There is one thing that I am afraid is likely to be forgotten during this Blackout Ireland week.
The media companies are right. Piracy is wrong.
Lets make no bones about it. These people are creating something and asking for a reward they deem fair in return. Whether or not we agree with that does not give us the right to take something without due compensation. I’m not going to get into the whole “victimless crime” thing or anything else like that, this is what I believe to be true.
What they are, however, is completely and utterly bone headed.
Times are changing. Music is not distributed primarily by physical media any more, but online. As time goes on we will start to see movies, television, books and other media shared the same way. These are already on the road, but not to the same extent that music is.
But the picture is not entirely bleak, these media companies have done some positive things. EMI were among the first groups to start selling music without DRM protection on iTunes. All of the “Big Four” music labels support the Amazon MP3 Store, unfortunately not available in much of the world yet. Microsoft were even able to pull a coup that Apple were long unable to do, subscription pricing in the Zune Store for “all you can eat” music access, and 10 tracks to keep. Not a fantastic deal, but better than most. Movies and TV shows are availble to rent or to buy in some countries, but legal issues mean they are not available everywhere just yet.
There is still a lot of work to do. Licensing is archaeic at best. So far, no officially supported store that I am aware of support lossless, or free and open formats or codecs (feel free to correct me in the comments and I’ll update accordingly). A choice between “pay-per” and proper subscription pricing to suit the casual user and the music lover both.
And all this needs to be done with video as well.
People have rallied against restrictive DRM systems for years, complained that they cannot get what they want when they want it where they want it. And you know what happens? It all starts again.
The Authors Guild have gotten Amazon to disable the text-to-speech function in their new Kindle. They are afraid that it will cause people to decide that a tinny, computerised voice with a difficulty understanding punctuation is much better than an audio book performed by a professional voice actor, or the author himself. I’m sure Amazon, owners of Audible, will bet against that. The madness starts anew.
Even communities of people who could benefit the owners of media, media players and media applications are being closed down. Movie associations are routinely targetting websites offering fan made subtitles, because they are breaching their copyright. Music associations used to do the same to lyrics sites. Better idea? Work with these sites to create a standard by which this meta data missing on purchased media can be displayed using the obviously willing and able community. Don’t kill them, don’t discourage them, don’t give them any more reasons to hate you. Embrace them, work with them, build a commuity around them. There is no reason this can’t be done.
Times are changing. People are adapting to the new way of consuming media at a far faster rate than anyone might predict (look at the explosion of file sharing and video streaming sites as proof), and if the media companies don’t take the long term view and start doing the same they are going to find themselves out of business. It might not be today, or next week or next year but it will happen. There are millions and millions of dollars and euros being spent persuing and fighting the way people work, which could instead be better spent offering better systems that might make people more likely to work with media associations rather than against them.
Tick, tock.