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Digital Music News

How should paid downloads be priced? Apple believes in a uniform pricing scheme, majors want a tiered structure, and most music fans want everything for free. Somewhere in-between lies Amie Street, a company that sets download pricing based on user demand.

That means that songs start at free, and ramp to 98-cents if the demand is great enough. But is the model working? Just recently, the group announced the addition of catalog from Beggars Group, Matador Records, and Polyvinyl Recording Co. The list of bands includes Interpol, Sigur Ros, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Devendra Banhart, Belle and Sebastian, Architecture in Helsinki, and other indie luminaries.

But it remains unclear if the sales story is developing, at least at this stage of the game. In a discussion Monday, company cofounder and chief marketing officer Joshua Boltuch declined to offer sales figures or average pricing data. Boltuch did point to strong album purchasing, and an album-to-single sales ratio of 1:1. “We attribute this incredible ratio to our fan-driven pricing model finding the best market price for albums, and therefore maximizing sales,” Boltuch explained.

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FT.com / Home UK /

Anti-piracy moves ‘hurt sales’By Andrew Edgecliiffe-Johnson for Financial TimesPublished: November 20 2007 02:00 | Last updated: November 20 2007 02:00Retailers are urging the music industry to drop piracy protection for online downloads after new figures showed the average Briton has bought fewer than three digital tracks in the past three years.Incompatible proprietary technologies, aimed at defeating rampant piracy in the digital music era, are instead “stifling growth and working against the consumer interest”, said Kim Bayley, director-general of the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA).Her warning comes as high street retailers and digital music specialists watch pre-Christmas sales trends nervously. The music industry makes at least 40 per cent of its revenues in the fourth quarter, but the traditional sales build-up has started later than usual.Although Leona Lewis – the X Factor winner backed by Simon Cowell’s Syco label – this month notched up the highest first-week album sales for a debut artist, album volumes are down 11 per cent, or 12m units, for the year to date, according to the Official UK Charts Company and Music Week.Recorded music companies had been “quick to complain” that the slide in CD sales had not been offset by growth in digital music, Ms Bayley said, but their embrace of digital rights management (DRM) systems “might have added to the slow take-up of legal digital services”.Just 150m tracks have been downloaded legally in the UK over the past three years, she added. “Sadly, that amounts to an average of less than one 79p per download per head of population per year.”The ERA’s appeal comes as more companies experiment with the DRM-freeMP3 format, following a pre-emptive challenge in February by Apple’s Steve Jobs. Most recently, Universal Music this month began offering its classical and jazz catalogue in MP3 format.In April, EMI “unlocked” its catalogue, charging consumers a premium for DRM-free versions of its music on Apple’s iTunes store, and has since signed deals with other digital retailers for MP3 files encoded at more than twice the quality of standard audio files.”There are certainly experiments, but there’s still a certain element of resistance within the music industry,” Ms Bayley said. “At the moment, [DRM] just puts consumers off,” she said, adding that confusion about formats was driving people toward illegal downloads.She cited research this month that found consumers were almost four times as likely to choose an MP3 file as a DRM-protected track when the two were offered alongside each other.The ERA, which represents high street retailers and online sites, said it was making the appeal now in the hope that music companies would drop DRM protections before the Christmas season and the January sales rise, when consumers load up the iPods they receive at Christmas.

kottke.org

Marginal Revolution and CNN (and New York magazine and Reddit and etc.) asked their respective readers: how much did you pay for In Rainbows, Radiohead’s new album which is only available as a pay-what-you-want download.

CCIA

Fair Use exceptions to U.S. copyright laws are responsible for more than $4.5 trillion in annual revenue for the United States, according to the findings of an unprecedented economic study released today. According to the study commissioned by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and conducted in accordance with a World Intellectual Property Organization methodology, companies benefiting from limitations on copyright-holders’ exclusive rights, such as “fair use” – generate substantial revenue, employ millions of workers, and, in 2006, represented one-sixth of total U.S. GDP.

