To find a topic for my research paper, I did a search on google.com with the words, “copyright and the internet”. That returned 915,000,000 results, and realizing that I am not that ambitious, I decided to narrow my focus to copyright happenings within the last 12 months. I will focus on how the music, movie, and television industries are battling copyright and pirating issues on the internet.
Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that “copyright owners could sue Grokster [a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network that allows users to share an unlimited number of copyrighted or uncopyrighted files) for facilitating copyright theft” (Miller). This means that the media magnates are making certain that those who facilitate copyright infringing P2P arenas will be dealt with most harshly. They already sued many users who were only consumers and simply participating in this P2P environment. Now, they are going after those who make it possible for the little guys to get in on some free music.
Back in the 1980s, there was a similar argument roaming about. This one about the VCR. The media magnates argued that the VCR was akin to the Boston Strangler (Miller). This silly thought turned out to be the complete opposite. In fact, “the VCR helped the movie industry by creating a massive home-market for movies that now brings studios more money than they receive from merely showing films in theaters” (Miller).
"This case is only the latest episode in a long-running battle between media and technology companies. In 1984, in a case involving Sony's Betamax video recorder, the Supreme Court ruled that technology firms are not 12/10/05:Am2 -->12/10/05ntial noninfringing uses". For two decades, this served as a green light for innovations. Apple's iTunes, the legal offspring of illegal internet file-sharing, is among the happy results" ( Economist Newspaper).
Sadly, Grokster is among those that have a less-than-happy ending. This is a case of lawmakers stopping innovation. Or is it? It still happens that others can come into the play and find new and innovative ways of getting the same result. “But in the end, as in every other copyright issue in the history of the market, the technology won out and was allowed to continue” (Wolf).
For instance, allofmp3.com, located somewhere in the beautiful Russian Federation, cannot be touched by the Supreme Court, and as we all know, Russians don’t follow the laws anyway.
There is a way for the media magnates to overcome this problem, or at least work toward a solution. Sony made a good first start. “For the first Resident Evil movie, Sony provided artwork and assets for fans to create a sales sheet in a contest” (Wolf).
But there are some that would take it to the other extreme. For instance, enforcing
"compulsory license for sound recordings. Let the music flow for free over the Internet and levy a per-user fee to be paid to the copyright holders, bringing an end to the copyright 'monopoly.' The government will decide what is good for the owners to get paid. A royalty of five bucks a month per Internet household to be paid to sound-recording owners has been proposed by some generous souls. This would add up each month to something like $300 million-and more as the number of Internet households grows. That's a deal; I'll take it" (Kenswill).
Kenswill makes a point later that those who use the internet only for emailing and reading news articles would be sorely affected by the fees associated. This would make the wonderful tool of the internet a lot harder to distribute to all who could benefit from it.
There are a lot of different views on how this should be handled. This humble student believes that if the media magnates would offer a lower price to consumers for copyrighted material purchased online, they would have more loyalty and more profit in the end. According to Mark Gorton, the man behind LimeWire, another P2P program; “file sharing is a net good for society. It lowers the cost of distributing [media]” (Reiss).
Kenswil, Larry. "DRM, Legit P2Ps Will Bring Life Back To Biz." Billboard 30 Jul 2005: 4. Research Library. ProQuest. BYU-Idaho Library. <http://www.proquest.com/>
Miller, James D. "Piracy Hasn't Permanently Set Sail." Better Investing 1 Oct. 2005: 16. ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry. ProQuest. BYU-Idaho Library. <http://www.proquest.com/>
Reiss, Spencer. "LimeWire's Live Wire." Technology Review 1 Jul 2005: 28. ABI/INFORM Global. ProQuest. BYU-Idaho Library. <http://www.proquest.com/>
The Economist. "Leaders: Rip. Mix. Burn.; Copyright and the law." The Economist 2 Jul 2005: 13-14. ABI/INFORM Global. ProQuest. BYU-Idaho Library. <http://www.proquest.com/>
Wolf, Jessica. "Digital Media Issues Debated at EMX Confab." Home Media Retailing 4 Sep. 2005: 10,31. Research Library. ProQuest. BYU-Idaho Library. <http://www.proquest.com/>