Fair Use or Fair Share?

The most important limitation to the writer’s exclusive rights is the public's right to exercise a "fair use privilege" regarding copyrighted works. Fair use refers to an individual's right to use copyrighted material in a reasonable manner without the consent of copyright owner.

OK, fine. But lets be realistic.. Ripping your CDs in order to put them on your portable player or recording a concert and sharing it with friends is fair use. Right? Or perhaps it is fair use in the new world of cyber space when a bunch of entrepreneurial students come up with something great and then deal with rights issues once they have proven concept or can afford it to pay the rights holders. But, when huge corporations make millions of $ from streaming music without paying rights holders a dime? This is NOT fair! (Whether or not they are profitable is their god damn problem.)

Perhaps it's time to introduce THE FAIR SHARE CLAUSE. The music business must first agree between them and then they need to act with unity. The collection and copyright societies are being way too vague in reacting to the misuse of the copyrights they are charged with protecting. And the labels are hunting around like hungry wolves trying to repair their last 5 years of declining sales with anything that they can get their hands on. They have lost site of the future. They can't save their old business model!  They have to find brand new sandboxes to play in.

Perhaps licensing at ISP level is a good way to start. On the 2nd of January my inbox was loaded with blog posts and newsletters from the various 2.0 opinion makers about how 2007 is going to be all about on-line monetization. But there were NO emails from the music biz! Have they nothing to say?  Are social networks going to start paying artist's and rights holders for the streaming of their content?

Lets hope that ISP’s, the social networks and the music industry can create a market place with a common understanding that the creation of great content (and I’m talking about REAL artists, not the 2.99 million shitty bands out of the 3 million on My-Space) does cost time, money and energy. It is no different from the development of technology. Artists have to start getting some return from the revenue their music is generating from advertising and broadband fees. Or else, in the future a lot of great talent won't transform itself into great music. And we’ll be stuck with talent-less "I want my 15 sec’s of famers" and Idol winners...

Posted at 12:00AM Jan 15, 2007 by Tommas Arnby in Music  |  Comments[7]