Intellectual Property Watch

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Copyright Holders Acknowledge Losing Battle For Public Consciousness At World Copyright Summit

by , Intellectual Property Watch 34 Comments

WASHINGTON, DC – Copyright holders on Wednesday acknowledged they have done a poor job of countering the “anti-copyright” lobby and demonstrating the creative community’s value to the world.

During the second day of the 9-10 June International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers’ (CISAC) World Copyright Summit here, some content creators also lamented that instead of fighting for compensation with the advent of new technologies, they fought the technology – like the VCR – itself.

“The enemies of copyright have really done a good job at creating the false premise that the interest of copyright holders and the interest of society as a whole are antagonistic, and they always talk about the need for balance,” said Fritz Attaway, executive vice president and senior policy adviser for the Motion Picture Association of America. “We have got to do a better job” at attempting approaches at copyright protection “in a way that we get paid but also that consumers can access our works,” he added.

He cited MPAA’s work with the technology industry in the introduction of the DVD. He also noted that via Hulu – a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp. that offers television shows for free, for now – almost all TV products can be legitimately available to consumers in the United States.

“We’ve got to do more of that. We live in an age where we cannot block access to our content,” he said. “People are going to get it one way or the other. We would like them to pay for it and we need to seek out ways where they can pay for it. But just saying ‘no’ isn’t the answer.”

“We live in an age where we cannot block access to our content. People are going to get it one way or the other. We would like them to pay for it and we need to seek out ways where they can pay for it. But just saying ‘no’ isn’t the answer.” – Fritz Attaway, Motion Picture Association of America

Eduardo Bautista, president of the management board of Spanish collective management group, Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, agreed, saying, “We’ve done a lousy job. We should have been fired.”

That’s also the message one of those referenced “enemies” tried to relay. Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association and president of the Home Recording Rights Coalition, said content creators cannot simply keep saying “no” – particularly with the next generation’s seemingly rebellious nature – because it will create more anti-copyright backlash.

“Recognise that kids today have been so turned off by the RIAA approach to litigation that they’re rejecting everything you say,” Shapiro said to National Association of Music Publishers President David Israelite.

Although Israelite made the comparison that if people were stealing computers from stores en masse, the technology industry would be up in arms, Shapiro argued that it is not the same, and that copyright and intellectual property rights are different than “real” property – a statement that received groans from the rights holder-friendly audience. “That’s hurting your case because you’re being rejected by anyone under 25 who is saying, ‘these guys are full of it,'” Shapiro continued.

One way to strengthen the creators’ case, particularly given the current state of the global economy, is to stress the economic value of their industry, particularly in developing countries, experts said. The World Intellectual Property Organization, for example, pointed out that the copyright industry is responsible for roughly 6 percent of a developing economy.

“When you bring those figures to the attention of the government of developing countries, they begin to see it differently,” said WIPO Deputy Director General Michael Keplinger. “There’s something in it for them … it’s not just something for America and the Europeans and the Japanese.”

Copyright Harmonisation; Performance Rights Introduced; Orphan Works Coming

One thing that could provide beneficial to the copyright industry is copyright harmonisation throughout the world, many panellists agreed. Harmonised laws could help all cultures – including those in developing countries – survive in the global marketplace, and that that system would encourage diversity of creative works. George Washington University intellectual property professor Ralph Oman cited Canada and India for not signing on to various internet treaties that could help on this front, and Brazil for criticising WIPO as too oriented toward developed country interests, but not constructively engaging in the debate.

There were also more calls to pass performance-rights legislation for sound recordings in the United States. Perry Apelbaum, staff director for Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, said that issue is a priority for Conyers’ House Judiciary Committee. The House on Tuesday passed the Webcasters Settlement Act of 2009, which gives Web radio stations and artists more time to agree on a royalty payment system. The Senate is expected to take up the bill within the next month or so.

“At the end of the day, we want a bill that does not hurt any songwriters,” Apelbaum said.

US Copyright Register Marybeth Peters told Intellectual Property Watch that orphan works legislation is expected to be introduced within the next 10 days. It is her understanding there may still be some issues in the House version to be resolved, and there are some stakeholders – such as illustrators and other artists – “who are probably going to lobby pretty hard against it.”

Peters said this issue is important to her, and the fact it came so close to passing last year is almost bittersweet.

“What I hope it isn’t … is it’s one magic moment you get” to finally get it passed, then it doesn’t happen, she said.

