Chris Barton: First bloody skirmishes in global copyright war

COMMENT

New Zealand entered a global conflict this month - sparked by the Government proposing something called "format shifting".

It's a makeover of our Copyright Act to allow the "shifting" of, for example, tracks from Black Eyed Peas' Elephunk album on to a PC, or portable MP3 player.

Sounds reasonable - as long as you've legally bought that album. But believe it or not, if you do such a thing at the moment - and thousands of Kiwis are doing it every day - you're committing a criminal act.

Clearly the law is an ass - which is why the Government wants a change to make format shifting for personal use OK.

But to the music industry the proposal is an act of war. If format shifting is allowed it will open the floodgates to unrestricted piracy.

You can participate in the opening salvos where you can see submissions.

But New Zealand's entry into the global copyright war is late and rather tame. The war in the United States has waged for about six years and is getting bloody. On the front line, format shifting is far from the real battle between the downloaders and the music industry.

The downloaders, who have the weight of numbers on their side, appear to be winning. These are the millions of people all over the world (Kiwis included) who connect to the net with file-sharing software like KaZaA and Grokster and share millions of songs every day. Most know that's breaching copyright and wrong, but they don't seem to care. Fighting the unruly horde is the music and movie industry, which has money on its side. In the US and Canada, Denmark, Germany and Italy it has unleashed rabid lawyers trained to hunt down their quarry until the end of time - not just the businesses that promote file sharing, but also the downloaders themselves.

Our local Recording Association was instrumental in shutting down local file-sharing hub file sharing is hurting the industry. Global music sales are down. But figures in Australia last week show that, despite the marauding rabble, the music industry in 2003 had its best year. That wasn't the case in New Zealand, where sales were down 3.6 per cent to $190.3 million.

But O'Neill-Joyce admits such a drop could be attributed to other factors: " ... rises and falls in the market, small as New Zealand is, could be attributed to two or three massive CD sales ... There are many factors and I wouldn't be foolish enough to play the analyst here ... "

Interestingly, New Zealand music sales have been on the rise since 1999 (when the first major files sharer Napster got under way), reaching a peak of $201.6 million in 2001 and then falling in 2002 to $197.3 million.

Whatever the outcome, the copyright war will be a long, costly and messy campaign.

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