The Recording Industry vs The Rest Of The World

A long time ago there was this man called Thomas Edison. Our friends across the sea hail him as a genius and he certainly was quite a remarkable man. One of the wonderful inventions to come out of his laboratory was a machine which could take sounds and put them onto a wax cylinder.

We have come a long way. Through the 78, the vinyl, the reel to reel, cassette, CD, Video, DVD ….. and so it goes. An amazing journey. Enough superlatives.

For as long as I can remember the recording industry has been predicting their own demise due to piracy. Back in the cassette days I can remember the recording industry attempting to restrict the sale of blank cassettes to the extent that they levied 20 cents for every blank cassette sold which went straight to the artists associations to compensate for piracy.

But no sooner had this happened when the CD burst onto the market.

In the mean time the video cassette emerged and with it the predictions of the end of the theatre and the ultimate the demise of the movie. Why? Because people will be able to record and copy movies so easily.

Then there were the CD burners. Once again the demise of the recording industry was predicted.

What happened to all of these predictions? Recording artists are recording more, selling more, movie theatres are being built as we speak, DVDs are lining shop shelves in their billions. Why, despite the most dire predictions of the recording industry? The answer is simple. Consumerism. People love the look of the flashy DVD on their shelf. Teenagers take great pride in their CD collection – or did until the iPod. Oh yes. That latest trophy. There may be many cheaper and more versatile media players but it is the iPod that is selling. And with it the paid downloads, despite the fact that they could obtain the music for nothing from pirate sites.

I have heard these predictions for thirty years and they sound as ingenuous now as they did thirty years ago. I am not sure if they believe their own publicity but I suspect that the primary motivation is greed. I am not in any way justifying piracy or saying that profiting from others hard labour is right. People who produce and knowingly sell pirate material should be prosecuted, but the claims of the recording and software industries of losses in billions of dollars are laughable. In the first place they are using the retail price of each unit, knowing that a large proportion of the items are sold at a discount through competition or in the case of software, site licenses. Second most of the sales actually are to people who would not actually buy the product if they had to pay say $500. So it is not a loss, or a lost opportunity. It is in fact nonsense.

I recently read that more money is made from DVD releases than theatre releases. So how does this square up against the assertion that the movie industry is loosing huge amounts of money? Absolute rubbish.

So. They have used this as an excuse to introduce macro vision. Has it stopped people copying DVDs or Videos? No. It means that if we want interference free vision on our TV we have to shell out for a box to remove the interference from the signal. There are a large number of instances where certain combinations of equipment require the installation of a filter. I had to buy a $100 video switch to overcome deliberately introduced interference from my DVD player in order to play legitimately purchased DVDs.

We cannot make “fair use” or backup copies of recordings. If the recording deteriorates prematurely, or is scratched, or refuses to play on my multimedia computer then we have to shell out another $35 to buy another one or do without. And what of the stripping programs that allow people to make copies of their legitimately bought recordings. Oh no you have to buy one for your car and one for your home (assuming it will play on your car).

What then is the motivation for such a policy. I can only see one, greed. Artists have been conned into agreeing to encrypt their audio recordings for the sake of a marginal theoretical increase in income. In fact I suspect that it does not make a scrap of difference. I remember the first copy protection I encountered was on the so called killer app for the PC. Lotus 123, the definitive spread sheet program of the 80s. If I recall correctly, the original floppy had to be placed into the drive to start the program. Lotus soon produced a crack to their own program so that the original floppy was not needed. They discovered that it was pointless since if people wanted to copy the program then they only needed to download a crack from their local bulletin board. As soon as the industry devises a new method of protecting data a means of defeating the protection will soon follow. But it makes little impact on the industry and I doubt if it ever will. Better to spend that money on pursuing the real cheats. Find the people that mass-produce illegal copies for profit and leave poor John Citizen Consumer to go about his own business in peace. To misquote Mark Twain the death of the recording industry has been greatly exaggerated.