Copyright Business

BMG, the recently relaunched music publishing arm of Germany's Bertelsmann, has €250 to spend on buying up catalogues of music rights. What can  this tell us about the state of the music industry?

According to reports in the Financial Times, BMG*, the recently relaunched music publishing arm of German media empire Bertelsmann, has €250 million  in venture capital funding. It is seeking to spend this money on catalogues of rights to composers and songwriters in the US and the UK. In doing so, it hopes to challenge the might of the 'big four' music publishers who currently control the music market. 

The story here appears to be  quite a different story from the one that the music industry tells to politicians and policy-makers.   

It is interesting that in times when

The sunglass-wearing Irish pop singer Bono has a clash of financial interests  between his Internet investments and his copyright pro-3-strikes stance, as exposed by the sale this week of the computer-maker Palm. Should we call him a hypocrite?

U2's Bono is one five directors of Elevation Partners a venture capital company behind Palm, the US maker of hand-held computers.  According to US media sources, he has already made $US82.3 million from this investment. The sale of Palm to Hewlett-Packard for $US1.2 billion, agreed yesterday, stands to return his invested capital and net him even more profit. Bono is also sponsored by Blackberry, the maker of a rival product to Palm.

U2's manager, Paul McGuiness, is one of the most vitriolic opponents of the open Internet. McGuiness is  a key person behind the music industry's push for 3-strikes measures to punish Internet users - for using the very equipment which is delivering this second fortune to Bono. McGuiness has spoken openly and aggressively about his desire for ISPs to be made liable for copyright infringements.  

How do 

The EU-funded film Slumdog Millionaire won 8 Oscars yesterday. It's backers are lobbying the European Union for 3-strikes measures that will penalise Internet users and puts the entire Internet in jeopardy from filtering. How do we square that from a public policy perspective?

Anyone who is not a hermit will know that a film called Slumdog Millionaire won 8 Oscar awards at a ceremony in Hollywood last night. What isn't so well known is that the film received 830 million Euro from the EU's MEDIA programme which provides funding for European films. Even less well known is that its other financial backers - Pathe and 20th Century Fox - who stand to make huge profits from the film - have been lobbying the EU for graduated response / 3-strikes measures.

Pathe (based in France) and Fox (owned by Rupert Murdoch's

'Long Tail' author Chris Anderson, and Duke University law professor James Boyle, discussed the economics of 'free' and the merits of the Creative Commons, in a BBC Radio programme yesterday evening. But to find out why the headline, I'm afraid you'll have to read the whole article.

Anderson, who uncovered how digital economics means that selling a large catalogue of niche products in small volumes can be profitable, has a new theory. That businesses can give up to 90 per cent of their products and services away free, and still make a profit.

Taken at face value, Anderson's theory will cause apoplexies among music and entertainment industry executives. But when you think about what he says more carefully, he is

A report from the management consultancy firm Booz and Company says that the losses to the telecoms industry from a 3 strikes / graduated response measures, would be much higher than any potential gains to the music industry.

The report, entitled Digital Confidence, securing the next wave of digital growth, carries out a calculation for a hypothetical scenario of terminating internet access to persistent filesharers in the UK (I stress it is a hypothetical scenario, because the UK government has not said it has plans to implement the 3rd strike - termination of access).

The report says:

"One aspect often overlooked in public discussions on the merits of "three strikes" is the damage to the overall digital economy as the result of disconnecting significant numbers of users from the Internet. Implications of "three strikes" would need to be understood more holistically. A high-level sensitivity calculation, for the