I was going to comment about this book on copyright.
I do want the book cited. The writer– himself gifted in language– strongly recommends the book.
I have been interested in copyright issues for a long time, but especially since the late 1990’s when I was convinced that the music industry had disastrously misjudged the technological landscape and invested all of their strategies into trying to kill online access to music and videos. It was Apple who first realized that it really wasn’t about the money. The typical down-loader spent far more on buying records and CDs than the average non-downloading citizen did. It wasn’t that millions of users were so eager to obtain music and video without paying for it: the truth was they just wanted access. They wanted to be able to find a recording or movie they liked and listen to it or watch it without having to go to a physical store and place an order and wait– forever– for some distributor to finally acknowledge their preference and ship it to them.
Apple charged people for every download, and, astonishingly, people bought it.
We have a reached a point now where I believe the sale of actual music or video files is no longer the salient point. The point is eyeballs, email accounts, registrations– whatever attracts the user to the website, to the click-throughs, the data. The question content owners are going to ask is not “did you pay for the song” but “do you have an account?”. Can we sell your eyeballs? Can we hit you up with ads? Can we spy on you?
The second thing that has become apparent is that, in spite of what the industry keeps telling us, the artist is not getting paid. The average amount an artist was paid for an album sale in the 1970’s was about $1. The average amount he receives for a download from iTunes or Spotify is too small to measure.
Who is getting the money?
Spotify and Apple and their cohorts.