Recent news in the copyright world is Yahoo’s leaving digital rights management (DRM) off Jessica Simpson’s new song and making the download of the song playable on most platforms (my first guess was that they’re doing it because the song is so terrible that this is the only way they’ll be able to get people to watch or listen to it). So, presumably, the song can now be copied onto CDs and whatnot.
The bit that really confuses me is that Yahoo has been a really big proponent at WIPO of extending the Broadcasting Treaty to webcasting and simulcasting. The Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech, one of the big WIPO watchdog organizations) went so far as to write them a letter asking them to please back down from their position as “the single most active company pushing the Webcasting treaty, and many of the substantive discussions about the treaty have focused on Yahoo’s desire for a new IPR right for webcasting” (see, for example, one of their presentations to WIPO). What gives? Why is Yahoo so supportive of DRM for webcasting on one hand, but suddenly appearing to be on the cutting-edge of “free” with the release of the Simpson song?
I may have my analysis mixed up - but if not, I think Yahoo may be trying to build a reputation as an organization that supports open access (they also have the “creative commons” option on their advanced search engine), while working in the background, and away from the public eye, on securing all economic rights to everything they put on their sites. Dirty.
Are they assuming the webcasting treaty will some day exist? It was recently pulled out of an optional appendix to the Broadcasting Treaty and put into a separate document which will run on a different, slower “track” from the Broadcasting bit. Nobody knows if it’ll actually work out. What’s Yahoo’s guess?
Clarifications and demystification of the bifurcations are most welcome.
-S.
July 22nd, 2006 at 2:23 pm
I make a practice of not listening to any jessica simpson songs, but I am tempted to buy this one just to bump up the #s. I don’t know if I really trust Yahoo and I don’t understand what is going on beyond corporate greed, but let’s see. Yahoo is totally dependent on the internet for its profits, so maybe anything that gives them more traffic is good for Yahoo. I mean, as long as they don’t own the content. they’re not like a record company or a hardware maker. If the thing is of really crappy quality, people will still want to buy the record. mp3’s sound ok but not terrific at 128kb, which is what you usually get as a default b/c it’s small in size. Does that help?
Also, let us consider that streaming and broadcasting are different from selling music tracks… there were lots of battles over internet radio a few years ago. People disagree whether it should be treated just like radio or not, but I am very ignorant on details. They put all those little indie and college web radio stations out of business. Yahoo owns some kind of streaming thing that you can use like a personalized radio. Thanks to the record companies worries, the restrictions on those things are really weird. It lets you skip songs, but you can’t go backwards in a playlist, or repeat a song, or choose a particular song by a certain artist, or play the same artist twice, stuff like that. Find it and play with it.