The exhaustive report, released today at a briefing on Capitol Hill, quantifies for the first time ever the critical contributions of fair use to the U.S. economy. The timing proves particularly important as the debates over copyright law in the digital age move increasingly to center stage on Capitol Hill. As the report summarizes, in the past twenty years as digital technology has increased, so too has the importance of fair use. With more than $4.5 trillion in revenue generated by fair use dependent industries in 2006, a 31% increase since 2002, fair use industries are directly responsible for more than 18% of U.S. economic growth and nearly 11 million American jobs. In fact, nearly one out of every eight American jobs is in an industry that benefits from current limitations on copyright.

by Douglas Galbi on August 19th 2007

From 1985 to 2004, video rentals from U.S. public libraries grew 340%. Over the same period, video rentals from U.S. commercial rental businesses grew 140%. Public libraries’ video rental activity did grow from a smaller base: 70 million videos loaned in 1985 (6% of the number of videos commercial outfits turned in that year), to 300 million videos loaned in 2004 (12% of the number of videos rented commercially). The growth of video lending from public libraries has been amazing, and largely unnoticed.

Pricing is probably a large part of the explanation for this performance differential. The average price for commercially renting a video in 1985 was $2.38. The average price for borrowing a video from a public library in 1987 was $0.39 (30.4% of libraries charged for borrowing video, and those libraries charged an average of $1.29). In 2004, the average price for commercially renting a video was $3.43. The average price for borrowing a video from a library was then approximately zero. Lower price induces greater demand, and free (zero price) is a highly appealing price.

This video example does not depend on some of the factors thought to be producing the death of paid text content. From 1985 to 2004, there wasn’t a proliferation of free video content on the web. I would guess that, overall, commercial video rental stores have a video inventory that most persons would value more highly than the video inventory of a library. Consumer may like free content. But video is quite expensive to consume. Given that the average video takes perhaps an hour and a half to watch, the higher inventory value of commercial video rental firms might have easily outweighed the lower video rental price from libraries. But it didn’t.

Persons seem to have a high time-discount rate in content choices. The benefit of watching a relatively good video comes later than the cost of paying the rental fee. A high discount rate lowers the importance of the former, and raises the importance of the later. So perhaps a significant part of the challenge of making a paid content model work is delivering benefits soon relative to payments.

* * *

The table below summarizes the facts. Subsequent notes describe the sources and estimates.
U.S. Public Libraries and Video Stores
1985 2004 % inc.
total public library circulation 1150 2010 75%
video share of library circulation 6% 15%
video borrowing price from libraries $0.50 0
videos borrowed from libraries 69 302 337%
video rental price from video stores $2.38 $3.43
videos rented from video stores 1100 2592 136%
All counts in millions. Video includes Betamax, VHS, and DVDs.

Sources

Public library circulation: For 1985, interpolated from figures for 1983 (Goldhor (1995)) and 1990 (NCES/ALA). The Goldhor figures are given in Galbi (2007a). For 2004, figure from NCES.

Video share of public library circulation: Dewing (1988) presents results from a survey in early 1987 of about 3000 public libraries having video cassette collections. The survey received 841 valid responses. Id. p. 69, Table 6.19, gives average tapes loaned, by size of the community the public library served. The survey did not include data on total library circulation. Using NCES Public Library Statistics for 1987, I calculated average circulation per week for the four community size categories used in reporting the video survey results (less than 20,000; 20,001 to 50,000; 50,001 to 100,000; greater than 100,000). Average videos loaned were 18%, 7.5%, 7.7%, and 7.4% of average library circulation for the four community size categories, respectively. Responses in the smallest community size category may not have been representative of all small libraries in that category. Since the video survey addressed only public libraries having a video collection, the survey doesn’t account for the zero circulation share in libraries that didn’t have a video collection. For a conservative estimate of the growth rate, I estimate the 1985 video circulation share to be 6%. One small additional piece of evidence: In West Virginia about 1984, the Morgantown Public Library reported that video circulation accounted for more than 6% of annual circulation. See Caron (1984). The video share estimate for 2004 is based on the data in Galbi (2007b). While the data could support a higher estimate for the video share in 2004, I’ve used a rather low estimate to generate a conservative estimate of the growth rate.

