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].