French Three-Strikes Strikeout

Rights holders were dealt a blow Wednesday when a French court struck down the country’s “three strikes” law, saying that “free access” to the internet is a human right and cannot be withheld without a judge’s order, and that the new system presumes guilt, instead of innocence. It is anticipated that the government will introduce a new version of the bill with the same “graduated response” approach, but it may transfer some of the administrative powers to a court.

“This isn’t over yet in France by a long shot,” said Shira Perlmutter, executive vice president of global legal policy for IFPI – as well as a name said to be under possible consideration for President Obama’s IP “tsar.” “In general, the French approach was a very important step in just recognising we need cooperation by ISPs.”

YouTube – to which users upload 20 hours of video each minute – took a bit of a pounding the day before by rights holders, and has been sued by some artist groups and others. YouTube representatives noted that the service is losing money, and parent-company Google has invested a lot of cash and resources to try to make it a viable business.

YouTube currently has 4,000 licensing partners, and wants to acquire more, but one obstacle contributing to what YouTube chief counsel Zahavah Levin called “copyright gridlock” is that there are too many disparate licensing schemes to deal with. The company touted its “historic, first-of-its kind-deals” with rightsholders to obtain the licensing tools it has after Israelite blasted YouTube for practising the “Corleone business model” [referring to an American mafia figure] in which they launch first, then ask for permission from content holders later.

“We ploughed through, spent an inordinate amount of energy … we’re very proud of what we accomplished and if you’re serious about working with new media companies instead of killing new technologies, that’s what you guys should have done in the beginning and that’s what you should be doing now,” Levine told Israelite.

Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond defended his company’s business practises, noting that while there’s still a long way to go in perfecting its licensing regime, the company has benefited rights holders. He noted that in 2008, Google generated $6 billion for publishers via its Google Ad Sense program; the company’s net income was $4.3 billion. As for YouTube, the movie “Monty Python” saw a 23,000 percent increase in DVD sales in three days immediately after the launch of the Monty Python YouTube channel.

“We don’t want to shy away from the fact that Google’s been a disruptor, along with other internet companies” for artists, Drummond said. “But at the end of the day, I believe we’re all motivated by a common mission. …We can be partners, not enemies.”

Liza Porteus Viana may be reached at lizapviana@gmail.com.

Creative Commons License"Copyright Holders Acknowledge Losing Battle For Public Consciousness At World Copyright Summit" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Comments

  1. Andrew says

    Mr Iv, when I find your car on the street unlocked, its OK for me to take it then just like you might think its OK to take an unlocked file on the internet and copy/distribute it? where do you live and do you have a nice car?

    Reply

  2. Rabbit80 says

    Andrew – I would be more than happy for you to take an exact duplicate of my car – just so long as you leave the original exactly where it is and don’t modify it in any way! I would also be happy for you to make copies of it and give them away to everybody who does not own a car!

    See – if you did that there would not ever be anybody in the world short of transport and it would do everybody some good – there would however be people who dislike my car, and they could get a copy of a different car. There would be yet more people who would want an “original” car and people who would want something “a bit different” or with new features.

    These people would ensure that new cars were still being developed and so the car development cycle would still work!

    Reply

  3. Advocate says

    Let’s not pretend that the motives of copyright holders are completely altruistic. Many rights-holders pushed for the (what should have been deemed unconstitutional) Sonny Bono Copyright extension that has done much to harm the public good.

    Better protections, yes in some cases. However, so many pushes for greater rights for rights-holders have resulted in greater resentment in the public at large.

    Reply

  4. Rekrul says

    So, the main theme of this summit was that everything will be ok, once they pass enough additional copyright laws?

    No wonder their businesses are in trouble. They think that more laws can fix everything, when the reality is that they’re to blame for most of their woes.

    People want content in digital formar without restrictions, so why not sell it to them?

    Look at iTunes: Most of the files are crippled with DRM that locks the files to specific computers and a single portable device, the iPod. Despite these limitations and the fact that songs are over-priced at $1 each, people still use the service. If they’re willing to pay to use such a restrictive service, wouldn’t people pay to buy content from a less restrictive one?

    Each company should put up a web site with their entire catalog of content where users from anywhere in the world can buy DRM-free copies in a variety of formats for cheap prices. Charge less for MP3 music and AVI videos, and more for FLAC music and MKV videos.

    Will this stop piracy? No, but many people who would otherwise pirate the content will happily pay for a legal alternative. Besides, how much money are the film studios making now on digital downloads?

    Won’t these files get pirated? Yes, quite probably. However, people are already trading DRM-free copies of almost everything, so it’s not like this would give the pirates anything they didn’t have before.

