Seems Google is falling victim to DRM just as much as the consumers. Now, how they're handling the money might be considered a head-scratcher, but the shutdown does illustrate in bold relief just how bad the predominant content model is for audio and visual media, and how it must switch lest the entire industry collapse under its own profiteering weight.
This is interesting to me because I was just in a discussion on another forum about theatrical rights. The almost-100-year-old system used by live theatre is thus: a playwright writes a script, the script is "managed" by a rights house (Samuel French, Dramatists Play Service, Tams Whitmark, MTI, etc.) If a theatre (professional, community, academic) wants to produce that play, they have to buy (or rent, in case of musicals) official copies of the scripts from said house and pay a per-performance royalty to the house, which is then filtered back to the playwright. The big hoo-haa lately is that some theatres have a habit of making changes to scripts, such as editing out swearing in some cases, or striking sections of story they don't like or that they think their audience won't appreciate. This is a monumental no-no, as it can get a theatre blacklisted, sued or shut down. I thoroughly support the view of "if it's on the page, it goes on the stage"--after all, the playwright is an artist, and their work is a blueprint, and it's up to the other artists to be true to the text.
Anywho, this is relevant to the recorded media debate in that this particular model is perfect for specialized considerations, such as a group putting on a play, in effect using the recoded media (the script printed on paper) to create a derivative artwork (the play). There's no charge other than purchase price and shipping of the script itself if you're just wanting a copy to collect or peruse or consider producing later. As an end-reader of the script, it's yours to do whatever with.
Theatre folk know the deal, and we (for the most part) respect the arrangement. It gets playwrights paid for their work, based on the quality of their work judged by how many theatres want to produce their plays, and the royalties are low enough not to be putative--usually less than 5 or 6 tickets sold, in the case of my theatre, will cover royalties for that performance.
This play-script model is what the RIAA and MPAA are trying to emulate, but on a massive scale, and they're finding out it doesn't work the same way, since there's no specialization of knowledge or respect for their work among the general public. There's such a glut of audio and video in the world and on the net, and a glut of distribution outlets, the value of any one particular recorded piece has been driven so far down it's hard for people to gin up the respect needed to "rent" the material on the extortionistic terms the **AA groups want to work with. In the time recorded media was rare, the value was high. Now it's so ubiquitous people think it strange to put a putatively high value on it. Thus the root of the problem here, IMHO.
I hope this ramble made sense, and I hope I was able to get some kind of point across with it. I felt I had to say something. |
