The reaction of many corporates to the new powerful digital consumer is to try and use the law to hold on tighter and tighter to their product and their margins.
Historically, copyright law has been used to ensure a balance between protecting the entrpreneur/artist's ownership and the consumer's right to use a product as they wish. And also (according to the US constitution no less) to promote the, 'Progress of Science and useful Arts'.
But increasingly copyright law is working in favour of the copyright owner. And while protecting poor suffering artists sounds good in theory, copyrights are of course often held by corporates who 'own' the artists.
Of course the most famous proponent of this approach of this is the all powerful Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and their reaction to the peer-to-peer downloading of music by digital consumers : sue everyone. Despite their belief that this has actually worked (rather than just preventing anyone from admiting to it) the reality is that they are now doing deals with iTunes and ID2 that digital consumers think are a fair deal.
In the US this has led to the creation of a group called digitalconsumer.org. More than 50,000 strong, the group is concerned by recent US legal changes. While, it's obviously legal to lend a physical book to a friend, copyright restrictions on electronic books make such lending illegal. Making a copy of your own CD for personal use was legal in the past, but it is no longer legal if the CD has been copy-protected (and the record labels have announced their intent to copy-protect all future CDs). Recording a show to watch later used to be legal, but with new digital TV standards, such recording will only be legal if the TV station explicitly gives you permission (and broadcasters have already announced that they will not allow recording of "premium" shows). In certain cases, it can even be illegal to fast-forward through advertisements at the beginning of a DVD that you've purchased!
The groups stance is encapsulated in its Consumer Technology Bill of Rights which can be found at http://www.digitalconsumer.org/bill.html.
And it's not the only one. The Alliance for Digital Progress (ADP) is a coalition of businesses and consumer groups. ADP's mission is to convince Congress to reject the entertainment industry's call for government-mandated copy-protection technology.
Furthermore, many digital consumers have just decided to use digital technology to completely bypass the copyright system by using a Creative Commons licence that has a much more flexible, collaborative approach to protecting the brainwaves of talented folk everywhere.
So, when will the corporates realise that the new powerful digital consumer can not be pushed around anymore ? Probably when they start to listen to the views of modern marketeers who understand the issues involved.
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