antimeria

A bunch of music/Internet/CC/copyfight-related articles (mostly from Boing Boing) after the jump.

A new challenge from a Harvard Law professor to the RIAA’s lawsuits-as-intimidation policy. Momentum could be building:

Nesson argues that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group — the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA — carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court.

Nesson, the founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said in an interview that his goal is to “turn the courts away from allowing themselves to be used like a low-grade collection agency.”

The Beastie Boys-accompanying, Yahoo Music-heading (wonder how much a part he played in their DRM debacle), Topspin-founding Ian Rogers suggests a Web 2.0-style democratizing of the music industry:

It’s hard to deny there’s a power shift going on from label to artist, and therefore the artist’s closest business partner, the artist manager. This isn’t to say labels aren’t valuable. A lot of people like to line this debate up as label vs. independent, but that’s not how I see things. What I see happening is artists having a choice, and labels needing to prove their value. It’s no longer the de facto dream of every musician to “get signed”. Instead of doing a 360 deal with a label artists are able to do a 360 deal with themselves and choose their business partners based on who is going to add the most value. If you’re an unknown pop-punk band from Orange County would you benefit from the marketing and branding help Epitaph Records could provide? Hell yeah. If you’re Joe Purdy would you benefit from what a major label adds? Perhaps, but what would you give up in the process? Artists now have some leverage in their ability to earn a living without making the leap.

Again, there are only two players in the music business that matter at the end of the day: the artists and the fans. The rest of us either add value or get in the way. Don’t get me wrong, over the years labels have added a tremendous amount of value through financing, A&R, marketing, promotion, etc. I’m just saying that every player needs to either understand how it truly adds value or it needs to get out of the way.

We’re not seeing the death of the music industry. We’re seeing it date Mila Kunis, lose the love handles and show its penis a lot (I finally got around to Forgetting Sarah Marshall yesterday). Anyway…

British Boing Boing blogger B’Cory B’Doctorow still hopes that the copyright crusaders come to their senses:

The reason copyright exists is because culture creates a market for creative works. If there was no market for creative works, there’d be no reason to care about copyright.

Content isn’t king: culture is. The reason we go to the movies is to have something to talk about. If I sent you to a desert island and told you to choose between your records and your friends, you’d be a sociopath if you chose the music.

Culture’s imperative is to share information: culture is shared information. Science fiction readers know this: the guy across from you on the subway with a gaudy SF novel in his hands is part of your group. You two have almost certainly read some of the same books, you’ve got some shared cultural referents, some things to talk about.
[...]
It’s entirely possible that there’s a detente to be reached between the copyists and the copyright holders: a set of rules that only try to encompass “culture” and not “industry.” But the only way to bring copyists to the table is to stop insisting that all unauthorized copying is theft and a crime and wrong. People who know that copying is simple, good, and beneficial hear that and assume that you’re either talking nonsense or that you’re talking about someone else.

Because if copying on the Internet were ended tomorrow, it would be the end of culture on the Internet too. YouTube would vanish without its storehouse of infringing clips; LiveJournal would be dead without all those interesting little user-icons and those fascinating pastebombs from books, news-stories and blogs; Flickr would dry up and blow away without all those photos of copyrighted, trademarked and otherwise protected objects, works, and scenes.

In case you don’t have time to wait for the industry giants to reverse course, you might want to check out Magnatune’s DRM-free, no-commitment, pay-what-you-want model.

This is a post-scarcity business model that we have been adopting, and let me say that it’s been working really well for us.
[...]
We’re simply continuing to face the “Internet Reality”: a world where everyone has more music than they know what to do with (from Bittorrent to Last.fm and beyond). The way to compete in this new world is not try to create artificial scarcity, but offer something better than what is available for free, in all ways that we can think of.

Links:
Law professor fires back at song-swapping lawsuits (AP)
Why I Copyfight (Locus Magazine)
GRAMMY Northwest MusicTech Summit Keynote (Topspin)
Membership without obligations (Buckman’s magnatune blog)