Viacom,
Disney,
Microsoft,
and MySpace
all have a couple of things in common?
Apart from being huge
media companies with a lot of financial clout, they also want
to set some “guidelines” in order to maintain
copyrights online.
The four (seems a strangely small group considering the
proportions of the effort, no?) have joined hands to work to establish
a commonly acceptable system which will purportedly “stop
pirated
material” from proliferating and generally protect copyright
rules from
widespread subversion.
And all four will fail at the job. Well, okay, maybe they
will,
maybe they won’t. To tell you the truth, I’ve no
clue how things will
shake out.
But I kind of find it troubling that corporations
are working in unison on technologies to address the issue of
peer-to-peer piracy and whatnot, rather than, you know, the institution
whose role it is to protect copyright law: government.
So
troubling, in fact, that one can’t help but get a little
suspicious
about the true intentions of this wee project they’ve all
bandied
together on.
Job For The Copyright Board?
Now, I’m not trying to conjure up a conspiracy
theory here. To be
honest, I think all involved with this newly announced effort are
participating with nary an ill intention whatsoever.
But really, should
not the Copyright
Board or some other group of suits be doing this kind of
generalized work?
Alright, so as I see it, of the four initial participants (the
BBC has reported
that analysts predict Google will join the fold sometime or other),
Viacom and Disney definitely have incentive to keep their respective
catalogues from being leaked, pilfered, and distributed illegally.
And
because Microsoft and MySpace are venturing more and more into the
world of media (as distributors), they’ve got reason to
maintain the
media companies’ good graces.
Thus they’ve all at
once sat down at the
proverbial table to discuss potential solutions to the problems they
all now (and will continue to) contend with.
Unfortunately, they’re all profit-seeking
businesses, and one can
also quickly point out the fact that they are competitors, too. So how
do competitors manage to work together? Well, they don’t. And
if they
do, things never work out as planned.
So this thing, this “pact” Viacom, Disney,
Microsoft, and MySpace
have signed on to? It’s not going to pan – at least
not in the way
they’re hoping.
Yes, copyright law and the issues surrounding
it
certainly need to be addressed, but this quartet seem to be under the
impression that it needs to be fortified and upheld with nifty new
pieces of software and so forth. That impression is flawed. Instead,
copyright law itself needs changing.
Conclusions
Copyright owners need to swallow
this bout of grief they’re experiencing and embrace
what’s going on on
the Web today. Such is the only path they can take that offers them the
best opportunity to pull themselves out of the hole they’ve
dug.
Yes, they’ve dug. To lay the
fault of current debacle with any group other than the copyright owners
of the world would be foolish.
Think differently? Let us know below. Think alike? Do say so
as well.
Paul Glazowski is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
