Here’s One Way to Get People to Pay for Music: Labels Win $2 Million Verdict in Downloading Trial
by Peter Kafka
Posted on June 19, 2009 at 3:00 AM PT
Don’t want to pay $1 for a song on iTunes? Try $80,000 a pop. That’s what a federal jury in Minneapolis has told a woman to pay the music industry for illegally downloading 24 songs, bringing her total bill to $1.92 million.
This is the second time Jammie Thomas-Rasset has been ordered to pay the music labels for her use of file-sharing services. In a 2007 trial, a jury originally decided that she would owe $9,250 per song.
It’s unclear what prompted the jury to bump up her tab in the retrial, but it’s going to be academic anyway. The industry is making noises about settling, and 32-year-old Thomas-Rasset, who lives in rural Minnesota, doesn’t have $2 million lying around. In her words: “The only thing I can say is good luck trying to get it, because you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”
Lawsuits like the ones the labels filed against Thomas-Rasset haven’t worked: Music piracy has continued unabated, and while Apple (AAPL) sells about $2 billion worth of songs a year on iTunes, the overall market for digital music is flattening. That’s why the lawsuits are supposed to be relics of the past, replaced by a new strategy whereby music labels convince Internet service providers to help them police piracy.
But while the industry floated the concept six months ago, it has yet to get a single cable company or telco to sign on. And even if they do, there’s not a whole lot of incentive for the likes of Comcast (CMCSA) or AT&T (T) to really crack down on music pirates, who don’t take up much bandwidth and don’t steal anything the pipe guys care about.
Comments
I once worked for a small consulting firm with two founders. The firm was a consulting firm and had always been one. But one of the founders wanted to transform it into a software business. That battle raged for several years during which 99% of our income came from the consulting business and a pittance came from selling software, and that software income was more than consumed by support costs.
The guy who wanted to sell software had a good point: “If I can get a hit with the right software I can just sit back and collect annual support fees without having to do too much additional work. You guys doing consulting have to constantly work hard to make money.”
That was before the Internet became what it is today and piracy still referred to guys with eye patches on wooden ships.
Piracy needs to go away, and it will, as soon as everyone becomes a consultant. You may steal parts for your plumbing, but you can’t steal the time and skill it takes for a plumber to install or repair it.
None of the remedies for software or music piracy work very well. You either have to have these ridiculous decisions where the punishment exceeds the crime to “set an example” or you have to build a time-bomb or tracking mechanism into the product. That latter approach of course eliminates the freedom to develop your own software (or use Open Source software). The price for such controls is to stifle innovation and competition.
Most musicians fit nicely into the consultant mindset. They enjoy the performance aspect of their art and don’t have as their motivation the idea of sitting back and collecting royalties. This notion applies to music, software, popular fiction , science writing and histories, and of course, especially, the mainstream news media. Everyone’s motto in the future should be “What have I done for you lately.”
Posted by Mac Beach at June 19th, 2009 at 10:50 am