Medialoper

Chasing the Long Tail of New Media

Piracy

Universal Music’s New Biz Model: Lawsuits and Extortion!

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Unversal Music, the mega-major record label that thinks so little of its fans that their CEO, Doug Morris, recently said that iPods were: “just repositories for stolen music,” has evidentally hit upon a new business model: lawsuits and extortion.

Apparently making money by putting good music out there with a price point that might entice people just isn’t good enough. Because, of course, we are all thieves. So instead of that, they’ve decided to go a different route. Instead of using their artists to make money, they’ve decided to fall back upon the lawyers. Hopefully, the lawyers will get a better royalty rate.

Let’s review, shall we?

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Five Lessons The Music Industry Can Learn From AllofMP3

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The recording industry has been waging war against Russian-based music websites for years. While the industry has successfully litigated most file sharing networks out of existence, they haven’t had much luck stopping sites like MediaService’s AllofMP3. Despite the RIAA’s best efforts AllofMP3 continues to sell digital downloads to music lovers around the world, while technically complying with Russian copyright laws and licensing agreements.

While complying with the laws of your country may seem like a loophole here in the United States, it makes perfect sense to a company that’s based in Russia. Unfortunately for MediaServices that the loophole is about to be closed. There are signs the Russian government is planning to crack down on grey market download sites like AllofMP3 in an effort to gain admission into the World Trade Organization.

Regardless of what you think about the legality of AllofMP3, there’s no denying that MediaServices has created one of the most innovative and consumer friendly digital music services around. AllofMP3 is so well done that the “legitimate” recording industry could learn quite a bit by studying it. Hopefully the major labels will take a long look at AllofMP3 before it gets shut down.

Here are a few lessons the music industry could learn from AllofMP3:

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The Fall of Allofmp3.com

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I’ve never actually checked out allofmp3.com, the infamous Russian site that offers a ton of music for prices that are more in line with the non-physicality of digital files. Not for any moral reason, but because I remember the bad old days of the late 1990s, when clicking on dodgy-seeming links looking for an .mp3 caused tons of windows to pop-up or other weird things.

But while I never bothered, I count myself a fan of anything that causes fuming at the RIAA. And a lot of y’all took advantage of their services, so much so that people were saying that it could keep have Russia out of the World Trade Organization.

That’s right. Forget all of that stuff about Putin’s insanity, and all of those unsecured nukes, but let’s go after the people who provide the cheap and 100 percent legal under Russian law downloads. So, the pressure was on, and just the other day, after Visa International suspended credit card service, allofmp3.com cried “дядюшка,” and changed their business model.

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The MPAA’s Final Solution to DVD Piracy: Two Doggies!

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Sigh. Nothing worse than life imitating a throwaway joke. Last week, writing about YouTube’s copyrighted material discovery software, I called it “the digitial equivalent of drug-sniffing dogs.”

Little did I know that the MPAA had already taken my silly joke and turned it into an even sillier reality. In a move that sounds more like a YouTube parody than anything else, the MPAA has trained a pair of dogs to sniff DVDs. I swear to gods that I am not, in any way, shape or form, making this up.

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The Futility Of DRM

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2006 will go down in history as the year the entertainment industry finally started to take digital content distribution seriously. So far this year we’ve seen television networks and film studios experiment with a surprisingly wide variety of new distribution models, while the recording industry has started to realize that there may be a future in downloadable music. If there’s a downside to the recent explosion of digital content it has to be the entertainment industry’s unhealthy obsession with digital rights management (DRM).

In the past entertainment companies have been hesitate to distribute content digitally due to piracy concerns. Those concerns have apparently been replaced by a complete and total faith in DRM. Or, at the very least, a belief that it will be possible to build viable new business models around DRM protected content.

There’s just one problem — DRM doesn’t work. It’s a futile exercise in artificial scarcity that punishes honest consumers while doing little to slow the tide of piracy.

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6 Books You Should Read Right Now If You Wanna Get Some Insight Into This Whole “New Media” Thingy

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Wanna know the philsophical underpinnings of some of our posts here at Medialoper? (I’ll pretend you said “yes.”) The following books have helped me work out some of the concepts that infuse nearly everything that I write about what we are calling the “new media.”

Here they are, alphabetical by author:

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Hong Kong’s Anti-Piracy Sweatshop

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The Boy Scouts of Hong Kong are at it again. Last year they began awarding merit badges for copyright proficiency, and now they’ve enlisted their entire membership to scour the web for signs of piracy. Nothing says summer fun for kids like firing up the laptop and searching the internet for intellectual property violations.

It’s not just the Boy Scouts either. According to the New York Times 200,000 children Youth Ambassadors, will be actively involved in the program.

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Should Episodes of Chappelle’s Show Have Stayed Lost?

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I never really got the whole Dave Chappelle thing. During the height of the frenzy, when he was selling skizillions of DVDs, I watched a few episodes, but it never really stuck with me the way that other sketch comedy has. Given the fact that plenty of people whose taste I respect like him, I’m perfectly willing to say that is a defect on my part. Just add it to the list.

However, I found his whole abandonment of his megastardom fascinating, and a bit refreshing. It seemed to be part and parcel of whatever anger fueled his comedy in the first place, and it actually made him more interesting to me.

Of course, what’s “interesting” to me was a goddamn nightmare for Comedy Central, who have plenty of experience dealing with badly-behaving geniuses (Matt and Trey!), but probably never had to deal with someone who just left all of the money on the table.

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When DVDs Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Send DVDs

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In the latest indication that the entertainment industry has completely lost its grasp on reality, a coalition of forces lead by the MPAA has enlisted a pair of well trained dogs to help fight the war on piracy.

The program, which began testing this week, was announced by a press release that can only be described as surreal.

Program co-sponsor Raymond Leinster could hardly contain his excitement:

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