Music downloading is here to stay

According to a new survey, pirating is up in Sweden. 43% now claim to have downloaded music illegally, up from 36% last year. One of the most common reasons given for people downloading music illegally instead of buying it online is said to be DRM.

Meanwhile, Karl Sigfrid (a member of parliament for right-wing party Moderaterna) has asked prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt (also from Moderaterna) why the party is not adhering to its election-time promise of not hounding down an entire generation for copying. Neither the prime minister nor the minister of justice has deigned to comment.

The background to all this a proposed law that would require ISPs to give out personal data about downloaders. Sigfrid claims that Reinfeldt can't support this, since that would contradict his statements before the election. The EU's general lawyer has stated that ISPs don't need to give out this information unless local law requires them to, so there is nothing in the EU body of law that requires this change.

Sigfrid compares the police bust of The Pirate Bay with the copying of cassette tapes that was widespread 20 years ago, when double tape recorders were common. At that time, no one tried to make the police stop Sony from making double tape recorders. Today, only a few people are protesting when the police do exactly that; stop The Pirate Bay from providing tools for copying music. In both cases, music copying is wide-spread. The difference is in the reactions from the music industry and how the government has reacted to music industry lobbying.

Of course, there is no way back once the genie is out of the bottle. There is already a generation out there that are used to being able to download music from the net. They won't accept having that possibility taken away. They may accept having to pay for the service, as long as the service is better that copying, but downloading of music is here to stay. Music publishers will have to learn to live with that and make sure that their customers can buy their music in a simple, efficient, and DRM-free way. The alternative is illegal downloading, and that's free.

Andra bloggar om: music, musik, downloading, copying, piracy, copyright, nedladdning, fildelning, the pirate bay, eu, moderaterna, karl sigfrid, fredrik reinfeld, politics, drm
Technorati tags: music, musik, downloading, copying, piracy, copyright, nedladdning, fildelning, the pirate bay, eu, moderaterna, karl sigfrid, fredrik reinfeld, politics, drm

Google, fair use, and the future of copyright

I'm happy to see that a court of appeals recently ruled that Google's use of thumbnail images in its image search is not a copyright violation. A different ruling would have made it impossible to create an image search tool as we are already used to having it.

I'm old enough on the internet to remember how the world wide web was like before Google, before Altavista, before Metacrawler. Finding something you didn't already know where it was located was basically impossible.You could stumble upon something useful by sheer dumb luck, just like clicking next blog on BlogSpot occasionally turns up something useful. The problem is that the chance of this being both useful and relevant to the problem at hand is infinitesimal at best.

If the previous ruling had been allowed to stand we had probably been forced back to a world without image search (at least as the American search engines are concerned). As usual, it all comes down to copyright and fair use. To me, there's no question that it's fair use when Google displays a thumbnail an inch wide of a book cover scan found on another site or a photograph someone posted. In the case of the book cover scan, I can't see any problems with reposting a full-size scan either, since all that does is market the book anyway. There's still a somewhat sliding scale here. There are, for instance, lots of sites distributing clip art and icons. These are images that probably aren't even as large as Google's thumb nails to begin with. Is it still fair use to display them as search hits? My answer would be yes: both since this is still free marketing for whomever posted the images to begin with and since making special allowances for very small images would simply not be worth the trouble (so what's "very small", exactly?).

I'm worried by the current trend curtailing fair use and increasing copyright reach. Personally, I'd like to see a reform that drastically shortens the length of copyright to a few years after publication. Even today, there are very few works that actually bring in any money after that time. By recognizing that, we would enrich the common culture available to everyone a lot without hurting short-term sales. I would also like to see blanket rules for "orphan works" (meaning works where the copyright holder can't be identified or located). It should be possible to reuse this kind of work without (as today), waiting until 70 years have passed after the author's death (or, for anonymous works, after publication).

Andra bloggar om: image search, search, google, copyright, orphan works, fair use, reform
Technorati tags: image search, search, google, copyright, orphan works, fair use, reform