Shake Your Money Maker

Despite the fact that Harpy and Iggy seem to be doing the election dance – in at least one instance literally - and as a result all bills will die, yet again; and while I may be late – although I would like to think fashionably late – to rant (as all bloggers, but particularly legal bloggers, do) about what is right and wrong with the proposed copyright amendment legislation, I have been saving my energies. But, now that we are back to school…

I am not going to go into the details of what Bill C-32 the Copyright Modernization Act is all about. Others have done so better than I would: Michael Geist’s comments are as usual insightful and thorough, and the larger Bay Street firms have had their pundits pontificate.

While they may disagree as to whether this has been suitably drafted to take into account fair dealings, they do agree that Bill C-32 puts more teeth into a copyright holder's ability to pursue violators – higher fines and the addition of an infringement for circumventing DRM/TPM.

What I find more interesting, however, is how the reality of “new technologies” and social media’s impact on “traditional” business models that rely upon copyright protection are finally being exploited more effectively by the “old school”.

In September 2, 2010 NYT’s Technology Section, Claire Cain Miller in an article entitled “YouTube Ads Turn Videos Into Revenue” wrote:

"…TomR35, uploaded a clip from the AMC series “Mad Men”…. In the past, Lions Gate, which owns the rights to the “Mad Men” clip, might have requested that TomR35’s version be taken down. But it has decided to leave clips like this up, and in return, YouTube runs ads with the video and splits the revenue with Lions Gate.
Remarkably, more than one-third of the two billion views of YouTube videos with ads each week are like TomR35’s “Mad Men” clip — uploaded without the copyright owner’s mission but left up by the owner’s choice..." (emphasis added.)

The article goes on to note that in the beginning copyright holders spent a significant amount of time and money getting their material taken down. Now they are reaching agreements with YouTube (aka Google) to get recompense from the inevitable misappropriation of their copyrighted materials that current technology makes possible. Cain Miller notes that this market will likely grow exponentially with new entrants and the interweaving of TV, Internet and mobile devices.

And isn’t this is really what copyright is all about: enabling the owner of a copyright to exploit the copyrighted material for profit? If you can’t beat them, join them.