by Rick Carnes

In a recent article in The Hill Public Knowledge’s Gigi Sohn questioned why I have taken a position on Net Neutrality “so at odds with individual artists and so in line with Big Media”.

I would simply reply that my record in fighting for songwriters and artists is, pardon the expression, public knowledge. I have fought in every major battle for creators’ rights since joining the board of the Songwriters Guild of America (SGA) back in 1985.

As SGA vice president I fought alongside the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the American Federation of Musicians to get the Bono Copyright extension passed. Public Knowledge opposed us.

As President of SGA I stood with these five unions representing the overwhelming majority of the “individual artists” Ms. Sohn claims I’m at odds with to fight illegal filesharing in the Grokster Case. Again, Public Knowledge opposed us. Where was Public knowledge during the 25 years I fought against the record labels on controlled composition clauses that insure that recording artists receive only 3/4′s of their royalties on their own songs? Where was Public Knowledge when I was the lead witness to boost royalty rates for artists at the hearings before the Copyright rate board?

It is not surprising that Ms. Sohn doesn’t get it. She has not spent her life as a creator or as an advocate for songwriters as I have. She has not watched as her friends and co-writers lost their jobs, their homes, and even their families, due to Internet piracy. She claims I ignore independent filmmakers. I guess she doesn’t know that my daughter is a student Oscar winning independent filmmaker (A Leg Up) or that my wife is a recording artist? (Hoagy N’ Me). Believe me, I’m intimately aware of what artists and filmmakers think. Continue reading →

As we’ve said before, the key to getting more and better content online and available to consumers will be experimentation. Sometimes, those experiments are successful, which explains the many platforms available for acquiring video, music, software, games, or books. Now we can add three more companies experimenting with digital music sales: eBay, Fairmount, and Live Nation. As Bruce Houghton reported last week at WebProNews, all three of these potential vendors have an advantage for digital download sales over a number of their competitors: “1) significant existing traffic and 2) on-file credit cards of potential downloaders.”
In the case of eBay and Live Nation, there’s yet another advantage: people visiting those sites are already looking for music related items, be they physical CDs, concert tickets, or fan gear.  As Houghton notes, that’s a “logical point of purchase” for music downloads.
Of course the other side of the experimentation coin is that not every venture works out as planned. Last week, TechCrunch reported that imeem, a music streaming service, was facing some dire financial straits, largely because the business model was based on compensating record labels on a per-stream basis. The company is renegotiating its deal with the labels, instead sharing revenue on a per-user basis.
There was no way for imeem to know going in which model would be better: it just had to experiment to find the right one. And that’s what the future of digital content is all about: experimentation. Trial and error–and eventually, success. As long as the freedom to experiment is preserved, consumers, platform providers, and artists will find the business models that work best for all of them.

Conficker Day may have come and gone already without incident, but there’s still plenty of malware, spyware, SPAM, worms, and viruses out there. If you didn’t catch it last Sunday, you can learn more from this 60 Minutes feature on the problem:

On the positive side , it looks like some of the scarier predictions about Conficker didn’t come true…yet. Of all PCs in the world that are the source of suspicious online activity, only 4% are infected with Conficker.c, according to security experts.
But it’s still disturbing to know that even if you think you’re doing all the right things, you could still be vulnerable. One-in-four Americans having fallen prey to the more destructive cyber-security problems–according to 60 Minutes–is certainly a high number, one that we should all be working harder to avoid.