Industry Needs to Maximize Innovative Opportunities to Provide Digital Content Legally, Say Panelists
Consumers are willing to get digital content legally, but copyright issues can create some barriers for obtaining books, movies and music, said panelists at an Information Technology & Innovation Foundation event Tuesday. In the U.S., more than 50 percent of music revenue in the past year came from digital downloads, said Zahavah Levine, Google Play head of content partnerships. Consumers drive the digital content market, and they seek media on demand that’s available on a wide range of devices, said Digital Media Association Executive Director Lee Knife, whose organization works with Google Play.
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Google Play was launched in 2011 as a unified content platform for apps, music, books and movies, said Levine. Eighty percent of Android device users use Google Play to buy apps and other content, said Levine. “Our goal is to make purchasing seamless and convenient to consumers,” said Levine. “People are responding, with our revenues increased three times over in a year-to-year comparison, and most of it goes directly to the content creators.” Through YouTube, now owned by Google, users can upload videos with copyrighted content, and they can choose to remove the content or include advertising, said Levine. About 4,000 users are currently uploading videos through the service, she said.
Copyrights for music are different than for other forms of digital content such as books and movies because they have two different owners needing to be compensated -- the record companies and the publishers, said David Israelite, National Music Publishers’ Association CEO. Mechanical reproductions, performances and synchronizations comprise 95 percent of the revenue for the music industry, and all three are regulated differently, said Israelite. The current system to pay two different owners doesn’t make sense in today’s digital environment, and the rights need to be “collapsed into a more singular licensing solution,” said Israelite. Music rights are owned by two different parties because of laws to limit abuses of monopoly power, said Knife. “The streamlining of licensing needs to occur through different business models such as a percentage of revenues or advertising to see what does and does not work."
Customers will still buy quality content, said John McCoskey, MPAA executive vice president. “Lots of experimentation and innovation in digital content is indicative of a highly functioning competitive market.” But piracy remains a big problem in the U.S., with 24 percent of bandwidth used the past year for piracy, said McCoskey. The Copyright Alert System is working to combat the problem by alerting users when they access content illegally and guiding them to legal content, but “stakeholders must work together to solve this problem,” he said.
Digital radio operations such as Pandora may not fit in today’s consumer-oriented world, said Iraelite. “Pandora has limitations because it is not an interactive service,” he said. “Customers can’t look through a playlist to see which songs they don’t want to play.” Customers who can’t get what they're seeking instead might chose to look for content illegally, said Levine. “To maximize services, we need to give users the content that they want when they want, to make bigger profits.” Innovations are going to continue in windows to release movies and music, said McCoskey. However, the desire to control copyright might create some new limitations to windows, said Israelite. (sfriedman@warren-news.com)