New business models for old?

Jeremy Silver from Media Clarity gave an engaging talk this morning about copyright in the music industry. 'The industry is at a tipping point,' he said, contrasting the decline worldwide in CD sales (decreasing at a rate of about 17% a year) with the growth in live music sales and file sharing as a means for consumers to enjoy and share music.

He talked too about the implications of audience fragmentation, explaining that many consumers are now just as likely – if not more likely – to consume media on the web rather than on traditional formats such as TV or radio. These new channels have also led to a new culture of creativity, he explained, such as mashups or remixes of others' work. This blurs the lines of who does what in IP terms: who is the creator; who is the director/producer; who owns the final product?

This is not a trend that businesses can overlook. According to his figures (presentation coming soon for download): 30% of all internet traffic is distributed via a BitTorrent – a staggering figure. As proof of this point, he also said that internet traffic plunged by half after the Pirate Bay trial in February 2009 in Sweden. Up until that point there had been 1.8 users a minute on the website. Internet traffic returned to its previous heights in October 2009 said Silver, but now half of it is encrypted, and therefore more difficult to trace.

The world has moved on, stressed Silver, but business models haven’t; for example, the music industry continues its practice of releasing new songs on the radio eight weeks before they are available for purchase in retail stores. Little wonder then, he suggested, that consumers are downloading the songs (legally or illegally).

He argued for the need to reform copyright and rights management in the music industry, saying that: we need to bundle digital rights and unify collecting societies to manage recorded and publishing rights in one go. 'It's currently too difficult to sort out what needs to be cleared and with whom.'

In addition, Silver put forward the view that our notion of copyright was in itself outdated: 'We have a basic view of copyright that says it’s all about blocking copying,' he said, 'but these days, that's almost impossible. You can't stop people copying, which means that the law itself doesn't work.'

But Silver said that often more important to creators than preventing copying was the need to enforce attribution and getting paid for use. 'In that sense, copyright would work better as a right to getting paid and to attribution, but not to reproduction as it's too late, that’s gone,' said Silver, although he conceded that that could make it difficult to enforce moral rights; for example, to not use a creator's song to advertise a product that they did not agree with.'

To find out more, look out for Jeremy Silver's presentation. Coming soon.