27 janeiro 2003

CULTURAS IN VITRO
The Keys to Ending Music Piracy: The record labels' legal assault is winning battles and losing the war. Educating copyright thieves is as important as prosecuting them
Real-World Music Retailers Fight Back: The music business is being fundamentally and forever altered by the Internet, and the big real-world retailers are painfully aware of that fact as conventional music sales have steadily headed south.
But these companies are not going to slink off licking their wounds, and that accounts for today's launch of Echo, a retailer-driven digital music consortium that says it is "committed to bridging the gap between brick and mortar and digital music distribution."
Music misses an(other) opportunity: It seemed too good to be true. When I read the Reuters report on Monday that Hilary Rosen, chairwoman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, had declared that her agency "will hold ISPs more accountable" and suggested that one way was to impose a fee on Internet service providers whose users frequent file-sharing sites, my ears perked up.
Not only did her suggestion make a lot of sense, but it also signaled a significant attitude shift for the industry. The music industry's business plan to date had called for suing college students and seizing laptops from Navy midshipmen; now it seemed as if Rosen was saying that the RIAA was amenable to imposing flat fees on ISPs to compensate for their users' downloading.
But alas, to paraphrase R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, 'twas never thus. When I called the RIAA for elaboration, a spokeswoman answered, "Hilary never said that."