    Of course, such a thing will never happen. Most of the content companies would never agree to sell DRM-free content and even if they did, it would be over-priced and available only to select regions. Not to mention that they can’t put a lot of their older content online because of the licensing mess they’ve created. It would probably cost them a fortune to straighten out the rights to each movie for the music and such.

    The content companies are too blind to see that they’re being crippled by the mess of copyright and licensing laws that they’ve argued so hard for and they still think that the solution is to pass even more such laws until every creative work and every new piece of technology is strangled to death by red tape.

    Reply

  6. Ray Beckerman says

    Could it be that their bringing tens of thousands of frivolous litigations, mostly against innocent people, and almost always against defenseless people, based on bogus evidence, concocted legal theories, and deliberate misstatements of fact and of the law, has done something to tarnish the public’s perception of them?

    Reply

  7. Copycense says

    The phrases “anti-copyright lobby” and “enemies of copyright” seem to be ways in which large, multinational, corporate copyright portfolio owners now are choosing to frame any group that disagrees with the exceedingly strong copyright legislation that exists now (at least in the U.S.), or any group that actively seeks to balance such legislation by proposing rollbacks or reversals.

    We also find it interesting that organizations like the RIAA and MPAA now have chosen to characterize themselves as being victimized by an organized, media-based effort from those that are part of the “anti-copyright lobby.” It’s almost as if these organizations have cribbed from Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism, and chosen his ridiculously, historically and theoretically inaccurate view of copyright as their latest public relations spin.

    It is unfortunate that IP Watch has chosen to adopt this frame as the prism through which coverage of this event is shaped. By adopting the “‘anti-copyright’ lobby” language in the first graf, and failing to challenge this lobbying rhetoric elsewhere in the story, IP Watch effectively gives credence to presumptions that (a) there is, in fact, an “anti-copyright lobby”; (b) it is effective in rebutting the media messages of (or even getting equal time with) the entertainment industry’s enormous public relations and propaganda machinery; and (c) such a lobby’s efforts (assuming they exist) are inconsistent with the constitutional balance sought by U.S. copyright law solely because those efforts question corporate lobbyists view of copyright as the default view of copyright.

    As we have seen recently in the U.S., what is good for GM no longer is necessarily good for America. Likewise, one can argue reasonably that in 2009, a copyright regime that is good exclusively for the multinational corporations the RIAA and MPAA represent no longer is necessarily good for the domestic or global copyright system. Raising this issue or reasonably making this argument does not make one “anti-copyright” or a copyright enemy. Instead, it is the height of engaged citizenship.

    Reply

  8. Rekrul says

    Re: #7, Alex;

    “rekrul, you’re out of date: iTunes abandoned DRM last year!”

    Have they removed the DRM from the video files that they “sell”? Does the new DRM-free music store have all the same songs that the DRM-crippled one had? Can the iTunes store be accessed with just a web browser to buy copies of these DRM-free files?

    Reply

  9. Ric says

    What baffles me most, is these content providers that be were once smart enough to build business models around scarcity and finely controlled marketing and distribution, would figure out how to monetize and profit on a new model of abundance.

    Its all about the convenience after all and I would think they would get that … or perhaps I am giving them too much credit. I think artists need to issue their own record contracts and use all the same people that worked for them before. Cut out the middle man.

    Reply

  10. john says

    “…We would like them to pay for it and we need to seek out ways where they can pay for it. But just saying ‘no’ isn’t the answer.” – Fritz Attaway, Motion Picture Association of America”

    The answer is saying ‘know’ that the entire landscape has changed and old copyright laws are simply outdated and obsolete. That established monopolies can only use the lawyer-club to try and hold back the future is rather pathetic. Too bad they didn’t think to use some of their excessive profits to adapt rather than ignore what’s happening.

    Reply

  11. Britt Griswold says

    Back to the car analogy, no one is going to be able to sell you a car to put on the street to be stolen (copied), because the car companies have all been put out of business by those receiving the free car and not paying for their own. The one you can buy will cost $20 million dollars, because it will be the only one sold.

    For independent artists, being able to control the sale and resale of their art (for modest fees) is essential to making a living at their art. All the schemes that tried to pass Congress last year in the Orphaned Works Bill were economically untenable to an artist’s business model. It threatened destruction of copyrights to new and old work owned by those without corporate status and deep pockets. There were gapping holes in the economic model for enforceability of our rights to control the sale of our work efforts. We have only one important right under copyright- the ability to sue the hell out of someone who steals our work. That is the one and only deterrent to protect our property. There are excellent ways to give rights to free use. But using art without permission is not one of them. Amendments to the Orphaned works bill were offered to make it true to its name, they were ignored. So we (83 creators organizations) fought it tooth and nail.

