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Research of Copyright involving Entertainment Law thing the legal issue to Universal Music suing of Grouper. com and Bolt. com. No of pages 4 style MLA Abstract and bibliography, No of sources: 6 3 books and 3 internet sources Deadline Nov 11 Dawn of computers and internet technology and rapid economic and communication development has compelled the society to access to modern information technology in their day to day life. Development in the communication technology especially the internet era has changed the way of peoples life and it has made the whole world into a global village.
But this era has resulted in the abuse of internet technology by downloading the copyrighted music form the internet without actually spending on the CDs, disc and tapes there by infringing the copyright laws of a country. The inventor of the music is accorded a copy right to it and in practice, this being virtually transferred to music producing company. These music companies or producers are trying to deter the illegal duplication of their titles by monitoring piracy in global markets. But in this Internet era, music fans are able to search for and to exchange data files on line and the improvement of audio-encoding technologies, which transfer sound to digital media, have resulted in unlawful reproduction in a massive scale which threatens to prevent large share of revenues to music producing companies. One may recall how earlier consumers used to spend on purchase of CD, Disc, tape to listen and enjoy their favorite music. Thanks to the advent of the internet technology which allows the consumers to down load at free of cost their favorite music from their residence without any hassles and at their convenience and almost at zero cost.
This has provoked the copyright owners and music industry as it has deprived of their revenue and legal rights. Free downloads from the internet have almost spoiled their earnings and have made them economically down. Free down loading of music is not a problem to a particular nation but it is universal as number of cases and litigation has been filed in most countries on the subject. For instance in the USA, Napster company has been sued for the infringement of copyright laws by A& M and other music companies.
At last, Napster lost the case as the court ruled that internet consumers share music is not a suit of fair dealing. Likewise in China, the famous Baidu Case where Baidu has been asked by the Chinese court to pay compensation to the copyright owner as it has infringed the copyright act by allowing internet users to download the copyrighted music free of cost. International music sales touched new height of US $ 32. 2 billion during 2002. About 34. 5 % in Europe, 41 % of these sales were made in North America, 18; 6 % in Asia, as lion share was represented by Japan in Asia, 2. 7 % in Australia, Africa and Middle east and 3. 1 % in Latin America.
Sale of music is concentrated almost in top five countries Japan, US, UK, Germany and France and sales of music in these countries represent 76. 5 % of total international sales and residual top countries are Italy, Canada, Spain, Mexico and Australia which comprises of about 9 % of global sales. (IFPL, 2002) Further about 70 % of international sales of music were concentrated in five big corporations such as BMG, Warner, EMI, Sony & Universal. When new music album is produced, artists usually receive an up-front honorarium and a royalty between 5 % to 14 % of the retail price of the music record or DVD. (S&P, 2002). CD sales are occupying about 72 % and sale of LP and cassettes are being replaced by the sales of CD albums. The average CD price in US is around $ 14. 19 and top albums cost around $ 20. The European Commission made an investigation in 2001 to study the higher music prices in Europe and the variance in prices inside the European Union. Distribution costs of music turns to be major percentage in the total cost of music production.
The final retailer price of a CD is $ 10. 50 which has a suggested price of $ 16. 98 and this exhibits high cost of distribution. In UK, Supermarket has increased their music sales from 11. 2 % in 1999 to 17. 7 % in 2001. On line retail, as a % of total sales have increased from 6 % in 2001 to 9 % 2002 in Germany, from 4 to 6 % in UK and remained firm at 3 % in US. The music companies either hold the copyright or make pact with copyright owners to distribute their music and big corporations in this trade are AOL Music Net, Press play owned by Sony and Universal which is jointly owned by EMI, AOL Time Warner and BMG and Real Networks, iTunes and European music companies such as OD 2, Wippit and Tornado Virtue.
Online digital music delivery has been dominated by piracy and after the closure of Napster, illegitimate music online downloading can found globally on P 2 P file-sharing services such as KaZaA, Grnutella, Grokster, Imesh These sites are allowing free downloads and netizen are allowed to download licensed and unlicensed files of music. The worlds largest recording company, Universal music filed separate lawsuits against Bolt Inc, which runs Bolt. com and Grouper Networks Inc, operator of Grouper. com. It is worth while to mention here that the Grouper was acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment in August, 2006 for $ 65 million. As per Universal Music, film studio will be added as a defendant in these cases.
The main allegation by the Universal Music group is that these companies illegally encouraged the music lovers to share the music videos and other copyrighted materials with the prior approval of the copyright owners. Clips from movies and music videos are being downloaded from the video sites by millions of netizen at free of cost. Google Inc. recently has acquired one of the top of such site namely you tube for $ 1. 65 billion. A content licensing agreement was recently concluded by the Universal music with You Tube. Universal music disclosed that its effort to conclude licensing deal with the both Bolt and Grouper was unsuccessful.
In the copy right violation suit filed by the Universal music in U. S District Court in Los Angeles against Bolt and Grouper, the Universal music has alleged that defendants have flouted the copyright laws by copying, distributing, reformatting and creating works derived from songs and music videos owned by them. Universal music is the division of French media and telecommunications company Vivendi. Plaintiff has pleaded to order un stipulated damages earned from any profits by the defendants or $ 150, 000 per copy right work which was purportedly distributed on the websites without their prior approval. The New York based Bolt tries to defend its side by declaring that it has always observed with music companies instruction to remove any copyright video after the fact. We have to wait and see the outcome of these cases.
