With bipartisanship in the US all but broken, intellectual property policy is one of the last bastions of strong consensus. With remarkable consistency, Democrats and Republicans have backed industry-led efforts to expand intellectual property rights and ramp up the enforcement of them. Support comes from across the political spectrum, from the US Chamber of Commerce to the current vice president's office, where Joe Biden has led the charge against what he calls "people blatantly stealing from Americans -- stealing their ideas and robbing us of America's creative energies." The latest fruit of this effort is the PROTECT IP bill currently before Congress. If passed, PROTECT IP will empower private parties and the Justice Department to block access to websites deemed to be "dedicated to copyright infringement." What critics fear it will do, instead, is open the door to government censorship of the Internet, stifle innovation in the web services sector, and break the unified naming conventions that make the Internet a truly global network. The act is unlikely, in any event, to seriously inconvenience piracy. The means for circumventing these blocks are trivial and in fact already available.
The image of foreigners stealing American creative products is, of course, political catnip. What US politician wouldn't get behind measures to stop such behavior? Unfortunately, it is also an unproductive way of understanding, much less addressing, the problem of global media piracy. In the SSRC's three-year, comparative study of piracy in the developing world, our teams came to some different conclusions about piracy's causes and potential solutions. Our explanation, at its core, is very simple: high prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. If piracy is ubiquitous in most parts of the world, it is because these conditions are ubiquitous.
This may seem like an obvious conclusion but it is strikingly absent from policy conversations about intellectual property, which focus almost exclusively on strengthening enforcement. Nowhere in the industry literature or in major policy statements like the US Trade Representative's annual Special 301 reports will you find an acknowledgement of piracy's underlying causes: the fact that, in most parts of the world, digital media technologies have become much much cheaper without any corresponding increase in access to legal, affordable media goods. DVDs, CDs, and software in Brazil, Russia, Mexico, or South Africa, for example, are still priced at US and European levels, resulting in tiny legal markets accessible to only fractions of the population. Would you pay $136 for a Tron Legacy DVD (the relative price in Mexico, adjusted for local incomes)? How about a $7300 copy of Adobe's Creative Suite? I didn't think so.
So why doesn't Sony or Disney or Warner Music Group lower prices in the developing world and expand its markets? Say, to something comparable to the $1.60 per album level recently advocated by Warner Music UK's former CEO Rob Dickens? Isn't there a win-win scenario in which prices fall, markets grow, and profits increase? To judge solely by the behavior of the big multinational companies in this sector, the answer is no. They're fine with high prices and the resulting tiny markets. Why is this so? We drew two conclusions in our study: (1) they want to protect the pricing structure in the high-income countries that generate most of their profits; and (2) they want to maintain dominant positions in developing markets as local incomes slowly rise. In most countries, there is no serious domestic competition to provide an alternative. And that, too, is a problem.
The big industry players in the enforcement fight see no issue here. As Greg Frazer, vice president of the MPAA put it recently in an interview in Brazil, "Democratizing culture is not in our interests. It really isn't my interest."
Fair enough. But democratizing culture is in the interests of developing-country governments. And legal forms of democratization of access would be much better than the illegal ones we'll get anyway. Would lower prices eliminate piracy? No. That goal is unrealistic. But as the US context shows (and as we show elsewhere in our report), in competitive markets, companies will leverage digital technologies to produce lower-price, lower-piracy outcomes. There's little reason, in contrast, for poor countries to spend scarce public resources on enforcement initiatives designed to prop up the market for high priced DVDs and $300 copies of Microsoft Office. Put differently, there is no viable enforcement strategy without an affordable access strategy. And the US -- the main protagonist of this story -- doesn't have one.
I think that the companies complaining about online piracy and spending money on lobbyists, politicians, and commercials have violated their fiduciary duty to shareholders by willfully ignoring high profit business models. Were I an investor with significant capital in any of these companies, I'd look to my legal options for breach of fiduciary duty.
