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Lloyd Webber calls for P2P Regulation

Valerie | 06 Apr 2009, 08:26

Music composer and theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber has attacked internet service providers (ISPs), blaming them for facilitating online piracy and has called on the government to safeguard Britain’s creative future by drawing attention to “the cataclysmic consequences for all creative industries if this area remains unregulated”.

Speaking to the House of Lords on Thursday, Lloyd Webber said:

“The question that occurs to me is whether, in 10 years’ time, Britain will be a place from which, say, the Beatles could have emerged. Will Britain be a fertile environment for all creative talent? Will Britain be a place where music, TV, film, games and publishing companies are sufficiently healthy to invest in British creative talent and take it to the rest of the world?

“No, not when there are no longer shops selling the physical products and when the internet has become a sort of Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy”.

Whilst admitting he “had no real answers” to the question of how to reduce piracy, Lloyd Webber urged the government to delay its plans to invest money in improving the national broadband network until a solution to illegal file sharing can be found. He also referred to the proposal outlined in Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report that suggested ISPs should collect and share data on copyright infringement so warning could be issued by rights holders, arguing in favour of tougher measures such as the “three strikes” regime, whereby repeat infringers would be cut off from the internet.

Lloyd Webber’s comments come as high profile musicians such as Billy Bragg and Robin Gibb have, in a letter to The Times, accused Google of devaluing songwriters, following a dispute over the payment of royalties from music videos played on YouTube.  A YouTube spokesman said that the firm “cannot be expected to engage in a business in which it loses money every time a music video is played”.

Could technology save the Publishing Industry?

Valerie | 03 Apr 2009, 12:09

Unlike other sectors that are reeling from a slowdown in consumer spending, it appears that although certainly not immune, book publishing is doing relatively well, with sales reported to have remained resilient, particularly in continental Europe - the number of books sold in France rose 2.4 percent in January and by 2.3 percent in Germany according to a report in the New York Times.

Earlier this month, the sector was given a boost with the launch of Amazon’s ebook application enabling Apple iPhone and iTouch owners to download electronic books onto their gadgets. This was widely seen as a strategic move by Amazon for a greater piece of the e-book reader market, following the launch of the second generation of its Kindle e-book reader in February. It was also seen as a move to take on Google, who recently joined forces with Sony to launch a mobile version of its Google Book Search, giving iPhone and Android users instant access to more than 1.5 million public domain books. Nintendo also made the move into book publishing in December following a deal with HarperCollins to make literary classics available to read on its DS portable games consoles.

The publishing industry has on the whole welcomed e-books and is genuinely excited about their potential to generate incremental revenue. However, its digital future has caused tension between open-source advocates who would like to see DRM barriers removed and those who want proprietary content regulations strengthened, and those who fall somewhere in between.

The launch of Amazon’s second generation Kindle caused controversy due to the text-to-speech synthesiser feature of the new upgrade, which opponents such as the Authors Guild argued was an infringement of copyright. Another example is Google, who last year settled a class-action lawsuit with the two most powerful authors’ and publishers’ associations in America. Document sharing site Scribd, which has been described as the ‘YouTube for documents’ has also come under fire from authors such as J K Rowling for allegedly allowing users to share copyright protected books.

The opening speaker at the BookNet Canada Technology Forum earlier this month remarked:

“None of us wants our intellectual property to be used without recompense. But we do want our intellectual property to be used to serve our readers”.

The event drew consensus that “change is inevitable, the consumer will be the chief beneficiary and the obituary for the book is not being written just yet”.

With the development of more competitive e-book readers on the horizon – Samsung is expected to unveil its Samsung Papyrus in Korea this summer and rumours abound that Verizon and AT&T are also looking to enter the fold – copyright arguments aside, the outlook for e-books looks optimistic.  The ongoing technological developments are may be what is needed to stimulate innovation and get the publishing industry through this recession intact.

The future of free vs. ad-supported music services

Valerie | 01 Apr 2009, 10:36

The demise of two popular Web 2.0 music services over recent weeks has called into question the future of the ad-supported business model.

The FT reports that SpiralFrog closed down on March 19 after borrowing millions from private investors, while Ruckus, another free service aimed at college students, folded in February. SpiralFrog’s business model was entirely supported by advertising, offering free and legal music and video downloads although songs could not be transferred onto storage or portable devices.

According to CNET, although ad-supported music sites have been around for two years, none have turned around any profit or matched the traffic achieved by iTunes. Blame has been cast on the record labels for demanding advance royalties or investment stakes -take the example of YouTube, which had to stop showing music videos in the UK because of demands that it should pay royalties each time a song was played being “simply prohibitive”. Meanwhile a Telegraph blog argues that these companies failed not because of “tumbling advertising revenues” but simply because they never generated the level of consumer interest needed to sustain them. 

The value of the free music business model has been much debated, particularly in regards to the right of artists to protect their IP, and the demise of these companies comes at a time when the music industry is questioning whether ad-supported sites help to boost music sales or are actually threatening to replace them.

Spotify, another free music streaming service announced a deal this week to sell MP3 downloads via the web-based music store 7digital, positioned in the media as a direct assault on the dominance of Apple’s iTunes Music Store, the UK’s biggest music retailer. Users have the choice of listening to music interlaced with adverts for free or paying a subscription to listen to tracks that are ad-free.

Mark Mulligan an analyst at Forrester Research observes:

“Spotify went into this thinking it was going to be a premium subscription business. The problem is what’s proven to be the successful part is the free bit”.

Echoing this view, is Ged Day, the founder of early download site Bleep.com:

“The market leader isn’t iTunes. The market leader is free”.

What is becoming apparent is that Web 2.0 is entering a transformative period in which business models will be re-evaluated and adapted so perhaps it is still too early to say whether recent events signal the death of the ad-supported model.