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New canons to protect copyright in a changing world
By h.b. - Jun 23, 2006 - 8:22 AM

Some false DVD's being destroyed by the authorities - Archive Photo EFE
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More and more people are downloading their music and films
EDITORIAL COMMENT - On Thursday, Congress approved the changes to the intellectual property laws in Spain – copyright laws if you will. The idea is that a small canon will have to be paid on every blank media – from a blank CD to mobile phones and even a memory stick. However, computer hard disks and ADSL lines have, for some reason been left out of the legislation, despite their widespread use for illegal copying of music and films. Somehow the money collected in the new canon will then be paid back to the owner of the copyright.

The law is quite obviously a botched job, but a better solution is yet to be put forward. Protestors claim that we will all be paying the canon, even if we don’t use the blank material to make a copy of copyright material. And then there are the CD’s and DVD’s which have some sort of copy protection system, and so we can’t copy anyway, even though we have to still pay the canon.

For some time there has been quite a lot of publicity about the extent of how we all download or copy music, but some recent statistics have really taken the matter to new levels.

Telefonica has been looking at who and what is using most of the bandwidth of its infrastructure and now 90% of it is internet traffic using I.P protocols. Five years ago that number was just 15%. So the usual phone calls are just 10% of the system usage. As if that is not amazing enough, break down the 90% that is the internet use and we find 8% is audio or video streaming, and emails – 11% is the usual browsing of the Internet, but a massive 71% of the total is P2P traffic. That is peer to peer – direct connections between two computers and that means file sharing and the direct copying of audio or video files. The numbers also reveal that 30% of the users are taking up 90% of the bandwith – ie some of us are really using a lot of the stuff. So as more and more music and films are downloaded, less are purchased in the shops – a whole lot less. The average Spaniard now buys just 1 CD a year, and even DVD sales fell from 501 million in 2004 to 359 million last year.
One number that was up – the 509 million musical archives estimated to have been downloaded in Spain last year.

A real shake up of the cultural world is going on. Numbers from the annual report from the Spanish copyright organisation SGAE, show that only live performance, be it theatre or music, continues to show financial and audience growth. Also on the up are videogames. But elsewhere the numbers of us watching films at the cinema is down, and for the first time so are the number of screens.

As bandwidth increases and software becomes easier to use, as more youngsters are computer literate and think nothing of downloading and burning a film or an album, the copyright owners are in for several more years of a bumpy ride.

Surely the only way they can ride this wave is by offering legal downloads, at a better quality and, key to all of it, a keen price. Then the big companies will perhaps regain their market share.

For a while though there is a general feeling that CD’s and DVD’s have been over priced for too long, and so José Público feels no guilt at all. Getting back at big business is one thing, but defrauding the creator of the work, the copyright holder, of his or her income is quite another.