Videos borrowed from public libraries: Calculated from library circulation and video share.

Video borrowing price from libraries: Dewing (1988) pp. 70-71 provides the data on prices for borrowing videos from libraries in 1987. Most libraries (73%) had a loan period of about a week. I roughly estimate the price in 1985 to be $0.50, and also roughly estimate the price in 2004 to be 0. The later estimate is based on the declining purchase price of videos and personal knowledge of library operations. Elgin (1992), p. 12, recorded that libraries that eliminated charges for borrowing videos experienced increased video borrowing.

Video rentals from video stores: From EMA, A History of Home Video and Video Game Retailing.

Video rental prices: EMA gives the 1985 average price. I calculated the 2004 average price from rental units and total rental revenue (Adams Media Research data).

References

American Library Association [ALA], Public Libraries in the United States Statistical trends, 1990-2003.

Caron, Barbara (Fall 1984), “Video Cassettes in the Public Library,” West Virginia Public Libraries; cited in Elgin (1992) p. 6.

Dewing, Martha, ed. (1988), Home Video in Libraries (Boston, Mass.: Knowledge Industry Publications).

Elgin, Romona R. (1992), Comparison of Book and Video Circulation in Public Libraries, Student Report, Northern Illinois University, Department of Library and Information Studies.

Galbi, Douglas (2007a), Book Circulation Per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856, available at galbithink.org

Galbi, Douglas (2007b), “library users like audiovisuals,” available on purplemotes.net.

Goldhor, Herbert (1985). A Summary and Review of the Indexes of American Public Library Statistics: 1939-1983. Library Research Center Report (Eric Document # ED264879). Urbana, IL, Illinois University.

National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], Public Libraries.

In this report, we revisit our “Long Tail” thesis on the entertainment industry. As we
wrote last year, digital technology and economics are loosening the barriers to entry
in the video production business. In our view, this augurs a significant increase in
supply of video content from many sources, which could lead to slowing growth for
incumbents and a shift in value from content creators to aggregators/packagers of
content in the middle of the supply chain that can best connect users’ individual
tastes with theoretically infinite choice. This report delves further into this theme and
addresses key questions we have received from investors and industry contacts on
this topic.

LINK

LSE

Platforming is for low budget films, foreign films, idiosyncratic films. Blitzing is for expensive films; those that might turn into ‘blockbusters’ – but also those that might be too expensive to expose to audience opinion, too expensive to ‘discover’ that demand is low.

Music industry attacks Sunday newspaper’s free Prince CD | | Guardian Unlimited Business

The eagerly awaited new album by Prince is being launched as a free CD with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread criticism from music retailers.

The Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday that the 10-track Planet Earth CD will be available with an “imminent” edition, making it the first place in the world to get the album. Planet Earth will go on sale on July 24.

One music store executive described the plan as “madness” while others said it was a huge insult to an industry battling fierce competition from supermarkets and online stores. Prince’s label has cut its ties with the album in the UK to try to appease music stores.

The Entertainment Retailers Association said the giveaway “beggars belief”. “It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career,” ERA co-chairman Paul Quirk told a music conference. “It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music.

“The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday.”

Market capitalization
Cisco: 162.24B, Time Warner: 78.95B

2006 Gross Profit
Cisco:

18.747B, Time Warner:
17.811B

Cisco addresses legit P2P in Supervisor enhancement – CBRonline.com

Cisco Systems has unveiled both a product enhancement and a series of architectural templates to enable enterprise networks to address the challenge of legitimate peer-to-peer apps such as the Groove feature in Microsoft Office.

The product side of the announcement involves a deep packet inspection capability, delivered via a hardware upgrade to the Supervisor engine on its flagship 6500 switches, essentially introducing additional Cisco-designed ASICs to handle “DPI at multi-gigabit rates,” said Neil Walker, the company’s head of product marketing for core and foundation technologies in Europe.

