Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous german philosopher said once : “There is no moral phenomena at all, only moral interpretation of phenomena“. The lessons of this teaching is not to forget about moral, but to understand that the same phenomena could be analyzed differently than from a moral point of view. And I choosed to give you an insight of the digital cultural sharing from the IT industry business interests point of view. If I may take Nietzsche words, I’ll say that this article is an interpretation of digital cultural sharing beyond good and evil…
Moral condemning of downloading has begun very soon in the history of Internet. In the beginning of the Web, around 1999, I remenber having read that Web search engines could be considered as illegal since they steal content from Web sites in order to index them. If you don’t believe me, I’ll take another example. Do you remenber web sites that forbid right click ? During a long period of time, every webmaster thought that his holy duty was to protect his intellectual rights and prevent his own visitors from stealing his content. They forbid the possibility of right click blocking by the way some core functionnality like opening in a new window or tab. And this was technically inefficient.
Besides this there were also so many communication campaigns to teach people not to steal music, films and so on. www.Jaimelesartistes.fr is just one of them. Do you remember this one:
Pirating MP3 is downloading communism, a message of the RIAA (SACEM equivalent for the USA)…
Or even this one :
Captain Copyright provided to you by the Canada's Access Copyright agency
When we come to discuss a bit about digital content sharing and downloading, the first thing you have to do is condemning illegal download. Then during all your speech, you have to keep in mind that illegal donwload is bad. Promoting free (as in speech) downloading and sharing music on Internet is now considered as being a pirate or worst a sociopath. “Le Monde” is even publishing a story with this title : “La contrefaçon de DVD financerait le terrorisme” (DVD piracy is supposed to fund terrorism) based on a research from the very famous agency RAND Corporation. These are attemps to paralyze any unbiased reflexion about digital content sharing.
Illegal content downloading became very soon in the history of Internet. There were personal home pages and FTP. Then they became private. There were Warez on Usenet. Then it became forbidden by ISP *but* programs were sold to download from them. There was Napster, eMule and other P2P program. Then Napster, eMule and clones closed or were bought. Then they were Bittorrent search engines. They’re still alive. There were RadioBlog.Club. Then it closed, but Deezer, Spotify, iMeem were launched. Every attemps to end with illegal downloading by closing a service failed. The cultural industry was fed up and decide to fight back the Empire of Pirates… That’s why bills such as EUCD, LCEN or HADOPI in France have been brought in.
The French minister of the IT Economy, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, has even declared that she has never been consulted about the HADOPI regulation law against piracy. It was designed by the Minister of Culture alone. She has been kindly advised not to interfere with this project. That shows that this type of laws are adressed to protect the Cultural industry from the new habits coming from the information age. PC Inpact magazine has launched a poll asking what people will do when HADOPI will be active. 72% declared that they will continue to download using another technique. About 14% declared that they will stop downloading if they recieve any threat to cut their Internet access. And only 2% said that they will stop downloading. So even if HADOPI is voted and executed I think that the issue of piracy will be still last for a long time. Schumpeter and his theory of “innovation grapes” think that every major innovation is followed by a crisis of the old production structure. Following this idea, the cultural industry seems to be this old production structure and their fight seems to be an already lost battle.
So let’s be pragmatic. We’re working for the telecom industry. And the telecom industry has no interest in discouraging its clients to download. Their mission is to provide the way for people to communicate and consume content. But let’s be honest : if downloading didn’t exist, ADSL wouldn’t have got the success it has nowadays.
Borrowing Slywotzsky ideas, one of the better known american consultant, the value is now migrating. The value of the digital content industry is migrating from promotion to distribution. In the beginning was the artist, then the major came and was the new boss. Now it’s just ISP turn.
A recent French study has shown that biggest DVD pirate downloaders are also the biggest DVD buyer. Another study found that the most prolific online pirates are 21% more CDs than the average among such consumers. My own personal conclusion is that the greatest pirates are also the best buyers! So why are we punishing them? Shouldn’t we encourage them instead downloading and take the most benefits we can from it?
Pirate Bay, the famous bittorrent search engine platform, have launch a new service : a private VPN dedicated to content sharing. This service cost 5€ by month and give you complete security and anonimity over the data you’re transferring. Why are we waiting that pirates launch this type of services and not launch them ourselves ? Why are we letting a bunch of geek teenagers become millionaire by launching services like Napster, RadioBlog.Club, bittorrents and so on? My bet: Telecom Operators will begin to launch legal services competiting the pirates ones using exactly the same technology.
Not to mention that online music selling is emerging in the US : see the numbers +33% in one year despite the crisis! Knowing that prices are much lower online, and the crisis push people to seek for low prices, my prediction is that CD market will continue fall dramatically while the Digital content exchange business and online music selling will grow fantastically. I think that’s the telecom operators should take over the content sharing and distribution place in the value chain.
Now based on my predictions on value migration, let’s imagine the future on this 5 simple hypothesis following this repartition of revenue of a CD: Cost of CD fabrication will be cut by 2
- Authors will earn the same amount
- “Majors” rate of return (operational margin rate : EBITDA/CA) will stay the same
- The distribution incarned by Telecom Operators will take half of the cost and revenue of promotion and fabrication
Old Distribution of revenue for the CD industry
Future Distribution of revenue for the CD industry?
written by Badredine Ladjemi.
(8 votes)
Loading ...