The other day Doug Mataconis wrote about how the real reason for the Netflix Qwikster split was because of the copyright holders.
but eventually Hollywood said, “No way. Here is how it is going to work. You will pay us a $/user/month for anyone that has the ‘right’ to connect to our content — regardless of whether they view it or not.” This was the term that changed Netflix pricing.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball agreed and said “With the discs-by-mail business, they never needed permission from the movie studios. With streaming, they do.”
While that’s all true, what many don’t realize is how widespread and unfortunate it is, because it’s not just in the movie business – it’s the entertainment industry as a whole because of the outdated copyright laws. Let’s look at the music industry:
Years ago there were tons of mom-and-pop stores that sold every physical CD one could think of. No one needed permission for resale, it worked the same for music as it did for movies, because of the First Sale Doctrine. But for some reason, that “magically” goes away when you move from physical to digital.
Take for example something on a grand scale like Columbia House, which in the 90′s was basically Qwikster for music. In today’s world, now that everything is digital, the copyright holders and the laws that they’ve lobbied for are actually destroying the longtail of mom pops and the selection that the public has to order from. Back then, for every Columbia House, you had a local Full Circle Records, or Tunes or Tower Records nearby, all across the world. For every Blockbuster, you had a Watchdog Video or TLA Video that sold movies all across the world. There was so much competition and selection, no wonder why the 1990′s were the height of CD sales.
But in this digital age, the laws say it’s not the same, but it is. So now we have only one store that sells movies, one store that sells music, and soon one store that will sell books. And the reason for this is because when the law leaves the power up to the copyright holder, rather than the first sale doctrine, then those with the leverage and lawyers, are the ones who win. So the winners will always be Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Say bye bye to Amie Street, Muxtape, and thousands of other online music “mom and pop” stores and station. They’ll be closed down or trampled on.
And because of that, the public loses. And the choices we have now for purchase digitally are horrible. Case in point: it wasn’t even until last year when Apple got The Beatles onto iTunes. Online mom and pop stores are now forced to sell cover songs or original music, instead of the original sound recording.
Even things like digital lockers (Apple’s iMatch), online radio stations (Pandora), or sheet music (8notes) kind of suck because of the law. We can’t carry the music with us to stream in the cloud, we can’t listen to the same artist twice in a row, and we can’t have a full catalogue of sheet music to choose from, respectively. But it’s no different than storing a CD in your house, listening to AM/FM radio, or buying sheet music at your local store. Yet, we’re going backwards, and that’s bad for the buying public, as well as for the copyright holders.
One of Doug Mataconis’ commenters had a really good question: well, why blame the copyright holders?. Here’s why:
The magic of the internet is in the longtail. It’s always awake, its fragmented, and it’s alive. It’s secret is in it’s fragmentation, sub communities, secret forums, and more. It’s too complicated to think of why it works, it just does – and to fight that with creating a single landing page, or newsfeed, or store, is really dangerous and unfortunate. It’s not the Huffington Post’s, or the New York Times that’s makes it what it is. The internet’s real magic is in the millions and millions of blogs and authors that spread the word, or self-publish, or buy things, or bring people together. It’s secret sauce is the the long tail and not knowing how it really runs, there are too many beautiful variables at any given second. So the copyright holders are shooting for short term profits rather than longterm gains. And who loses? Not only the independent brick and mortar stores, but also the independent film producers, distributors, musicians, book publishers, and more.
And to think of how stupid this whole digital rights thing is, there are companies like Zediva that are actually streaming DVD movies online in an ingenious way to loophole the outdated copyright laws. Progress?
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