There arises a need to be able to differentiate between good P2P and bad, which is where the Programmable Intelligent Services Accelerator (PISA) upgrade to Supe32 comes in. “It’s akin to what we’re doing on the carrier side with the P-Cube technology for broadband policy management,” said Walker.

“There the carrier can determine who you are, what you’re doing and the bandwidth you’re consuming to do it. In this case, we’re enabling enterprises to enable wanted P2P and block the unwanted,” he went on. “For instance, two employees might be allowed to exchange IM messages, but not if one of them has just accessed some sensitive data on an internal database.” PISA is not, however, in any way based on the P-Cube technology, but rather the result of internal development, he went on.

Jobs says Apple customers not into renting music | Technology | Reuters

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs indicated on Wednesday he is unlikely to give in to calls from the music industry to add a subscription-based model to Apple’s wildly popular iTunes online music store.

“Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,” Jobs told Reuters in an interview after Apple reported blow-out quarterly results. “The subscription model has failed so far.”

His comments come as the company he co-founded gears up for contract renewal negotiations with the major record labels over the next month.

Since Apple launched iTunes in 2003, it has sold more than 2.5 billion songs and now offers increasing numbers of television shows and movies.

Many in the music industry hope iTunes will ultimately start, in effect, renting music online, so record companies can make more money from recurring income. But Jobs said he had seen little consumer demand for that.

“People want to own their music,” he said.

At least this is what proprietary software people prefer…

Microsoft executive: Pirating software? Choose Microsoft!

At the Morgan Stanley Technology conference last week in San Francisco, Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes commented on the benefits of software counterfeiting. “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” he said. “We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.”

Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

Radio listeners weary of hearing the same songs over and over may have something to cheer about: Broadcasters have tentatively agreed to anti-payola settlements that could shake up music playlists at some of the nation’s largest radio chains.

Four major broadcast companies would pay the government $12.5 million and provide 8,400 half-hour segments of free airtime for independent record labels and local artists, The Associated Press has learned.

The agreement is aimed at curbing payola — generally defined as radio stations accepting cash or other consideration from record companies in exchange for airplay. The practice has been around as long as the radio industry and was made illegal after scandals in the late 1950s.

Two Federal Communications Commission officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because final language has not been approved by the full commission, said the monetary settlement is part of a consent decree between the FCC and Clear Channel Communications Inc., CBS Radio, Entercom Communications Corp. and Citadel Broadcasting Corp.

The settlement was reached at the same time as a separate deal designed to lead to more airtime for smaller record companies and their lesser-known artists as well as local musicians.

The American Association of Independent Music, a group of independent record labels, has received a commitment from the same four broadcasters for the free airtime, the officials said.

In addition to airplay, the broadcasters and the independent labels have also negotiated a set of “rules of engagement” that will guide how record company representatives and radio programmers interact.

The free airtime would be granted to companies not owned or controlled by the nation’s four dominant music labels — Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and EMI Group.

Music executives judge Jobs, lament losses | CNET News.com

Apple, digital rights management (DRM) and the public’s willingness to pirate music were discussed, debated and lamented once more by attendees of the Digital Music Forum East conference.

“We’re running out of time,” Ted Cohen, managing director of music consulting firm TAG Strategic, told the roughly 200 attendees. “We need to get money flowing from consumers and get them used to paying for music again.”

The call to arms by Cohen, who was moderating a panel discussion titled “The State of the Digital Union,” comes as the music industry suffers through one of the worst slumps in its history.

CD sales fell 23 percent worldwide between 2000 and 2006. Legal sales of digital songs aren’t making up the difference either. Last year saw a 131 percent jump in digital sales, but overall the industry still saw about a 4 percent decline in revenue.

That has the industry pointing fingers at a number of things they believe caused the decline.

At the opening of the conference, some of the panel members lashed out at Jobs. Members said Jobs’ call three weeks ago for DRM-free music was “insincere” and a “red herring.”

“Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats,” Jobs wrote in a letter that rocked the music industry. “In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

Jobs’ position was perceived by many in the music industry as a 180-degree shift in direction. The view expressed at the conference is that Apple has maintained a stranglehold on the digital music industry by locking up iTunes music with DRM.

Cohen told the audience that if Jobs was really sincere about doing away with DRM, he would soon release movies from Disney–the studio Jobs holds a major stake in–without any software protection. An Apple representative declined to comment on Tuesday on remarks made by the panel.

Panel member Mike Bebel, CEO of Ruckus music service, said: “Look, I don’t think anybody is necessarily down on Apple. The problem is the proprietary implementation of technology…and it’s causing everybody else who is participating in the marketplace–the other service providers, the labels, the users–a lot of pain. If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them.”

The role of DRM
Panel members–who included Thomas Gewecke, Sony BMG senior vice president, and Gabriel Levy, general manager of RealNetworks Europe–were divided about what the music industry should do about DRM in general.

Most of the panel members, save for Greg Scholl, CEO of independent music label The Orchard, believe that some form of DRM is necessary.

Scholl said flatly that DRM doesn’t work. “The idea that DRM gives us choice isn’t right,” he said.

“The economics of the business are over for good and aren’t ever going to be the way they were before,” Scholl said. This is a position that some in the music industry are starting to warm up to.

In January, EMI said it was reviewing a request
by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to allow reverse engineering of
its digital rights management software. That EMI would even consider
the proposal was seen in many circles as a step forward by the anti-DRM
camp.

Gewecke also defended record labels against the criticism that the
music industry has its head in the sand and just doesn’t understand the
Digital Age. He said that Sony BMG is working with technologists and
retailers, and is constantly is looking for technological solutions to
some of the industry’s problems.

He also said that despite all the bad news, there’s plenty for the sector to be encouraged about.

“We
routinely talk to companies about what’s different,” Gewecke said.
“We’re constantly looking for where value is being created in a
business model. We are being flexible. There’s still an evolution that
has to happen. I say it’s an optimistic time considering there’s more
music being listened to now than ever before. There’s more
opportunities to monetize the music. We want to be out there looking
for new ideas and companies.”

| The Register

Australian TV viewers are waiting longer than ever to view their favourite overseas produced televisions shows, driving them to use BitTorrent and other internet-based peer-to-peer programs to download programmes from overseas, prior to their local broadcast.

According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series’, Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first run series’ first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months.

A survey of TV programmes found that while some aired very close to their US air date, many popular programmes were significantly delayed.

Average broadcast delays were shortest for TV series’ on the Seven and Ten Networks, at around nine months. The average delay for TV series’ airing on the Nine Network was 22 months, while TV series’ on ABC and SBS aired on average 23 and 30 months behind the US.

Among popular programs, fans of Nine’s Without a Trace had to wait nearly nine months for an episode that aired in the US. A recent episode of Seven’s My Name Is Earl aired a year after its US broadcast date. Fans of Ten’s American Idol have just seen last season’s finals – nine months after they were seen in America, while Americans vote for the new Idol.

The ABC recently showed an episode of The West Wing 21 months after its US broadcast date, but Nine’s Antiques Roadshow and SBS’s Iron Chef take the cake with recent first run episodes shown over 11 years after their first overseas broadcast.

The survey followed a similar survey from two years ago which found the average delay for first run TV programmes on free-to-air TV at the time was just under eight months. Popular prime time TV programmes currently subject to substantial delays including the following:

* Close To Home (8.6 months)
* CSI: N.Y. (9.3 months)
* Desperate Housewives (4.4 months)
* Grey’s Anatomy (4.9 months)
* Heroes (4.2 months)
* House (5 months)
* NCIS (4.1 months)
* Third Watch (22.1 months)

While film and music content owners have attempted to cater for digital consumers through services like iTunes, Australian TV networks appear to be unable or unwilling to change their programming policies or provide new digital based options for consumers that don’t want to wait to view their favourite shows.

openPR.com –

As Mr. Gupta explains, “Bollywood is not just India, it is not just for local consumption, but Bollywood is also very voraciously consumed overseas. In addition, there is the ripple effect as Indian culture is quite akin to Middle Eastern and Eastern European culture making Indian cinema stars, Indian movies and Indian songs super hits throughout these regions.”

