iChoons

I could not believe my eyes. Disney? DIsney who have driven the Sonny Bono act driving copyright to outlandish extremes so they can hang on to their corporate mascot and continue to hassle childrens parties?

Disney?

The Disney owned Hollywood records has partnered with Yahoo! to 'test the water'. Some choice quotes follow:

Yahoo tests 'Right' to MP3 downloads

"We're trying to be realistic," said Ken Bunt, senior VP of marketing at Hollywood Records. "Jesse's single is already online and we haven't put it out. Piracy happens regardless of what we do. So we're going to see how Jesse's album goes (as an MP3) and then decide on others going forward."

Wow! Someone is actually getting it! Yes, there will always be a few (and initially quite a few, possibly mostly) bad eggs, but when the new approach is mainstream and every most media companies are doing it (perhaps ill-advisedly still using DRM on their 'premium' offerings) then most consumers won't mind paying for their music - especially if it follows eMusics lead and sells songs for about 25cent each.

Labels and Netcos will be watching sales of the album, which Yahoo! will promote heavily throughout its network of Web sites to see whether consumers are more interested in buying unprotected MP3 files and whether it has any impact on piracy.

Magnatune has been using a model that allows the consumer choose how much they want to pay for the album. A lot of people choose the 5 dollar minimum. But most choose the recommended price of 9 or 10 dollars and a lsignificant proportion actually pay 15 or 20 dollars per album.

They have been successful at this for years.

The mainstream media companies will see that it will work for them too. It might be slow to catch on and possibly even be a 'loss leader' for them but it will stabilise and they will reap the benefits of not having to lobby the U.S. and other Government to change laws, they wont have to pay clever (and sometimes underhanded) people to invent new ways of locking up your music and they wont have to spend money brokering deals with like-minded companies and hardware manufacturers to produce proprietary formats to lock out the competition.

They might even be so generous as to start paying the artists properly! Who knows?

I will leave the last word with Dave Goldberg of Yahoo! music

"We think this is a really good experiment, because copy protection is not doing anything to stop people from stealing when you can just get unprotected tracks off of a CD or get music illegally online," said Yahoo! Music topper Dave Goldberg. "We think it's good to make it easy for consumers to get digital music on whatever device they want and for companies like us to not be reliant on one particular technology company for how our consumers can access music."

The FInancial Times reports that Universal 'music' has sued two video sharing sites for copyright infringement.

This is the same Universal 'music' who has already squared off to the new GooTube (Google owned YouTube) claiming that they would not hesitate to sue them for copyright infringement. Of course it would be cheaper for them to ask Google to take down the infringing videos, but there you go.

Universal is well within its rights (legally if not morally) to sue the two video sharing sites. After all as the article states:

In separate lawsuits, Universal alleged that Grouper.com – recently acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment – and Bolt.com had built up traffic by encouraging users to share music videos from its artists without their permission.

Well fair enough then, people have been sharing these videos on line, without permission even. Thats theft right? I mean everytime someone watches one of those videos online a DVD dissapears in a puff of smoke frm the stores of Universal 'music'. Right?

The article goes on:

In one incident, it claimed a video for the Mariah Carey song “Shake it Off” was viewed more than 50,000 times on Grouper without the company’s permission.

50,000 infringements of copyright. Universal 'music' must be bleeding and walking funny after that surely!

But hey! Wait a second here. Did they just say that 50,000 people watched a Mariah Carey video? Without having to be medicated and propped up in front of it? And more than that, it actually cost Universal 'music' nothing, zilch, nada, diddly-squat to achieve the grand figure of 50,000 viewers?

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE UNIVERSAL 'MUSIC'!!

What the fuck? Do you know how much marketing dollars it takes to make one person watch any video, never mind Mariah Carey? And in this case you have a targetted audience! Captive even (if not captivated). WHY NOT SELL SOME MARIAH CAREY CRAPOLA TO THEM WHEN THEY ARE WATCHING THE VIDEO THAT COST YOU NOTHING TO GET IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES?? Ok it costs money to produce but the distribution cost are nothing!!

ARE THEY FUCKING INSANE? AM I THE ONLY PERSON WHO SEES THAT THERE IS A BIG NEW WAY TO MARKET TO THE AUDIENCE HERE?

You can lead a horse to water......

So what does this mean for Google? Nothing? Everything?

Google are a bunch of pretty smart guys who might even catch on to this an put some pressure on the media companies - make them an offer they cant refuse - and get some brain cells firing in the right way.

Regardless, there are interesting times ahead for us all. If Google has the balls (and more importantly the money) to flaunt the media companies intellectual property rights in an attempt to show them the one true path then we might get somewhere. Maybe even some CEO's might take a chance liten to the lower management and ignore the upper management and drop the dead donkey of DRM and stop treating their customers like criminals. Amen brother

OR, the media companies might just continue with business as usual and bring down Google, the internet, World of Warcraft, for shame.

Damn if I dont need a walk in the sun smeling some flowers right now.