JanneJalkanen pointed me ¹ to this story he had gotten via Slashdot ²: Music boss: we were wrong to go to war with consumers. “The boss of Warner Music has made a rare public confession that the music industry has to take some of the blame for the rise of p2p file sharing.”
Music boss: we were wrong to go to war with consumers
It took a long time to realize it. I wonder: If peer-to-peer sharing technology had not played into the hands of consumers, would they have learnt the same lesson? In a way this seems to indicate that we should be wary of building a society that allows a group strong control over anything, because it is precisely this lack of perfect control that allowed the privateers of this age to share music even though the labels wanted to prevent it. And only the sharing in defiance of the law gave the customers a voice in this dialogue. I’m sure if consumers had only complained instead of complaining and *taking* what they wanted, their voice would not have been heard.
It remains to be seen whether this will end well. All this alienation has certainly given me a strong aversion against the labels. What would they have to do to undo the damage they have wrought? I think the solution will have to come from a third party. For example: The telcos or the state will impose a culture tax that will be redistributed via a collecting societies. In terms of dialectics it will be “unexpected and new” – neither free for all nor DRM. A synthesis.
#Copyright