However, as the film industry has grown to new levels, so has the problem of video and movie piracy. In fact, in India it is estimated that movie piracy basically nullifies theatre revenue after only 3 months, nearly half that of a typical U.S. theatrical window. This of course significantly cuts into the film industry’s bottom line. As a result the Indian government has made dealing with piracy a priority.



BELGRADE (Reuters) – Rada Banjanin plans to stay up late on Sunday, fingers crossed that “Babel” will take the best picture Oscar at the 79th Academy Awards.

Not that she watched the inter-continental saga on the big screen. Rada hasn’t been to the cinema for over a year, but has seen nearly all this year’s Oscar nominees for 2.5 euros ($1.3) a copy in the comfort of her Belgrade living room.

“I like to see the latest hits, and I get them all on DVD,” she said ahead of the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles on February 25.

Belgrade’s “King Aleksandar” boulevard is packed with vendors selling the latest movies from cardboard crates on wooden stands, often before they open in European cinemas.

“The Last King of Scotland” and “Rocky Balboa” were available this week. “The Departed” went on sale months ago.

This year, the Motown musical “Dreamgirls” is in big demand in Serbia. “Everyone wants ‘Dreamgirls’. But we’ve run out of copies,” said one street vendor, who asked not to be named.

It’s a poke in the eye for Serbian authorities, who say they have cracked down on the film piracy that gave Serbs one up on the rest of the world while their country sank under war, sanctions and isolation in the 1990s.

BOSNIA, ALBANIA, MACEDONIA TOO

Things have improved since then, says Zoran Savic, Serbia’s anti-piracy chief. But according to some estimates, he says, “pirate copies arrive in Belgrade between five and seven days after the movie premieres in the United State”.

“The main problem here is the copies are so easy to get hold of on the streets, and sometimes via Internet,” Savic said.

Video clubs offer under-the-counter lists of pirate offers to loyal customers, sometimes including screening copies sent out for review only and marked “not for public viewing”.

In the United Nations-administered Serbian province of Kosovo, the bootleg trade is wide open.

At the gates of NATO headquarters, aptly named ‘Film City’, brightly colored four-storey shops sell thousands of pirated films and music CDs, as well as fake Breitling wristwatches.

The customers are international police officers in an array of uniforms and gun-toting NATO peace troops in camouflage.

And it’s not only Serbia.

“It’s the same here in Sarajevo. It’s easy and everyone is doing it,” said Reuters Bosnia correspondent Daria Sito-Sucic.

In the Macedonian capital, Skopje, correspondent Kole Casule says films such as the James Bond hit “Casino Royale” and Scorsese’s “Departed” sell for 80 denars (1.5 euros).

Albania correspondent Benet Koleka bought “The Queen” and “Next President” from a Tirana shop loaded with bootlegs.

Officially, the sales are illegal in all four countries. Of the former Yugoslav republics, only Croatia has clamped down with success on the suitcase DVD trade, says correspondent Zoran Radosalvjevic. “It’s mostly illegal downloads now,” he said.

WE’RE NO ANGELS

The fact pirates still thrive in the Balkans will hardly dampen spirits at the Oscar ceremonies.

But piracy undermines the home-grown movie industry, which is unable to offer good financial rewards because so few people go the cinema. Research shows under 20 percent of the 7.5 million people in Serbia went to the movies in 2006.

“People don’t have the feeling they are doing anything wrong by buying pirate DVDs and watching them at home,” says Danijela Milosevic of Taramount, which distributes Disney movies here.

In 2005, Serbian ‘blockbuster’ “Mi Nismo Andjeli” (We’re No Angels) lost an estimated 400,000 cinema-goers when pirate copies hit the stalls just days after the film premiered in Belgrade, according to its director, Srdjan Dragojevic.

Director Miroslav Momcilovic said his 2006 movie “Sedam i po” (Seven-and-a-half), a bitter-sweet take on the sinking of postwar Serbian society, suffered a similar fate.

