Sabiene Heindl might be about to leave her role as the general manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations and spokesperson for the Australian Content Industry Group for a high-flying career at the National Broadband Network Company, but the anti-piracy campaigner just can’t stop enthusing about content protection.
In an opinion piece published this morning by The Australian, Heindl — who has long led the music industry’s anti-piracy taskforce in Australia — argues that a recent deal signed between US Internet service providers and film, TV and music studios is a positive for everyone. Writes Heindl:
“The significance of the US agreement cannot be overstated. It has proved wrong all those people who thought the content industries and the ISPs could never come to a voluntary agreement in a market as big and as complex as the US … There need not be a winner or loser. Everyone can benefit from this.”
Now Heindl’s got a point. At the end of the day, most consumers basically want a moderately priced and convenient way to access all of the content they want (regardless of where it was created or who owns it), whenever they want, and in a format that will suit them. If ISPs, content owners and platform providers like Apple, Microsoft and Google can work together on a solution to this issue, everyone can win. Content owners can get paid a fair amount for their work, ISPs won’t get sued constantly for traffic passing over their networks, and consumers can consume at their leisure.
However, the content industry hasn’t exactly given Australia’s consumers or ISPs a great deal of confidence recently that negotiation can achieve the right outcomes.
Ongoing lawsuits against major ISPs, threatening legal letters sent to both ISPs and consumers, appeals to the Federal Government to step in, region IP-blocking for services like Hulu, a lack of distribution rights for eBooks and even a failure to launch the same services in Australia as are available overseas … the content industry isn’t exactly coming to the party here.
Partnership takes effort from both sides, people — and right now, Australian consumers and ISPs aren’t feeling the love from big content.
Image credit: Luis Lopez, royalty free
I love the fact that someone has the heart and gall to go after those that easily seem to forget that “Content is King” and without it, ISP’s and others have no real business. Let’s talk music.
Musicians really are being ignored here, I being an Independent Artist/Musician, have strong concern for what is and isn’t taking place fast enough to protect those who are creating the content called music.
We all need music in this world, all facets of life, no matter where you are, music plays a vital part of all our lives. So why then is there such a strong hold on not wanting to compensate those who are the creators?
Every other industry has someone or organization fighting for them, but musicians, or am I missing something in the articles being written.
Who am I? The Silver Conductor at:
http://www.thesilverconductor.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOO6ZTBf1Oc
http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Silver-Conductor
Remember:”Always know who loves you”
The Silver Conductor
“Tweeting while Rome Burns” By John Giacobbi AKA The Web Sheriff (The internet’s top cop and world’s leading music piracy specialist.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/john-giacobbi/tweeting-while-rome-burns_b_926095.html
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