The Battle To Change The Betamax Precedent
from the welcome-to-shortsighted-business-practices-101 dept
Fortune Magazine is running a long piece looking at the well-known RIAA case against Grokster and Morpheus, pointing out that the industry doesn't just want to ban file sharing networks, it wants to overturn the Betamax ruling entirely. The Betamax ruling, of course, is what most of these cases rely on. Nearly 20 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that video tape machines were legal, so long as there were "substantial non-infringing uses" of the devices. Fortune, of course, is owned by
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I shouldn't have zero interest
I wonder if that's part of the problem. Music people, like many sports fans, assume that everyone has the same interest, though perhaps to a lesser degree. In fact, there are many of us with very little or no interest at all in either,
and perhaps that causes us to sometimes ignore things we shouldn't be ignoring. Maybe people who are close to this need to spend more time pointing out the larger issues?
Now how to write to my congress-folk explaining that I'm concerned about this even though I don't care one bit about it.. :-)
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Losing the Betamax decision could be a disaster
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This isn't surprising...
Is it just me, or does the whole concept of copyright need to be revisited? I support creators of art being paid for their efforts; what upsets me greatly are huge corporations using copyright as an excuse to deny people material that they want and are willing to pay for! Look at all the music and movies and books that are out of print. It's just as illegal to copy those as it is something brand new and in the stores -- yet you cannot BUY a new, legal copy of them.
Here's an idea (and as a generality, I know there are rough edges in it): if an album or movie or book is unavailable to the public for more than (say) two years, the copyright holder must either make it available, or see *ALL* rights revert to the creator. If the creator is a corporation, the work goes public domain. If the creator is a human being, they get another year to return the work to availability before it goes public domain.
There would have to be a phase-in, but what I see happening is the growth of companies that would specialize in on-demand production; the major copyright holders would license them to produce their material, so if you want a DVD of an obscure movie -- or TV show -- or whatever, you can pay for it (probably more expensive than the mass-produced current product, but not unreasonably so) and get a CD-R of the music, DVD-R of the movie/TV show, or a version of the book in a format amenable to on-demand production. The copyright owner gets paid, and the public gets the material they want.
Of course, this would put an end to companies like Disney saying "buy it now, or you won't get another chance at it" to drum up sales for a particular movie. Sounds good to me.
GM
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Re: Losing the Betamax decision could be a disaste
A far more likely scenario is some kind of copyright surcharge tacked onto things like broadband connections, CD/DVD-R, etc.
In the end, artists should get compensated for what they create, and while the record industry business model is flawed and antiquated, they have the right to whatever recompense the market will bear.
The underlying issue is that the price the market will bear has dropped considerably over the past several years. The largest cost component for a record company in producing an album is marketing expense. RIAA would be far better served in finding a way to reduce that cost component, bringing the cost of music more inline with what people are willing to pay.
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