Here we go again. A lawsuit has been filed against the third largest cable provider, Cox Communications, alleging the company has failed to exercise proper restrictions and penalties on customers who repeatedly have violated the copyright policies of downloaded music. There are specific Internet addresses and numbers of violations listed in the lawsuit.
Free Culture
Whether the lawsuit is successful remains to be seen. What is clear is that the culture, nationally and globally, is one where when it comes to music and most everything digital, free is the best price. The line between sharing music and profiting from music has become so blurred that individual musicians have taken to starting their own websites and publishing away from established sites such as iTunes or Amazon. The case being made by the musicians is that they receive so little in profit and the provider makes so much profit from each song, that it is unfair to the musicians.
The perspective is that a few companies are making obscene amounts of money from someone else’s hard work. Illegal downloading of the music benefits no one except the person illegally downloading the song. It ends up being free for more than a few people, while many more are paying more because they choose to conduct themselves above the table.
Who Stands to Lose
Both the musician and the cable company are direct losers as their profit is derived from providing a service, music or Internet, to the public at a FCC regulated price. When people circumvent the structure of the service, they end up either increasing the cost of the service for the honest people or eroding the quality of the service for this same group. The lawsuit is a mechanism to seek compensation for one of these three groups, though it is likely the lawyers will get about half of the award.
The biggest loser group is the one of the three who should gain the most – the musicians. They are the ones who not only do the work, but have to manoeuvre a maze of copyright issues themselves before even considering the violation of their copyrighted finished work. The measurement being used in this and preceding legal actions against copyright infringement has always been dollars. But time moves on, and each day that passes where the artist receives zero dollars is another day without pay.
The Underlying Issue
In plain sight are the issues of money and digital theft. What makes the violator’s actions possible is a lax posture by the communications companies and a general failure of the international community to arrive at an international copyright infringement law that is enforceable. The problem in part rests with Internet providers such as Cox, but also with an unrestricted Internet that as of late has a series of security problems. The Digital Age has become more of the Digital Regulation Age, where governments, companies, and individual users are all trying to stop those who seek to profit from other people’s work.
What has occurred is the creation of products, visual and audio, that are intangible but whose value is universal and on occasion immeasurable. There have always been copies of music made and shared between individuals. Prior to the Digital Age, there had to the purchase of a tangible asset before sharing could occur. The same technology that has made more than a few companies billions of dollars in profit has now been turned against them and is requiring greater security to allow them to continue raking in the profit.
