The Case for Copyright Reform (week 5)

Referring to “The Case for Copyright Reform” by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström, I think that some concepts of their proposal for copyright reform simply got outdated and outsmarted by the industry, both existing and emerging. By removing the need to purchase the content, streaming services like Netflix and Spotify now act as a middle-man, and simply make file-sharing overly unnecessary and time-consuming. A general media consumer will gladly pay a monthly fee and never worry about finding a tv show, movie or music album ever again. Even being a veteran p2p user (starting with BitComet), I now find it much easier to pay Spotify and Netflix fees (shoutout to student discount) and get everything I need in one or two places. 

While consumers greatly benefit from such streaming services, the authors suffer. Average royalty for 1 song played is around 0.0038$ and 0.0074$ for major platforms so to make a living by simply uploading their works to a streaming platform, author would have to rake in hundreds of thousands of streams. So for smaller and even medium artists, streaming their music is most certainly not the formula for an early retirement. 

However, streaming services bring a major advantage to the table of the whole music industry. They teach consumers, that it is OK to pay for content, and you massively save time by still supporting (even with a small fraction) the content producers. Maybe in future we would be able to find more hybrid ways to get content and support artists where artists get a larger cut of the pie. Maybe the creation process will become more streamlined and it would become more popular for artists to just avoid labels and that way, by making the amount of people behind the scenes lower, they will increase their profit margin. But for now, streaming is the way to go.

PS As for DRM, that predatory thing just has to go.

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