Technology and the Indie Music Industry.
The robust and high quality recordings of DAT recorders served as the first serious piracy threat to the music industry. I have written about this in detail in my blog Legal Foundations of The Indie Music Industry. It made the replicates of digital music easy to be produced and sold. Another important incident related to DAT recorders created in collaboration between Sony and Philips was when the record companies placed legal pressure on Sony and Philips to sue for curbing copyright infringement and contributory copyright infringement. They wanted to force companies to hold off on releasing the product in the U.S. market. After a five-year long series of legislations presented by record labels in Congress regarding the issue, no stronghold gained and with no conclusions coming from Congress, Sony finally began selling DAT recorders in the United States.
As expected, the launch of DAT in the market was quickly followed by several lawsuits. The ongoing fight eventually became the reason for the passage of the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. This Act required DAT recorders be equipped with systems to reduce piracy and support copy management. It also allocated royalties to song writers and publishers coming as a small percentage of their revenues. The recording industry, never having gained any momentum in the case of the DAT recorder, successfully stifled the new technology.
As I have written in my blog Indie Music in The Computer Age, with the invention of technology, new, generally economical recording instruments, more people can take part in the production of music than any time in recent memory. Studio time is costly and hard to get, so most, if not all, of innovation is focused on the home-PC, laptop and iPads. As a result, anybody can create studio-quality music from their own home. Each home-made recording can be viewed as a fresh recording. Also, innovation makes sure this is accessible to the overall population. After equipment and programming costs, the eager indie artist need not stress over more costs, similar to expenses for studio space or sound specialists. As generation has been made simpler, marketing and publicizing have additionally gotten to be less demanding in view of current headways in innovation, to be specific through the web. This is how technology has affected the indie music industry.
foundation involved in the countless lawsuits related to file sharing. Introduction of online media streaming, without an option for download was in part the reason. While members of the entertainment industry feared that people would easily be able to break through the security to illegally download video and audio files, they were still interested in this technology and hoped that the legislation, if passed, would prohibit the circumvention of the security technology. In 1992, The Cable Act had been passed, which was similar to the DMCA and focused on the unscrambling of cable television signals. With that in mind, the entertainment industry sought broad laws against all circumvention, while negotiating the terms. The computer industry, however, hoped to narrow down the focus on copyright, so as to allow reverse engineering and security testing research. If the Internet played any role in circumvention, or dissemination of information on how to do so, it was also going to become a problem for internet service providers, which became a concern for them.
As a result of all of this, DCMA easily passed through the Congress in 1998, prohibiting any circumvention of security technologies meant to protect copyright. With clearly more benefit to the entertainment sector, the legislation made it illegal to produce or distribute any technology that could contribute to this bypassing. Criminal penalties were laid out in the Act, for companies to sue those who were not compliant, providing appropriate leverage for entertainment. The copyrighted work has since been effectively secured by DMCA and the Act has turned out to be very helpful for the entertainment industry.
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