Every three years the Library of Congress in the States goes through a review, where they grant the right to circumvent DRM in some cases, which is usually forbidden by DMCA. Not surprisingly, at this time you get the silliest and most infuriating spin from the copyright lobby.

The winner this time is Steve Metalitz, who is a lawyer representing MPAA, RIAA and other similar outfits. According to him consumers should not be able to strip DRM from material that is bought from stores that shut down their DRM-servers – thus rendering all the material bought from them useless. So, if you have bought your music from, say, Wal-Mart download service, you are out of luck – better go and buy all your albums again from somewhere else. Ka-ching.

According to Ars Technica Metalitz responded to several questions from the Copyright Office as follows:

“We reject the view that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.”

On the surface this looks kosher. Of course you can’t expect things to last forever or hold any industry to that kind of standards. Things break down, get lost and so on. But comparing downloaded DRM protected music to, say, electronics is a false analogy. Why?

Because DRM protected music is DESIGNED to fail whenever the seller feels like it. If someone’s music collection is lost due to a hard drive breakdown, accidental deletion or something similar (and there’s no backup), then the situation is pretty clear – he has to replace it with his own money. All kinds of devices wear down and break up sooner or later and there isn’t really much you can do about it. But a DRM kill switch is a different thing altogether. It’s not in any way an inherent property of music files, it’s a tacked on suicide pill which the consumer is not really paying for.

So, Mr. Metalitz and the organizations you represent: if we follow your logic, you would not mind if the car manufacturers fitted your cars with devices which they can use to trash the engine when they feel like it, or the furniture stores you use retained the right to just barge in and take out your sofas, beds and so on any given day? I mean, we can’t expect people to be able to drive their cars or sit in their living rooms in perpetuity?

If you follow the news about music industry, by now you must already KNOW that the pirates are killing music. Surprise surprise, while the industry is suing single moms for millions, they are also making more money out of paying customers.

You don’t have to believe us, you can ask Will Page, who claims that the revenues of the music industry in UK went up by 4,7% in 2007-2008 in spite of the recession and increase in p2p downloads. Who is this guy? Another copyright activist who tries to justify his piracy by babbling about online distribution, long tail and such crap? Not quite. Will Page is the Chief Economist of PRS for Music, which is a royalty collecting group for music writers, composers and publishers in UK. His study titled “Adding up the Music Industry for 2008” reveals that the music industry is diversifying and the consumers use a variety of different platforms to enjoy their music.

All in all the retail sales of music fell by six percent, which the report states is “actually quite an achievement, given the harsh economic conditions and turbulent events on the high street towards the year end”. The sales of physical records fell by 10%, but at the same time digital distribution was up by 50% and the sale of concert tickets by 13%. The net gain for the music industry over this was three percent. Additionally the industry saw dramatic growth in licensing, advertising and sponsorship deals.

The news article in Zeropaid made a nice summary of a key trend revealed by the report:

This report highlights the importance of diversification, or finding new places and new ways to generate revenues. By understanding the ecosystem, it enables more cooperation to grow the market going forward.

According to Zeropaid in the US investors have started to shy away from new innovations in digital distribution of music, because the biggest obstacle is getting the record labels to cooperate. At the same time the labels are whining about the declining sales, they seem to make it as difficult as possible to develop and adopt new revenue models. They seem to be either completely out of touch with what the modern consumers want, or somehow wilfully opposed to renewing their model just on principle. A good example of the former is Finnish Johanna Kustannus, which is a label for many well known major Finnish artists. In the beginning of the year they pulled most of their catalog out of Spotify, and what was the reason:

“We are a bit unsure about what Spotify is, so we wanted to pull our artists out of there.” -CEO Sini Perho (Kaleva)

Yes, because that information is so incredibly difficult to dig out…

So, what is the bottom line of this (and many other) surveys? It’s what us filthy pirates who want the artists to starve have been saying for some time: P2P is the new radio. People use to get to know new artists, then go to their gigs and buy both merchandise and their albums – the latter not necessarily as traditional CDs, but as downloads or song packs for music games, and so on. The same applies to YouTube with its numerous fan videos, which is in excellent way to get free publicity.

Make no mistake; the live music industry grew in 2008. More events, more bands, more tickets and importantly, higher ticket prices. Breaking it down to basic supply and demand economics, and given the scarcity embedded in its model, the live music industry is somewhere you really want to be right now. However, the distribution of wealth in live music represents a trend that economists at PRS for Music have also established in digital music – a perverse and paradoxical effect of the ‘long tail’. – Adding up the music industry for 2008

Music is doing just fine and so is the music industry – as long as the latter has the common goddamn sense to adapt to the times.

