More on the French P2P legislation
Today’s IHT has some reasonably thorough coverage of the proposed legislation to decriminalize online music sharing/piracy. Seen as this doesn’t seem to be going away I thought I’d add a bit more to my previous comments.
In my opinion, the IHT article fails to cover two points that are important in the debate. Firstly in it’s focus on reaction from politicians and the industry it fails to mention that the new leglislation is great for consumers. No longer will you have to wonder whether that track you downloaded will play on your brand X portable player. DRM does nothing for music listeners at all, it exists solely to protect big business and anything that bring it’s death closer should be welcomed.
The second thing that seems to have been forgotten in the furore is what effect the legislation will have on music distribution at a grass roots level. The proposed method of artist compensation under the new system is to divvy up a tax amongst the major labels with the size of the slice based popularity (there’s a conspicuous absence of technical detail on how to measure popularity in a downloading free for all). The labels will then continue to pay their signed artists according to whatever agreement they signed up to. My worry is that this results in is a system where consumers expect all music online to be free and almost all the money is still feeding to the major labels. If people looking for music online expect it to be free it makes it very difficult for individual artists or very small labels to operate a donation based system of compensation that bypasses the majors. Instead of damaging the big labels (which they seem to be very worried about at the minute) this could end up giving them a government sanctioned iron grip.
Either way, interesting times are ahead.
March 19th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Further coverage of the French copyright bill here. There’s now talk about forcing Apple to allow its Ipod to download music from other providers, a move that could force Apple out of the French market. I don’t think it’ll come ot that but interesting stuff anyway.