But he didn’t have the heart to put up a fight when he saw fake copies of his own movie being sold on the streets.

“Pirates have given me such pleasure over the years. I can’t just forget a dozen years of watching those films and turn around and be radically against piracy.”

Romania ‘built our country on pirated Windows’

ROMANIAN PRESIDENT Traian Basescu told Microsoft’s Supreme Vole, William Gates III that his country’s IT industry would be nothing if it was not for pirated Windows software.

Basescu met Gates at the opening of a global technical centre in Bucharest.

According to Reuters, Basescu said, during a joint news conference with Gates, that piracy helped the younger generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania.

It also helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world. He claimed that all this piracy “ten years ago” was an investment in Romania’s friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.

Variety.com – Spanish pirates flip for disk drives

Spain’s uphill battle against piracy is getting steeper.

The reason: small modem-like boxes, with remote controls and a computer USB plugs. Sold in department stores, they sport names like Best Buy’s Easy Player Jumbo Plus HD 400GB or Argosy’s Mobile Video GDD 400 GB.

They’re hard disk drives that plug into PCs and then TV sets, allowing downloaded movies easy TV play. Their sales are rising fast. “They’re steady little earners,” said one retailer over the Christmas season.

Prices have held, ranging from the Easy Player’s E379 ($493) to $194 for a drive from Woxster, a Spanish brand. But with sales ramping up, the drives are increasing capacity and features, such as photo and memory disk storage.

As hard disk usage seeps from Spanish geekdom to the mainstream, Spanish Internet piracy has hit Himalayan heights. According to consultancy Gfk, 43% of Spaniards pirate movies.

International Herald Tribune

“FIFA 07,” a video game for soccer fans, costs around €50 in Europe. In South Korea, five million players have downloaded the online version free — yet Electronic Arts, the publisher, is cheering them on.

Realizing that it was impossible to sell “FIFA Online” in a country where piracy is rampant, Electronic Arts started giving away the game last spring. Once the players were hooked, the company offered for sale ways to gain an edge on opponents; extending the career of a star player, for instance, costs less than $1. Since May, Electronic Arts has sold 700,000 of these enhancements.

In the traditional media world, as well, readers
are turning to free: According to the World Association of Newspapers
in Paris, at least 28 million free newspapers are distributed every day
around the world, 19 million of them in Europe, where the total has
doubled over the past three years. And digital over-the-air TV systems
like Freeview in Britain now offer dozens of channels, providing an
alternative to pay-TV for consumers who refuse to limit themselves to a
handful of viewing options.

Qtrax will resemble illegal file-sharing
networks, using peer-to-peer technology to help users find and download
music. But executives hope that the promise of a licensed, safe and
legitimate service will attract users weaned on digital music but
unwilling to pay for it.

“There’s a whole generation of consumers who think free music is a
birthright,” said Allan Klepfisz, chief executive of Brilliant
Technologies, which is developing Qtrax. “The closer you are with a
business model to current consumer behavior, the better your chance of
success.”

Worldwide, media spending by consumers and
business users still handily outstrips advertising, by $944 billion to
$385 billion, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. But growth in
consumer spending on media in the United States has slowed sharply in
the past few years, analysts say.

Worldwide, PricewaterhouseCoopers expects spending on high-speed
Internet access, which delivers digitized media, to increase faster
than outlays on content that traditionally comes with a price tag —
books, magazines, cinema tickets and CDs, for instance. Global consumer
spending on Internet access is expected to rise at an 11.9 percent
annual rate through 2010, according to the firm.

To be sure, consumer spending on media is not
going to disappear anytime soon. According to a survey of 130 media
executives from around the world, conducted recently by Accenture, 31
percent forecast that subscription models would be the dominant
business model in five years’ time, with 25 percent opting for
so-called pay-per-play funding.

But 37 percent said advertiser financing would be the predominant business model in five years’ time.

Can media companies adapt to a world in which “free is the new paid”?

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