Abstract
The Internet has enabled the efficient distribution of digital media for the benefit of music lovers, film fans, educators, students, and consumers around the world. However, it has also disrupted traditional distribution channels for the entertainment industry. Sales through retail channels are being rapidly eroded by unauthorized on-line distribution of digital recordings. Partly as a result, global record industry revenues declined by 3% in 2005, by 5% in 2006, and by 9% in the first half of 2007. Attempts to establish new models to capture revenue in the on-line environment have met with limited success. Apple’s iTunes Store generates significant revenue through its retail sales model, and a few subscription models have shown promise, but none of these will be sufficient in the long run to offset the steady decline in revenues from sales of physical media (CDs, tapes, DVDs, etc.). Academics, government officials, and industry representative are all struggling to identify a system capable of solving this intensifying crisis. More specifically, they are trying to identify a combination of legal reforms and business models that will enable us both to continue to reap the economic and cultural benefits of the new digital distribution technologies and to fairly compensate the contributors to the creative process. This lecture will review the various proposals now being discussed and argue for the superiority, at least in the near future, of a network-based collective licensing system.
Media
Speaker
Photo by Creative Commons, CC:BY 2.0
William Fisher
Hale and Dorr Professor of Intellectual Property Law
Harvard University
Professor Fisher received his undergraduate degree (in American Studies) from Amherst College and his graduate degrees (J.D. and Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization) from Harvard University.
Between 1982 and 1984, he served as a law clerk to Judge Harry T. Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court.
Since 1984, he has taught at Harvard Law School, where he is currently the Hale and Dorr Professor of Intellectual Property Law and the Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
His academic honors include a Danforth Postbaccalaureate Fellowship (1978-1982) and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California (1992-1993).
The text above by Wizard of OS, CC:BY-SA 2.0
