Young People, Music, & the Internet
The Internet and the possibilities that it offers constitute an enormous opportunity for the record industry. The web will help make it easier to access music products, and will allow the relationship between consumers and record companies to become interactive, with obvious advantages, including creative development and promoting emerging talents. The net is the ideal place for new artists and smaller labels to promote new music.
But all of this still requires a guarantee that the producer of the track, the artist, and the songwriters will all be sufficiently protected, from both the technical and legal standpoints. Artists and record companies, like songwriters, ask only that the digital world provided protections that are at least equal to those that already exist in the analog world - nothing more. When new technologies are used incorrectly, it poses a threat to the creative industry, and new laws must simply adapt the forms of protection to the new technological reality.
In this context, one important step was the implementation of the European Directive on Copyright, a crucial tool for development in the industry and in the digital environment in particular. The development of the Internet and of networks and telephony in general offers enormous opportunities for the record industry to expand on the global market, attracting new listeners, reducing production and distribution costs, improving the efficiency of distribution systems, expanding the available catalog, and allowing consumers to purchase the music they want in the format they prefer, whenever and wherever they want.
The newly approved standards favor the development of the legal market. Other significant efforts have been made to raise awareness among consumers and the web community in general about the problems related to copyright protections. The European website Pro Music was created as part of this campaign. It is a new international initiative founded to promote the legitimate use of music on-line and to dispel myths about music piracy on the web.
The site offers the biggest international source of information about the growing number of legal music sites on-line. The site also provides information about the process involved in producing music and the people involved in the chain, as well as a number of viewpoints on piracy, from artists to media to the public. Information and questions and answers are also available about copyright protections for on-line music.
COPYRIGHT PROTECTION AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES
It's common knowledge that copyright, which covers the rights of songwriters, producers, and performing artists, is the only form of compensation for work based exclusively on creativity and inventiveness. The economic survival of people who write music, write lyrics, and produce records is based on copyright, which protects intellectual property rights. This is why protecting copyright and related rights is crucial: protecting creativity makes it possible to develop new ideas and launch new artists. Without copyright there would be no innovation.
We often hear that the Internet has surpassed copyright and that everything is free on the web; people seem to think that once a protected work is put on-line, there are no longer any rights to protect. This idea is fundamentally mistaken. Taking the example of a piece of music, that fact that it is reproduced and made available by a website does not mean that copyright laws no longer apply.
An exclusive right exists for every piece of music. Reproducing the track as an MP3, for example, and distributing it without authorization from the record company, perhaps over a P2P network or through file sharing, is an act of piracy just like selling an illegally recorded CD on the street corner, and just like selling such a CD, illegal on-line transfers are punishable by law.
