I’m tired of going after the Canadian Recording Industry Association for its campaign against sharing of music files. Although I support most industries’ approach to copyright, the CRIA’s hidebound position is reprehensible.
A CRIA press release issued today reports that “Canada’s music sales [fell] 35 per cent in the first quarter” of the year, and that the decline is “the largest year-over-year decrease in Canada since the advent of widespread unauthorized file-swapping in 1999.”
I appreciate the use of the word “unauthorized” in the headline — the CRIA has been saying for the past year that it is illegal in Canada, which it isn’t. It’s a legal problem, but it’s not illegal.
The headline itself is disingenuous. The CRIA does not mean that music sales fell; it says more correctly later in the release that “sales of CDs, music DVDs and other ‘physical’ music formats fell,” not music sales over all.
And of course, the CRIA is counting the “physical” media made by its member labels, owned by four giant multinational companies. This does not include sales from Canadian independent labels that are not CRIA members, many of whom have found their ranks swelled by top-rate musicians and artists who have expressed open disagreement with the CRIA’s position (start with the Barenaked Ladies and continue from there).
The press release goes on to say that the 35-per-cent decline “comes on top of an almost unbroken string of declines since the widespread advent of unauthorized file-swapping in 1999 and the proliferation of CD and music DVD counterfeiting in recent years. Digital music sales, estimated at about 6 per cent of the Canadian market in 2006, are falling far short of replacing lost CD and DVD sales.”
For the life of me, I don’t know why this is a problem for the CRIA. The sales of digitally encoded music have skyrocketed since 1999. Sales of iPods are staggering, and credited with the stunning profits Apple Inc. reported yesterday evening. The world, in short, is moving to digital music, whether the recording industry likes it or not. It’s simply a matter of consumer demand; the market is speaking, and the recording industry isn't listening.
So I believe the CRIA when it claims that the fall of “physical” record sales is because of the traffic in digital music files, but not when the industry says it's entirely because of piracy. Does the CRIA want us to believe that the legitimate sales of music via Puretracks in Canada and iTunes in the United States has had a negligible effect on the recording industry?
Since 1999, the recording industry has been fighting a rearguard action against digital music, suing wretched end users in the United States while losing its fight with a much bigger rival, Apple’s Steve Jobs, who flatly refused to change the pricing structure on iTunes as the U.S. recording industry demanded.
If the industry had been a little more flexible in its position, it would have jumped on the digital bandwagon eight years ago instead of trying to bomb it into oblivion with legal improvised explosive devices.
I do, however, agree on one issue with the CRIA when it wants the “federal government to update the Copyright Act to protect artists and other creators of intellectual property from the unauthorized dissemination of their work on the Internet.”
A revision of the Canadian act is necessary. But the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the most draconian such legislation in the world, has not been effective enough to silence the CRIA’s fellow U.S. organization, the Recording Industry Association of America, which is still fuming over digital file-sharing. (Ottawa copyright lawyer Howard Knopf's Excess Copyright blog today offers an interesting take on another aspect of this issue in a battle between CRIA president Graham Henderson and Toronto Star Internet columnist and lawyer Michael Geist.)
Yes, Canada will eventually revise the copyright act. But before it does that, the country needs to address itself to much more important issues than the profits of four giant multinationals who have refused to move with the times.