Mean while it is pertinent to note that some of the earlier decisions on copy right violations by the music sites. Grokster: About 28 companies sued the Grokster in 2002. In deference to the Supreme Court ruling in 2005, it has settled $ 50 million and has closed all its operations now. It is exploring the possibility of developing a legal version or in the process of selling its assets to Mashboxx, a P 2 P service provider. eDonkey Meta Machine. In September 2006, it was sued by six record labels and also received the cease-and-desist order from RIAA in September, 2005.
Settled with the RIAA for $ 30 million and has shut down all its operations. CONCLUSION: During the fight to eradicate to music piracy, music industry had won most of the cases initiated against infringers at the beginning. Now the fight has become more intensified, complex and transnational. The public awareness has made the Copyright Act is now very simple and has helped more adherence rather than infringement. As such, under the changed circumstances, if the music industry does not pay attention to the public importance and if it continues to employ imprudent battle stratagems, chance of winning the battle is very remote. 1. Andr Paine -Seven Million admit to stealing music from illegal websites-Evening Standard London, Mar- 25, 2004. 2. "Why Downloading Music Could Cost You a Fortune. " Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales) 11 Oct. 2005: 19. 3.
Why Downloading Music Could Cost You a Fortune. Newspaper article: Western Mail. Publication Date: October 11, 2005. Page Number: 19. 4.
Music Pirates Turn Up Volume; Recording Industry Suits Fail to Squelch Use of Online Services. " The Washington Times 6 Sept. 2004: C 17. 5. Fisher, Eric. "On-Line Piracy May Be Sunk. " The Washington Times 18 Feb. 1999: 8. 6. Jacobson, Douglas, David and Lichman, Anonymity A Double Edged Sword for pirates online The Chicago Tribune, April 13, 2000. 7. Charles Goldsmith, Delaney and Kevin J, Music Industry targets piracy by Europeans, The Wall Street Journal, Jan, 20, 2004, B 1 - 2.
Likewise in European Union, Music net and Press play have come under the EU attack for their unfairly dominance of the market and anti competitive practice by allowing free music downloads. All these copyright violation have proved to be major concern for the music creators and these abuses and infringement is on the increase on day to day basis. At the same time, digital music download not only fetch the wide opportunities for music industry but also invites the infringement of intellectual property laws, with specific reference to China. MUSIC PIRACY IN UK: One of the studies says that more than seven million internet users steal music over the web.
Music industry has strongly warned the teenage culprits to desist else they could be imprisoned. The Record companies trade association namely the British Phonographic Industry has reported that about 7. 4 million people have admitted to downloading music from illegal sites. Album of top artist has been the main target of ongoing piracy which has cost the music industry with millions of pounds. Spending has come down by 32 % on albums and 59 % on singles due to illegal downloading. Illegal down loaders by the process of file sharing can able to swap the music stored on computers with millions of people all over the world.
Infringers can download an album and enjoy the music thereby saving about? 16 each time. Internet users are being warned on their computers that if they do not disable the software for the downloading, they may face court action. Song writers, artists, publishers, record companies, retailers and employees in the music industry are being affected due to illegal file sharing. As an alternative, the music company is encouraging legal payments for downloads which permits tracks to be bought over the internet for less than? 1 each. Coca cola has sold about 100, 000 tracks through online during 2004 Teenagers in the age group of 12 - 19 downloads up to 30 % and about 10 tracks are being down loaded a month by these infringers constitute about 48 %. These down loads are enabled by those who are residing at South-East and in London where internet broadband connections are freely available...
A mother of a fourteen year old girl was asked to pay? 4000 to BPI, copyright owner, for unlawful downloads made by her daughter recently in UK. It is to be noted that neither the age nor ignorance of law would come as defense to protect one against infringement in copyright case. Thus BPI now recommends that parents in UK should investigate whether their computers contain downloaded music files or software which could be utilized for unlawful file sharing such as KaZaA, Morpheus, and Grokster. Due to crack down on piracy, the traffic in the famous file-sharing network Bit Torrent has comedown drastically but the file sharers have moved to another network, eDonkey as per new data released reports. Cache Logic, a Cambridge based Internet analysis have conducted a study and found that eDonkey is presently on par with Bit Torrent in the China, USA, Britain and Japan. EDonkey is the major peer-to-peer file-sharing network in South Korea, which has the Worlds highest percentage of high-speed internet usage and has their presence in Spain, Italy and Germany.
In 2004, Bit torrent was consuming up to one third of Internets total bandwidth as users traded huge on music, movie files. The net work offers suggestions where to look for music files for downloading free. About 60 % of Internet total bandwidth includes p 2 p traffic and these technology employs technique to send data from user to user and is frequently found to be difficult to shut down because as these network dont rely on a centralized server to share or distribute data. In 2005, U. S. Supreme Court has ruled against P 2 P firm Grokster, declaring that because the motive of the company is to support copyright infringement, it could be held responsible for the music traded on its network.
It is interesting to note that Grokster case did not result in a swift decline in P 2 P usage EUROPEAN COPYRIGHT ACT: Harmonization of some features of copy rights and correlated rights in the information society which is generally known as EU Copyright directive and also known as EU directive 2001 / 29 /EC was passed in the European parliament on 22 may 2001. The salient feature is that has only limited exceptions to anti circumvention measures and exclusive rights. As it is yet to come out with specified directive, the EU member states have full liberty in certain aspects of directive implementation. The 2001...
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