As if taking on the entire publishing establishment weren’t enough, Google has managed to upset the venerable music business too with its unlicensed use and broadcast of music video soundtracks on YouTube and Google Video. PRS for music, formerly the The PRS Alliance (MCPS-PRS) had been in talks with Google to try to establish a license fee royalty payable by the search giant for each broadcast/play of a ‘work’ – as has been the way for decades.
Content Wars: PRS unleashes broadside on Google
Paul Quigley,
Editorial Director
As if taking on the entire publishing establishment weren’t enough, Google has managed to upset the venerable music business too with its unlicensed use and broadcast of music video soundtracks on YouTube and Google Video. PRS for music, formerly the The PRS Alliance (MCPS-PRS) had been in talks with Google to try to establish a license fee royalty payable by the search giant for each broadcast/play of a ‘work’ – as has been the way for decades.
But apparently, Google claims it would be unviable for it to continue in the suggested way and has recently pulled many of the more popular musical content from its sites.
With the current situation resembling a cross between a stand-off and an impasse, the solution to the problem is akin to the problem that music is facing in the devaluation of musical content, ever since the days of Napster and more recently BitTorrent and P2P file-sharing. PirateBay aside, the notion of attaching a value to a content item in the digital era is an almost impenetrable nut to crack.
Software firms have suffered for years from cracked and hack versions of their products, with the warez scene flourishing in all forms of software piracy whilst most firms can only stand by and watch, whilst trying unlikely schemes such as DRM and dongles to thwart the hackers. The Content Wars are now in full-swing.
Against a challenging economic backdrop, the environment for unlawful content distribution is arguably set to increase its pace. Where this leaves the content creators is between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Clearly, for creators to continue to create new and innovative products and solutions, a proportionate level of remuneration is still an appropriate way to go about it. However, digitisation’s capacity for cloning is so damaging and destructive to them, that the incentive could be lost. The baby could, quite literally, get tossed out with the bath water, leading to fewer new products, less innovation, poorer levels of support and a general decline in incentives to invest and market. This would be counter-productive for all sectors of commerce and industry as well. As capital flows take a pounding, what is left is little else than the starry-eyed optimism of entrepreneurs and their hunger to achieve.
Devaluing content by diminishing its unit value is the first step on a very slippery slope to product penury and an emaciated economic backdrop, assuming it is allowed to come to pass at all in the current climate.
That said, Content Wars of all shades amply show how vital they all are to overall business activity, and that to try to hunker down on costs and to focus solely on ‘price’ loses sight of ‘value’, not a state of affairs conducive to anyone’s benefit going forwards.
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