And how might that table look by the end of 2009? Factors outside the industry’s control will have a major say, especially as the effects of a ‘deleveraging’ economic downturn work through the system. Jeremy Fabinyi, Acting CEO of PRS for Music, has talked about ‘tough times ahead’, and advertising revenues are reportedly down double digits in many B2B sectors such as commercial television. That said, the intrinsic value of music itself may be playing a role in helping the industry weather the storm, as all major summer festivals have sold out and recorded music sales have shown some impressive resilience given the conditions. In terms of putting your money where your mouth (or mouse) is, two trends are worth a punt for 2009 though: firstly, B2B’s share of the overall pie will grow, and secondly that the wealth gap between hits (often heritage acts) and niches will widen. Ultimately what this all means is that portfolio theory matters more now than ever before or as Jeremy Fabinyi would argue, finding new places and new ways to collect royalties has never been so important. – Adding up the music industry for 2008

A thing most people – even many artists – don’t know is that when you join a copyright organization such as the Finnish Gramex or Teosto or their counterparts in other countries, you most often lose the right to decide how you can use your own music. Everything has go through the organization, which have their own non-negotiable tariffs. This means you can’t let for example a hobbyist theatre or a small film use your music for free or a smaller fee – or, it seems, even upload your own videos to YouTube.

According to Spinner.com article the latter happened to a Scottish artist Calvin Harris. He uploaded his song ”Ready For The Weekend – Original Mix” to YouTube, but it was removed by British Phonographic Industry because of a copyright violation.

According to his Twitter Harris, who uploaded the song for promotional purposes, was less than happy – especially so when his videos uploaded by other people haven’t been removed. “The BPI are the worst organisation to ever walk the earth and their setup is shambolic and their online employees are all massive retards” isn’t maybe the most constructive analysis of the situation, but the frustration behind that is very understandable.

YouTube is an excellent platform for promoting an artist with music videos, but it’s still severely under utilized by the music industry. I mean, where the hell can you see videos of most bands? MTV? I don’t think so. On an expensive as fuck DVD? Don’t make me laugh.

There are just two choises here – get with the program or lose the game.

Everybody who’s in a habit of clicking viral video links has probably seen one version or other of a clip of the movie Downfall (Der Untergang), where Hitler raves at his inner circle in the bunker. The idea of the clips is to alter the subtitles so that instead of his army getting their asses kicked Hitler raves about getting banned from Xbox Live or Frostbite metal festival, or whatever. Although in my opinion these videos are a terrible, terrible disservice to everybody who still hasn’t seen the movie, because they spoil the mood of the scene very efficiently, they are pretty hilarious at times.

The Constantin Film Produktion studio apparently doesn’t think so, since one by one these videos have started to disappear, apparently as a result of a DMCA takedown. So, what does a net user concerned with fair use guidelines do? A parody with Hitler ranting about copyright infringements, with YouTube getting a couple of knocks too. Enjoy.

Also, if you still haven’t seen Downfall, do it now.

Well, no surprise there that it was too good to last. If you wonder where your favourite music vanished from Spotify, they are implementing region restrictions. So basically in the future you can listen only to music that has been licensed for your country.

This illustrates beautifully one of the current problems with media distribution and the industry model. Whereas the industry, labels, production companies etc. are living in a word divided into regions, the consumer increasingly is not. More and more heavy consumers of music, movies etc. are relying on different kinds of digital distribution methods. Thanks to the stubbornness of the industry this distribution used to be peer-to-peer -networks for a long time. But what does it mean in practice?

Well, having to rely on p2p systems has led into a generation of consumers, who’ve got used to a digital distribution system with very little limits. A network is global and everything is available everywhere. If an episode of your favourite TV program is aired somewhere in the world, in the next day it will be downloadable on the net – regardless of the country. If a band releases a new album, it’s out everywhere at the same time, not to mention the movies. In order to be viable, this is how the commercial digital distribution systems should work. Compared to using even the simplest p2p-system the region based distribution methods feel artificially constrained and clumsy.

A lot of music, TV and movie consumers would like to pay for the content, but currently it’s simply impossible, amongst other things because of region restrictions and region specific distribution rights. This is the crap which is keeping for example Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 video stores down in Europe – the mess with the distribution rights in different countries. The oldest and the most archaic example of this is DVD region coding. This is a thing that costs the publishers money in a very concrete way. A year or so ago I watched a couple of episodes of an excellent animation series called Invader Zim. Waving a figurative wad of bills in my hand I went online to try and order the series on dvd, but nope, no region 2 version available. So, that’s my money out of the pockets of the series creators and no chance for me to support them financially. Nope, unlike many of my friends I don’t have a region free DVD-player, and I’m not going to risk breaking my PS3 which I use to watch movies.

