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this view of the world should be endorsed by legally
protecting it. Legislators in the U.S. and Europe pro-
tect digital content by enacting stronger intellectual
property law, based on the WIPO treaties. The high
price for a legal framework with such excessive copy-
right restriction will be loss of fair use and anonymity
for the user. Law combined with increasing techni-
cal control shifts the balance between the interests of
users and copyright owners towards the latter.
The WCT and resulting national laws are simply
protecting the interests of traditionally working indus-
tries in a new world, and the price for this often is pri-
vacy. The RIAA’s recent actions against users of file
sharing programs not only have shown that the new
legislation is criminalizing significant fragments of
the population, but also that many privacy issues have
been treated rather lightly when introducing the new
legislation. As an alternative, the Electronic Fron-
tier Foundation (EFF) has suggested to let users of
P2P file sharing services pay a voluntary monthly fee,
which would then be collected and distributed simi-
larly to the European fee on blank media. A similar
approach is letting Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
collect the fee as described by (Sobel, 2003).
As a radical alternative for content providers, the
Creative Commons concepts developed by (Lessig,
1999; Lessig, 2001) is an interesting solution. It is
based on the assumption that all cultural work is inter-
connected and thus cannot be regarded and marketed
as an individual product. This concept is mainly tar-
geted at content providers with no commercial moti-
vation, which want to make sure that their content is
available and can be used by interested parties.
7 CONCLUSIONS
While we argue that the music industry in general
could benefit from concentrating on new business
models rather then protecting the old ones, we do
not deny that commercial music piracy (such as pro-
ducing and selling counterfeit CDs) is a problem and
should be prosecuted. However, the current trend
to criminalize a substantial fraction of the consumer
base is probably counterproductive and will definitely
not help to increase the speed of adaptation to the
new reality of music as data. While large-scale on-
line sharing of copyrighted material is illegal, P2P
applications are not illegal by nature, and could also
serve as a foundation for a new way of making money
with music. Additionally, new studies such as (Ober-
holzer and Strumpf, 2004) indicate that the actual loss
of sales is much smaller than usually claimed.
The current copyright law (before the
WCT/DMCA legislation) is sufficient to protect
copyrighted material, and the attempts to legally pro-
tect the technical protection mechanisms for content
show that the resulting architecture will probably
result in more restrictions for users. The statistics that
are used to convince legislators to accept this kind of
legislation are highly questionable, starting from the
business figures and ending with the user counts and
the concluded loss of revenue. Only the complete
absence of effective user interest lobbying makes the
current legislation possible.
Promising new business models such as iTunes
show that it is possible to make money on the Inter-
net, and that users can be offered a service that is not
overly restrictive but still effective enough to avoid
large-scale exploitation. While we cannot present a
business model that will successfully move the music
industry into the area of the Internet, we are confi-
dent that the current complaints will disappear once
the thinking has moved from protecting the old ways
to discovering and using the new ways.
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