Now the revenue was largely going through apple and the old distribution companies woke up to this and didn’t like it. Therefore they attempted to open up competetors, not to much success.

Tracks sold through the itunes store divided by how many ipods sold shows that aproximatley 15 tracks have been bought per ipod. So what about the other 2000 on their? Apple doesn’t care about those because it made the technology that people wanted and when asked about the other 2000 apple just shrugged and stated “they must be ripping them from cd’s they bought”.

Telephone companies are common cariers, and dont care what traffic is going over their network; because it would cost too much to monitor and it is implausable to do so. This is under threat because music companies, film producers and to some extent television companies lobby the government in an attempt to change the law so they can monitor piracy.

A lot of people whom support open source are very critical of the DRM that apple shipped itunes tracks with because they could only play on an apple device. Other manufactuers argued that this was not fair because it aids monopolisation. Apple argued that they dont restrict what you can import into iTunes.

Steve Jobs needed to fend off the attcks on apple’s DRM and so he publicly annouced that apple would love to release tracks that are DRM free but that the deal that was signed with the record companies stops us from doing so.

2008 all tracks from iTunes are DRM free, which is what consumers want.

Amazon Kindle

Amazon are trying to do to the book industry what apple have done to the music industry. The device however is extemely restricted to what you can buy on the amazon store.

Language

File sharing: “theft”, “pirate”, “digital rights management”. These words are used by people who are trying to restrict end users by adding these negative conotations to file sharing. Ripping a CD is piracy and therefore theft. Music industry want you to pay per use, with a limited license restricting to just one or five mashines and make it difficult so that if you want to move your music from one computer to a new computer you have to begin from scratch as it cant be moved. When PR and lawyers talk about DRM what they are doing is extending their grip on demanding people pay per use and knowing whom are using what.

DMCA

This gives extrodinary powers to the american government to monitor people, built with holywood in mind. Extends copyright to 70 years. The trend in legeslation is to extend copyright to 70, originally it was 14 years.

The point of copyright is to protect the rights of the original creator of the work, so that they can make money out of it upon completion. It can be applied to anything creative, you can not copyright an idea only the form that it may take such as book, film, etc. The offense only happened when its copied, you would be free to discus and comment on them with reference. The counter argument comes from creative artists that it doesn’t need extending because people need a chance to extend upon what has already been made, if you have a 70 year restriction on that it slows down cultures progression.

Creative Commons

A form of lisencing that has emerged as an intelegent resonse to the above counter argument. It allowes the copyright owner to retain certain rights and allow through a teired system people rights of what they can do with your work. Such as if your work is used you must be credited, it can be used freely unless it is for comercial application, etc. Usually the artist just wants to be adknowledged, or they dont mind it being distributed but dont want it being edited or abused beyond their original intent.

Science Commons

John Wilbanks and James Boyle created science commons as an offshoot of creative commons. A more inteligent response to the difficultys of patents. The patent system has already caused problems within the pharmasutical industry as their is a conflict of interest when you patent a human genome because then you are the only company allowed to research or make money on cures related to it which ends up making costly cures and hindering research.

Medical research used to revolve around blockbuster drugs which could carry the company for 10-15 years.  Now that doesn’t happen as much which is why companies involved are becoming more open and sharing research through the science commons.

Carter Report

out-law.com/page-9528 /page-9660 /page-9654 Focus on the digital content part of the carter report.

The carter report is very interesting because it is at the moment in the process of being shaped. on 17th October 2008 Lord carter released the report for public scrutiny. Over the months leading up until it becomes law it will be edited a lot while a vast number of interest groups attempt to lobby the government for protection.