Copyright Business

Oh-o-oh, no more re-winds as the music industry begins a love-affair with streaming.

2012 was a tipping point for the music industry, when streamed music from services such as Spotify, finally demonstrated their economic potential. Indeed, the latest figures released by the British recorded music industry, otherwise known as the BPI, suggest that it is finally getting to grips with an Internet business model. So what does this mean for the future of copyright policy? Here are a few comments on the numbers, plus a review of Spotify for policy-makers.

London and Paris offices affected, as well as New York. And some curious downloading going on in the European Parliament.

Universal Music, which lobbies for enforcement measures against peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, has been caught with its proverbial pants down. Statistics on Bit Torrent usage, made available by the anti-piracy surveillance company, ScanEye, and uncovered by TorrentFreak, reveal the possibility of P2P downloading within the offices of copyright industry companies. For example, the data links certain downloaded files of copyrighted television programmes to the London and Paris offices of Universal Music.

When petitioning politicians for tougher enforcement measures, Disney Corporation will assure them that the motion picture industry is bleeding to death. Internet piracy, they will say, must be stopped in order to prevent the strangulation of the creative industries and protect the jobs of those who work in them. Hollywood is pretty good at foretelling its own death when there is a politician in the frame.

So it is curious that Hollywood's greatest corporation can now find a whopping $4 billion to buy out one of its competitors. For Disney Corporation is indeed

Did you know that the London Olympics have their own special 'right' under intellectual property law?

There's a quietly brewing disgust at the way the London 2012 Olympics are enforcing their rights under trade mark and copyright law. It's not just the granny who knitted Olympic dolls, and infringing shop windows, it's happening online too. For those who have followed the ACTA saga, it could be a telling precedent. In the latest twist, an Irish parody of the appallingly bad Olympic commentary was taken off-line under orders from the International Olympic Committee. It follows investigations into online traders, who include none other than the royal sister-in-law Pippa Middleton.

The European Commission has released a new draft directive aimed at regulating the music collecting societies. It follows several years of effort by the Commission, in which it tried out various initiatives, all of which failed to reduce the domination of the collecting societies or stop their bad behaviour. The new directive tries to make them more