The future of the Internet?
Recent developments in the way intellectual property (IP) is policed have made it clear that it’s no longer just a matter of concern for peer-to-peer file sharers, but for small businesses and ISPs too. In fact, it’s not exaggerating to say that the very nature of the Internet hangs in the balance.
So we thought it was time that HEXUS had its own debate on the matter and we invite the HEXUS.community to share your views on the rights and wrongs of the debate and where you think it’s headed. To give you some food for thought, here’s a summary of some recent related events and our analysis of them.
The debate
The debate on IP, raging for years in the USA, has so far found little echo in the UK. Matters appear to be coming to a head, however, and our disinclination to discuss the principles involved may be leaving us vulnerable to inadequately examined policy impositions.
Only this morning the Performing Rights Society (PRS) announced on Radio 4 that it thinks businesses even as small as five employees should pay it upwards of a hundred pounds a year for the right to play the radio within their office. This comes after it took legal action against a policeman for playing music in a police station.
The thinking, in the broadest possible sense of the word, seems to be that the business in question is getting a benefit from the music in the form of a morale boost and thus it should pay for it. By that logic, said business would presumably get a small refund on the cost of the license every time a James Blunt song is played.
But joking aside, isn’t the reason we get to hear this music for free because the broadcaster has already paid the artist (and presumably the PRS) a royalty and confers that cost on to the listener in the form of advertising or a license fee?
Another aspect of the issue was highlighted by yesterday’s announcement by influential Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch to ban any content linked to the Associated Press (AP), following the news agency’s issuing of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice against a minor blog’s use of short quotations linked to AP via reader submissions.
“It’s clear that AP are trying to claw their way to a set of legal property rights that don’t exist today.”“It’s clear that, like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), AP are trying to claw their way to a set of legal property rights that don’t exist today,” said TechCrunch.
We share TechCrunch’s astonishment that a major news wholesaler appears intent on attacking what is in essence free advertising for its product. If the traditional free-use attributed excerpts were to be banned, it would simply boost the unattributed use of the same material, with cosmetic changes.
In a related development the newspaper copyright group Copiepresse, which last year won a ruling from the Belgian courts forcing Google to remove headlines and links to member publications, announced that it is suing Google for between €32.8-€49.2 million for reproducing and publishing part of its members’ stories and by storing the full versions of archived stories in its cached pages.