PROTECT IP's overarching language fails to make a distinction between the rogue, online pharmacies that do not require valid prescriptions and the trusted, safe pharmacies that do.
Over a million Americans can't afford the price of their needed medications at home and so they import their prescriptions from abroad. PROTECT IP would effectively cut off this virtual lifeline.
RxRights is a national coalition of individuals and organizations dedicated to promoting and protecting American consumer access to sources of safe, affordable prescription drugs. We're encouraging consumers to take action now by sending letters to President Obama and Congress urging them to protect our right to safe, affordable medications. For more information or to voice your concern, visit www.RxRights.org.
Read the bill, not propaganda.
below the price of creating the product.
Beyond that, what are the ethics involved in allowing thieves to set the value of content?
As a professional songwriter who has the price of the sale of my work set by the US Government via the Compulsory Mechanical license, and as a citizen who pays taxes on the earnings from my work, I expect the Government to protect my property by law and by enforcement.
The "Simple Economics of Piracy" are this: Without property rights the fair value of goods cannot
be established in the market place. So don't lecture creators about pricing until Intellectual property rights are enforced.
Your argument is moot.
2. Songwriters do not tour or play live. We write the songs for the artists who tour and play live... No one ever told you that the artists don't really write their own songs.
3. No one wants to pay for ANYTHING... but the law requires it. Just because you can steal it doesn't make you smart. It makes you a thief.
4. The idea of charging people more than it costs to produce a product is called making a profit. Profit is a good thing. It incentivizes people to continue producing the product.
That is why the Art. I sec. 8 of the Constitution established royalties for creators.
5. Do I think a song is worth a dollar? Well, if you fell in love to it... If they sang it at your wedding... if you cried over it when you divorced... I think it added way more than one buck's worth of value to your life... WAY more than that 4 dollar cup of coffee you had at Starbucks today.
6. I don't work for Sony/BMG I am a self-employed small businessman. No health benefits. No pension.. No retirement fund. My songs are supposed to be my retirement. But thieves stole them.
Why shouldn't goods with near zero *marginal* cost of production and distribution be sold a lot more cheaply in countries that can't afford western prices (but that are part of the increasingly global culture that drives demand for Lady Gaga, Kanye West, and so on). There's an ethics here too. More importantly, there's a reality: if the industry won't exercise that option, others can and will.
And to our main point: you can't enforce your way out of this situation. The 'problem' is the technologies themselves--copying, distributing, etc. The ethics are secondary and struggling to shape them--according to all the credible research we've seen--is a losing battle. Asking developing countries to prioritize this is also a losing battle. They hit the limits of what they can do--politically, technologically, and economically--much more quickly. And they have other priorities.
So we document 10 years of escalating enforcement efforts with no discernable impact on the availability of pirated goods. Given the politics, enforcement always fails up--toward more expensive, intrusive measures. Analogies with the drug war become useful here.
The compulsory license you mention is also interesting in this context, since it was originally a response to a situation in which rightsholders could not efficiently control who played their songs (here, radio stations). Similar proposals have been put forward for filesharing. Are you suggesting this? Or just calling for doubling down in our new war on drugs?
Once again, your "Resistance is futile' argument doesn't fly... the current internet is simply the result of code.... Change the code and change the results. Not to mention the nearly total lack of response from law enforcement to date... but that is changing.
Analogies with the drug war and an enormous stretch...
You are totally incorrect about the origin of the compulsory license, It had nothing to do with radio.
Take some time. Do some research. Learn about the music business works and how what rights create what revenue.
Keep in mind that $5,178.76 US per person per year is the norm in Mexico.
These things *could * be done. Companies know it. But they are content to not spend the extra to protect their product and hope that more onerous legislation will do the job for them.
Protecting digital media is very difficult because it's just a string of zeros and ones. Any programmer who can get to those zeros and ones can modify a program any way they want.