The stock answer from the industry and lobbyists to this artificial scarcity is that people should just learn to live with the fact that they can’t get the content they want to: “you can’t always get what you want”. But well… you do and it’s very simple. It’s just a matter of firing up your p2p client of choice and downloading what you want. Immediately, without any hassle with cumbersome DRM and unskippable propaganda. (The latter has kept me from buying the said box set, borrowed it from a friend instead.) Of course you can wish very hard that people are so moral and complacent that hey won’t do it because you tell them not to, but oh do come on. No matter how many single moms and schoolkids you bully with lawsuits, that’s not going to happen.

If the industry doesn’t want to sell content to people, content that’s freely available illegally, they don’t have the right to say word one to complain about piracy. They can spout their propaganda about how downloading is stealing until they are blue in the face and thrash around with their lawsuits, but in the end they are going to just sink deeper and deeper into irrelevancy. It shouldn’t be so hard to understand: you can’t tell people what they should want, you should sell stuff the consumers want to buy.

So, dear music, movie and TV-industry – take a close look at services like Spotify. Do your utmost to get rid of artificial region based restrictions and aim to have your services working like this in 5-10 years minimum. If you want to have region specific distribution rights, limit them to retail and physical copies. Otherwise you have lost the game, pure and simple.

It remains to be seen how long will I be personally subscribing to Spotify. I’m not going to cancel the subscription right away, but I’ll be keeping an eye on how much of my favourite music is dropped from the catalogue and are there any plans of bringing it back. Now, if ever, you should support services like this.

One of the mantras RIAA, MPAA and other nosy cunts keep bleating is “you can’t compete with free stuff” – meaning what if a consumer can get something for free, he doesn’t have any reason to buy it. Also those who claim that there are people who download things for free and then buy stuff they like are liars or just deluded hypocrites (hmm, I must be imagining half of my CD shelf and all the TV series DVD-boxes, some still in shrink wrap because I’ve already seen them as downloads but wanted to pay for good stuff…)

Ok, the logic in that mantra seems to be beautifully sound. If you get an album or a TV series for free from the net, why pay for it? The thing is, people are not logical and the mantra just doesn’t apply to the real world, which is far more complicated than the oversimplifications the copyright lobbyists love. Some people want to own physical copies of movies or albums, some just want to show their support by paying for stuff they find enjoyable. The notion that no-one would ever do the latter tells far more about the mindsets of the lobbyists than the mindsets of the fans & consumers.

A case in point, Monty Python on Youtube. You could find tons and tons of clips from Monty Python movies and the TV series in Youtube, so what did these merry gentlemen do? Went into a huff, demanded that Youtube has to take down the illegally shared clips & started suing their fans? Nope, instead of that they founded their own Youtube channel, where all the stuff is up for viewing for free and in HD quality. So, according to the copyright lobby logic, they could kiss their DVD sales goodbye?

Wrong. What happened was that their DVD sales rose by a measly 23 000%. At the same time a major study done in Netherlands (in Finnish) revealed that file sharing actually helps the Dutch economy by 100 million euros per year, file sharers don’t buy less stuff than the other people but instead visit more concerts and gigs and game downloaders buy more games than those who don’t pirate them.

The same thing happened with Star Wreck, of course. When it was released as a free download, many internet cynics predicted that it would mean the end of the DVD sales. Instead, they skyrocketed.

So, please, copyright lobbyists and the industry, stop with the stupid already. You have already managed to create one generation who views entertainment industry and artists as greedy cocks who are willing to ruin the lives of their consumers with overblown lawsuits just to make a point. Stop shooting yourself in the foot and get on with the programme. No matter how hard you wish it, you can’t return to the time when all the content was under your control and frankly, you shouldn’t even try.

Instead of staring at the next quarter, look a bit further. The 15 year old kid who now downloads the songs without paying for them is in 10 years a young adult in his first job. By downloading material he has got to know a ton of artists, movies, TV-series and other material he wouldn’t otherwise know about – and more likely than not, his buying power is just going to keep increasing. This works in the software industry too. For example Adobe doesn’t go around suing private persons for pirating Photoshop, Illustrator etc too diligently, since with their pirated copies people learn how to use the software and then make their employer buy it. Everybody wins.

Free distribution is free publicity. File sharing is here to stay and people are going to distribute your stuff no matter what you do – so why not capitalize on it by sharing the stuff the way you want it to be done and giving people an easy way to pay for the product? The only thing you have to lose is a ton of ill will springing from fighting the realities of the modern day.