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Thursday, August 22, 2002

Copyright wrangling: It's ironic that both these articles, first in early June in Salon and then yesterday in the Washington Post examine the illegal copying of music, the stealing of intellectual property. Compare and contrast the two articles. Is the similarity in the pieces just a coincidence? Is David Segal guilty of stealing Dan Levine's ideas or is he creating something new from them? Segal adds facts and figures to Levine's more subtle piece. Does that put him in the clear? I think it does. . .

My take on the Post article: having finished off Napster through the courts, the music industry is now going guerilla. It's planting spoof files on p2p networks like Kazaa and Morpheus to stop what it considers is the theft of over two billion songs a month.

There's an increase in CD-R sales as new releases reach the shops and this reveals the extent of music piracy, it claims.

But Eric Garland, president of BigChampagne, a company that measures online file-sharing traffic, says what the industry is doing smacks of desperation.

'When you've got a consumer movement of this magnitude, when tens of millions of people say, "I think CD copying is cool and I'm within my rights to do it," it gets to the point where you have to say uncle and build a business model around it rather than fight it.' [Washington Post].

10:33 AM | permalink