Sep 09
6
The Content Industry Is Going South.
A white paper has recently been published by the Australian Film Television And Radio School written by Jennifer Wilson. It is called The Digital Deadlock.
In it Jennifer lays out some of the problems facing the content industry and the people in it, and the people who want to use content. but are faced with a dizzying number of clearance agreements, with varying prices for those clearances, and a seeming lack of logic built around those clearances.
Its a pretty good analysis of the current situation and is worth reading.
But it deals with an infrastructure that is relatively stable, and I believe that the content ecosystem is near chaos and likely to start going south at a growing velocity as matters of global economic importance continue to unfold.
If you think about content in the context of this argument by Stephen Lendman about the global economy you may get to another conclusion…
In it Lendman quotes a number of people whose opinion is that the US is coming to the end of its dominance as the global economic power. Now you could say just as, like Mark Twain said, “rumours of my death have been exaggerated”, it would be all to easy to write off what is still the global superpower.
But if you think about the content industry as a microcosm of the US, which it really is, you could reach some interesting conclusions.
After all, one of the principal revenue drivers of the US economy is royalty income from intellectual property. That is not just the content industry. It is from software, patents and a host of other intellectual property deals.
Those entities that are the rights owners in the US substantially control what the actions and the thinking is of subsidiary companies, collection societies, patent pools etc in other countries. Through them the ideas of governments are formed and incidentally the ideas of the local creative community. It is not hard to see why governments act in the way that they do in most of the countries in the world when it comes to IP.
But the system is not working the way that the powers that be would like it to. They can throw as many lawyers as they like at the system and they can sue people, but the fact is that the genie is out of the bottle. And as a result of the fact that there is a continuing growth not just in P2P networks but in encrypted traffic, there is a copyright insurgency on the move that is going to swamp the content owners' attempts to keep running things in the cosy way that they have for so many years.
The simple fact is that empires do come to an end. And the time of the American Empire is coming to a close. And with it will come the end of the content empire too.
That is not necessarily such a good thing.
At the end of empires it is too easy to slip into a dark age.
What we need is enlightened IP industries and enlightened governments. Unfortunately the influence of those who are unenlightened (they would probably argue that I am too radical!) is too great at the moment.
I believe that by the end of 2010 we will see the release of tools and/or programs that are really simple and user friendly (so that even your grandma can use them) that will enable encrypted sharing of anything on your system – so that it is untraceable.
Content will be everywhere and content companies will find that it is impossible to deal with the number of infringements. Once a tipping point is reached where analysts view this as a risk to their earnings, their stocks will get marked down (Another way of reflecting Tom's view of going long on music companies perhaps).
I agree with Jennifer's idea of a levy on media, by the way – been saying it for some time now. And if not a levy on the use of P2P software on your computer. But paying it to the content companies? I am not so sure about that. I think that a levy on software should go to funding local producers of content.