No Business Like The Content Business

The roundtable on copy protection at last month's CEA Fall Conference in San Francisco (TWICE, Oct.28, p. 1) was a fascinating exhibition. Entertainment industry representatives on the panel, Scott Dinsdale of the MPAA and Cary Sherman of the RIAA, pushed the point that copy protection must be increased in the digital era because technology has changed. In Dinsdale's words, consumer fair use rights, as defined by the landmark Sony Betamax case of 1981 is "contextual" because consumers now have the ability to send programming to a few friends or "share it with millions of your closest friends" via the Web.

Mitsubishi's Bob Perry stated at the roundtable that the CE industry is sympathetic to the plight of content providers in the digital era, "but we continue to live in fear and concern that this is the first cut of a thousand cuts" in limiting fair use.

Of course there has to be a middle ground to allow the fair use of home recording of content, so to paraphrase CEA president Gary Shapiro, we won't have to pay every time we want to receive and transmit content.

Besides, the entertainment industry's point is moot. Consumers will be in the streets in Hollywood in front of movie and recording studios with torches in hand if the entertainment industry ever gets its way. The Betamax decision made consumer reproduction of content a way of life worldwide. Analog or digital, the genie can't be put back into the bottle. The entertainment industry has to deal with this technological revolution.

History shows that showbiz has never initially liked new technology, from the Victrola and radio, to broadcast and cable TV and VCRs. But once the industry moguls, kicking and screaming along the way, figure out a can't-lose business model, they make more money than they know how to spend.

A passage in the excellent biography of Irving Berlin by Laurence Bergreen titled "As Thousands Cheer," illustrates this point. By 1919 Berlin, composer of "White Christmas," "Easter Parade," "There's No Business Like Show Business," and so many other classic American standards, had his own sheet music company. Bergreen says the typical view of sheet music publishers about the then-fledgling record business was this: "A popular record could sell as well as sheet music and of course returned royalties to the composers and performers. To the old guard on Tin Pan Alley, these black shellacked discs boded ill. Every record sold meant less sheet music bought – so ran the conventional wisdom. The fear was that a technological revolution would throw sheet music publishers out of business." (Those are my italics for emphasis.)

Sound familiar, doesn't it? It is in the entertainment industry's own interest to develop a business model for the digital era, while preserving fair use for consumers. There is no other option. (For more on consumer opinions on digital downloads take a look at the CEA study on p. 10.)