Digital Rights Network

Deadline for Submissions: Extended to 28th of February (was: Thursday 19 January 2006)

CULTURE MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
16 November 2005 No. 11

New inquiry: New media and the creative industries
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee is announcing today a new inquiry into the challenges and opportunities for the creative industries arising from the development of new media platforms. For the purposes of the inquiry, the term "creative industries" includes music, visual broadcasts, sound broadcasts, film, graphic art, design, advertising, fashion and games software.

See previous DRN article on 2004 decision by US Sixth circuit that even a 2 second sample constituted infringement.

See http://www.low-life.fsnet.co.uk/copyright/index.htm for an excellent (though dated) overview of copyright and sampling along with many examples of litigation over sampling infringements.

Examples

One of the more famous U.S music infringement cases involved ex-Beatle George Harrison, who was found by a jury to have "unconsciously" copied the Shirelle's composition "He's So Fine" in his 1971 hit "My Sweet Lord." Although George Harrison's hit was found to be strikingly similar to the Shirelle's song, it is even possible to infringe another song if only just a few notes are "borrowed." [Source]

Putting their music up for free download online has helped new Yorkshire band the Arctic Monkeys sell out concerts across Britain and have their first single go straight to number one. All of this despite the absence of a traditional marketing campaign and only getting a record deal with Domino in July.

Such success would seem to bear out many of the predictions of the benefits for bands of sharing music freely online. It demonstrates that doing so can help sales as well as making a big difference in concert attendance (the band has already had a sell-out UK tour which included headlining at the 2000 person Astoria Theatre in London). It also highlights how such an approach can help in creating a more direct relationship betweens a band and its fans. As the Daily Telegraph explained:

The BBC, together with project partners Channel 4, British Film Institute and the Open University, today launched the provisional licence that will govern the use of material from their 'Creative Archive'. The licence is similar to, indeed explicitly inspired by, a Creative Commons licence, in that it allows the freedom to access, modify and redistribute work, provided that this is done on under the same licensing agreement, no profit is sought, and the original creator is acknowledged.

The scheme will begin with a pilot, in which 100 hours of BBC content and a small number of BFI clips will become available. But your reporter was unable to find an exact date for the posting of the first material - the BBC offer an uncalibrated timeline for the project that suggests the first phase will be under way in around three months' time; the BFI website states that content will be available 'shortly'.

An extensive survey (2004-12-06) by the Pew Internet and Life Project produced interesting reading for observers of the P2P 'wars'. For example, in the comparison (p.44) of the attitudes of general artists, musicians the public it is revealed that on all measures artists have more liberal attitudes on IP (i.e. more favourable to sharing and fair-use type activities) than the general public. Moreover in general artists see the internet as being overwhelmingly beneficial and a majority consider file-sharing to pose little or no threat:

"LONDON -- Apple Computer's three-month-old European iTunes service came under attack Wednesday from Britain's Consumers' Association, which asked the Office of Fair Trading, a business watchdog, to investigate why the service's prices are higher than those in the United States.

British iTunes customers pay 79 pence ($1.40, or 120 eurocents) per song, while French and German residents pay 67.7 pence ($1.20, or 99 eurocents), a difference of 17.5 percent. Americans pay even less: just 99 cents per song"
source: wired news story