"QotW3: War of the Worlds”

"COPYRIGHT is so hot right now"

Ho Viet Hai

Introduction
The return of the web business in recent years has heated the topic of Copyright again. The easiness of sharing things online is like two sides of a knife. On one side, Internet users are sharing videos, photos or selling "lands", "houses" and even "avatar". On the opposite side, Copyrightedd materials are being sharing illegally everyday on the Internet. 3 years ago, in order to get a DVD Rip version of a movie, you are required to equipped yourself with hacking and cracking skills. Nowadays, everything is available at one click away on YouTube, MetaCafe or VideoEgg ... There is even a website named Eyespot where surfers can select videos to remix and create new works based on existed videos (copyrighted or non- copyrighted).
Entertainment industries, movies makers are getting headache because the simple word "Copyright".
Copyrights
There are many copyright acts. To name a few: the Bern Convention, the US Copyright act, the Canadian Copyright act, The Digital Millennium copyright act... However, in the age of Web 2.0, the Digital Millennium copyright act is probably the most referred one. The U.S government ambitiously want to maintain the laws on the cyberspace. It's a good thing to do as well as the hardest task. Copyright laws become obsolete when technology renders the assumptions on which they were based outmoded ( Digital Copyrights, 2001). In fact, sharing technologies always goes beyond Copyrights act makers one step ahead.
The Evolution of Sharing
Since 1990s, Peer to Peer network sparked off the wave of sharing files on the Internet. People were able to connect directly to their so-called "peer" computers in the same virtual network and download files. Millions of songs, software, ebooks have been transfered through Kazza, LimeWire, Bit-torrent..

Until 2004, according to Koleman Strumpf and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, “There were more than nine million simultaneous users on the major peer-to-peer (P2P) networks” (Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, 2005). The users have also gone beyond the limit of files sharing to illegally copyrighted products sharing. There are thousands of website providing P2P links for users to download like:
TorrentSpy Demonoid

Courtesy of Userstyles.org Courtesy of AmigaOS

It's as simple as click, save the files and then wait till finishing. One of the cons of P2P is that the speed is slow. As P2p is slow, file sharing technology has evolved to the next level: Sharing in Web 2.0. YouSendIt started by offering free files sharing for files up to 1GB. Soon enough, users have used YSI as the new platform of sharing copyrighted softwares,songs, videos. YouSendIt had to revised their rules and regulations, limited file size down to 100mb. However, Rapidshare, a paid-service, is now the current leader in sharing markets.

Rapidshare tells everything the name. Users only have to click one click to upload their files, and of course, share them. Further more, Rapidshare offers a premium account with unlimited upload and download at bullet speed. Here comes the paradise of pirates: http://rapidsharelinks.org - the collection of all Rapidshare links. Even an old lady with a premium Rapidshare account know how to download the latest Windows Vista for FREE.

"Rapidshare is the most expensive website on the world because billions of copyrighted products are there for FREE"

It's great for users, it's bad for Microsoft or other corporations. As requested by businessmen, GEMA - one of the strongest collective licensing organizations in Europe representing the performance and mechanical licensing rights of 60,000 German authors, composers and publishers virtually without any competition was granted preliminary injunctions against the file-hosting platforms Rapidshare.de and Rapidshare.com (NewTeeVee, 2007). GEMA CEO Harald Heker said:

“These rulings will also be of major significance when it comes to dealing with Web 2.0 services like YouTube and MySpace in the future. They show that the mere shifting of the act of use onto the user and the alleged non-controllability of the contents do not release the service operator from its responsibility under copyright law for the contents it makes available on its website for downloading.”

The fight is now much crueler than ever before.
Where is the balance?
On one hand, if copyright laws was successfully imposed, there would be no place for third-world countries in this cyber world. Things are too expensive
On the other hand, if there was no copyright laws, big corporations would have gone bankrupt.

So where is the balance?

Let's take a look of the world music industry as a typical example.
According to ITFacts, in 2004, the top 10 countries where piracy is "at unacceptable levels" are Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Paraguay, Russia, Spain, and Ukraine. In China 85% of music sold is pirated, International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said. In Indonesia the rate is 80%. Mexico, Russia, and Ukraine are all cited as having piracy rates of 60% or higher.
However, the same year ,BMI reported revenues of $673 million for the 2004 fiscal year, an increase of nearly $43 million, 6.8% over the prior year. The performing rights organization generated royalties of more than $573 million for its songwriters, composers and music publishers. Royalties increased by $40 million or 7.5% from the previous year. BMI President and CEO Frances W. Preston said both the revenues and royalty distributions were the largest in the company's history (Arstechnica, 2004)
A year later , Apple reported that the iTunes Music Store turned a profit in the fourth quarter of 2005, during its quarterly financial statement Tuesday. Customers are purchasing over 1.8 million songs per day, and the iTunes Music Store controls over 80 percent of the U.S. digital music market (Mac Observers, 2005)
Profiteers are still doing well despite copyrights violation. The fact would tell one simple thing: "Consumers are overcharged. Price could be cheaper". Lowering the price is one of the best solution for piracy crisis.
Lowering price would boost creativity
Either pirated or legal products, consumers still have to pay. They might pay for pirate CD softwares or premium account on Rapidshare. Hence, the difference is the price. As we see from the list of top 10 pirated countries, they are all poor. The poverty didn't show in the nation GDP but annual income per person. How could a farmer's son afford 1000USD for Abobe Photoshop and few hundreds dollars for future upgrading? Without piracy softwares, he would never ever been a computer experts. As Bill Gates was in Bucharest on Thursday ( 1st Feb 2007), the Romanian president Traian Basescu paid the Microsoft boss homage for the value of Windows. Well, paying homage is a lot cheaper than paying for software. Reuters reports had cited:

"Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania," Basescu said during a joint news conference with Gates.

"It helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world ...

It sounds unfair to Bill Gates, but it's the fact. Consumers are willing to buy copyrighted products as long as they can afford it.
Conclusion
There will be no ways to stop the PIRACY WAR. The Internet piracy websites is like a 7 headed dragons. When laws makers and enforces chop one head, another head will appears. Unless, there was a global operations to track down and stop all pirates in the world at the same time (which is impossible). The "dragon" is still the "dragon" while the business world still spins with or without him. The most important is to educate people to respect copyrights law because "if you don't want other steal your works, don't do it yourself first".
Courtesy of Borromeoturismo.it

Reference:
“Top 10 countries for music piracy: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Paraguay, Russia, Spain, and Ukraine”. ItFacts.Biz. Retrieved on February 2nd, 2007, from
http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P4228

Ken, F. (2004, March 9). “BMI posts record year, despite music industry doom and gloom.” ArsTechnica. Retrieved on February 2nd, 2007,, from
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040903-4156.html

Janko, R. (2007, February 1st). “YouTube, MySpace Face European Copyright Clash.” NewTeeVee. Retrieved on February 2nd, 2007,, from
http://newteevee.com/2007/02/01/youtube-myspace-face-european-copyright-clash/

February 1, 2007.“Piracy worked for us, Romania president tells Gates”. Reuters. Retrieved on February 2nd, 2007,, from
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020100715.html