    If the Copyright office puts forward the same stuff this year we will have to do the same.

    Reply

  12. zelrik says

    Copyrights will die. If they do not die within the next 10 years or so, it means we are heading to a nightmarish fascist world. You have to choose, enlightenment or darkness.

    Reply

  13. Brian J. O'Malley says

    As a messaging expert, I believe the creative industries have several flaws in their approach, but the most serious of these is the lack of audience identification and segmentation. The message is the same to the housewife who shares an MP3 with her son as it is to the guy retailing pirate copies of Star Trek on the streets of Peking. Second, there seems to be no psychographic data on these audiences or defined goals for them. Third, our industry hasn’t defined itself very well or effectively related our identity to these audiences. To them, theft of copyright is like punching someone in the dark – there’s no consequence of conscience.

    I wish all defenders of copyright well, but the real enemy here is the lack of a comprehensive and coherent approach to the issue.

    Reply

  14. Dennis Nilsson says

    You can’t pass laws to ensure that people earn money.

    You can pass laws to give them rights, but if those rights aren’t valued by the market, then there’s nothing the law can do.

    — Ruth Towse

    Reply

  15. Lois says

    The people hurt most by this legislation will be the small independent artists of all genres. They (we) are the ones who will not be able to afford the lawyers and personal assistants whose job it will be to fill out and pay for all the individual copyright forms for every sketch, piece of poetry or lyric that we scribble down. And we will not be able to afford legal representation to sue the large corporation who “couldn’t locate after reasonable effort” to buy the copyright for our work before they incorporate it into their latest ad campaign. The ramifications are not limited to people downloading a song from the internet. It is about artists losing the rights to their own creative work.

    Reply

  16. Mica Duran says

    Quoting Zelrik: “it means we are heading to a nightmarish fascist world. You have to choose, enlightenment or darkness”

    Speaking as one of those “evil content creators” who sits in a room, alone, 10 hours a-day, earning a living for my family…Fascism is exactly what I am fighting against! The government is attempting to take my “personal property” away from me, in order to control it themselves. If you think abolishing copyright will suddenly make all media available to the public, you are mistaken. The current proposed laws will not only take ownership away from “us little guys”, but is specifically set-up to allow large corporations such as Google to TAKE OVER ownership…and prevents us from being able to fight them in a court of law. How can any American be so ANTI-PERSONAL RIGHTS?? The whole concept of the internet is to allow INDIVIDUALS immediate access to/sharing of information. I would think those in the “internet community” would be fighting to uphold individual freedoms on the internet. It won’t be long before the government/corporations own all the media, and start dictating WHAT can be seen by WHOM. If you want “enlightenment”…stop encouraging the stealing of property, and support those who are doing all the work to share their knowledge.

    Reply

  17. Keldorl says

    I think that are ways that an artist have to protect himself from this without new regulations.
    Like Todd Lockwood site for example, he exposes his work in a lower quality images but give glimpses of the true high quality of the original art, then who realy get interested can buy a copy.

    But the internet is here to stay, batle against it and you be defeated, best choice is to adapt, smart solutions like the one in the example I gave is the solution in my opinion.

    Reply

  18. dd says

    has anyone read this?

    http://www.baen.com/library/

    “stop encouraging the stealing of property”

    “1. Online piracy — while it is definitely illegal and immoral — is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We’re talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

    2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

    3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The “regulation-enforcement-more regulation” strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.”

    And this was written by the creators not the pirates.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Linkdump 2009-06-11…

    All in favour say ‘Yar har!’ – “ We’re basically a civil rights movement. The Internet is not a toy that the politicians can take away from children when we’re being naughty. It’s an important part of the infrastructure of society. ” Mr Iv…

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  12. […] IP-watch har sammanfattat mötet och några verkar ha kommit till insikt. “We’ve done a lousy job. We should have been fired.” – Eduardo Bautista, chef för Sociedad General de Autores y Editores ”Recognise that kids today have been so turned off by the RIAA approach to litigation that they’re rejecting everything you say,” – Gary Shapiro, chef för Consumer Electronics Association och Home Recording Rights Coalition i replik till National Association of Music Publishers-chefen David Israelite […]

    Reply

  15. […] Meanwhile, at the world copyright summit: Rights holders were dealt a blow Wednesday when a French court struck down the country’s “three strikes” law, saying that “free access” to the internet is a human right and cannot be withheld without a judge’s order, and that the new system presumes guilt, instead of innocence. It is anticipated that the government will introduce a new version of the bill with the same “graduated response” approach, but it may transfer some of the administrative powers to a court. […]

    Reply

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