Can the music industry sue its way to profit? - Los Angeles Times

The LA Times recently ran a fascinating op-ed series that pitted Radio and Internet Newsletter publisher Kurt Hansen against Jay Rosenthal, a partner with the Washington DC law firm Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe, an attorney for the Recording Artists' Coalition, and a member of the board for SoundExchange.

The final installment in the series, Can the music industry sue its way to profit?, deals with the pending massive increase in royalties to be levied on Internet broadcasters. Rosenthal's latest contribution includes this glaring example of the industry's obstinate refusal to acknowledge its utter cluelessness and obsolescence:

And now the question is why we don't allow webcasters to do the same thing as Napster and Grokster, but without protest. We should just back off. We should allow them to use the music without payment, perhaps calling it a form of "fair use" or rationalize it as promotion—which will surely result in an explosion of music sales or increased touring revenue or loads of merchandise sales or whatever.

The entire series is well worth reading.

Give that man/woman a cigar!

Someone using the nickname Windbag posted an excellent and insightful comment in response to Children of the Web, from BusinessWeek.com. Here's an excerpt from that comment:

"The internet, agent of universalization, can just as easily be a tool of differentiation and individuation. The trick here will be to recognize that the new local will not necessarily be geographic. We see this already at the political level, where international Islamic communities of various stripes are building homes on the net. The same is happening in nonpolitical areas. The next commercial marketing wave will recognize and exploit these new communities."

Hell yes.