Aardvark Daily

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Solving the copyright problem

14 January 2009

Illegal downloads are here to stay and they're posing a very difficult problem for artists, studios, legislators and ISPs.

New Zealand's own response to the problem is a lame piece of legislation that, despite provoking loud and long cries of protest, looks set to come into effect next month.

I've already written a couple of columns decrying the ridiculous provisions of Section 92A of the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act, as have many other commentators but it would appear that even the new government's ears are closed.

But, if we are to demand that this ridiculous bit of legislation be tossed out due to the lack of checks and balances it provides, what alternatives can we offer?

How are we to ensure that copyright holders are properly compensated for the use of their hard work?

For an answer to that question, I think we ought to turn to the model used by the Kiwi music industry in respect to other media.

Over the holiday break, I regularly listen to NatRad's Matinee Idle programme.

It's an irreverent look at music hosted by Phil O'Brien and Simon Morris which is far better than anything I've found on commercial stations at this time of the day.

The dumbarsed thing about this is that they can broadcast the music over the radio-waves (where I can record it to MP3 file via FM) but they can't create a podcast of the same programme due to copyright restrictions associated with distributing the same stuff via the Net.

So how is it that they (or any) radio station can play a copyrighted music track to the public for all to hear without being charged with a copyright offense?

Well radio stations pay APRA a licence fee for the right to play those tunes and in turn passes the money on to the artists concerned.

APRA are extremely vigilant in protecting the rights of members and I have to admit that they appear to double or triple dip far too often for my liking, but the concept is sound (no pun intended).

For example: If you (legally) buy a tune online and download it to your iPod you'd expect that you now have a right to listen to that tune anywhere you want because the artist has received a chunk of that money. Well thanks to APRA, that's not the case at all.

If you stop in town for a coffee in a cafe and find that same tune playing on a radio that is positioned so that all customers can hear it -- you'll be paying *again* for the privilege. That's because APRA will be demanding fees from the cafe-owner for the right to play that radio in a public place. But wait... it gets worse! The radio station will also have paid APRA for the right to broadcast that tune in the first place. See what I mean about triple-dipping?

But enough APRA-bashing, back to my alternative solution to the copyright problem.

Why don't organisations like APRA get together and form a new cyber-entity that is responsible for collecting and distributing payments for works that are fired across the interweb?

A small levy could be tacked onto every ISP account to provide people with legal and effectively unfettered access to anything that was copyrighted, without fear of prosecution or being disconnected.

If (say) just US$5 month was collected from all internet users and put into a pool, that money would then be available to anyone who chose to assign their works to the collecting agency.

Yes, it's a media-tax, just like that levied on various recordable media in countries such as Canada, Germany, etc -- but it's a whole lot more equitable than the section 92A we're currently facing.

There are now 300 million internet users in China alone. If they all paid $5 a month, that's $18bn a year out of that country alone. I suspect the total number of Net users world-wide must be at least 700 million, which brings the annual levy total to $42 billion.

When you consider that (according to Wikipedia) the total value of *all* music sales in 2005 was just $12 billion, and the US motion-picture industry has revenues of around $33 billion then they'd actually be a whole lot better off simply giving up on trying to sell their product on a pro-rata basis and simply offer carte-blanc licensing in this way.

In fact, I see the current pro-rata purchasing system for entertainment soon becoming outdated and unenforceable (if it's not already).

Just as consumers prefer to pay a fixed monthly fee for their pay-TV and printed newspaper/magazine subscriptions, so they will with their audio and video media.

And, once the stuff is no longer charged for on a per-item basis, there'll be no such thing as piracy -- how can their be when it's all available for legitimate download, paid for by the mandatory $5/month media levy that *every* internet user would be charged as part of their ISP account?

Now there are some issues to be sorted (tracking downloads so as to compensate the creator accordingly) but the basic concept is so damned simple that I'm sure it would not even be on the radar of those pushing for draconian copyright laws like our Section 92A. Perhaps it's time to give them a whack upside the head with a clue-stick.

And for all those who would doubtless claim that they currently don't illegally download music or movies so they'd be subsidizing those who do... well guess what? You're *already* subsidising them by way of the increased prices you pay for your legal downloads or store-bought CDs/DVDs as the industries try to claw back those losses by including them in the pricing structure.

So what do you say?

Just introduce a universal copyright surcharge and make everything legally downloadable?

Or waste huge amounts of money passing lame laws and assuming that everyone is a criminal?

It's taken more than a decade to convince these industries that downloads are the way to go -- how long will it take before we can convince them that a fixed-fee monthly stipend might be a whole lot better than pro-rata charging and expensive copyright law-suits?

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