Copyright (was: alleged... behavior)

[Fenton Murray]

Well said, Israel! Your writing reads like a good book. May I have permission to copy and re-publish your prose?
Fenton
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Israel Stein 
  To: pianotech at ptg.org 
  Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2008 7:44 AM
  Subject: Copyright (was: alleged... behavior)


  I am changing the subject line in order to minimize inflammatory language and promote a civil discussion of this subject.

  At 04:33 AM 3/1/2008, Dean May wrote:


    As far as the premise that distributing information electronically for free detracts from sales and royalties, the whole Napster episode seems to demonstrate otherwise. At the height of all the music file sharing where people were getting music for free the sales of music went through the roof. While it is true that some utilized Napster to rip off the music companies and get all their music for free, many more simply used it to preview music before going out to purchase their own copies. The result was more $$$ in the pockets of the music industry. They only shot themselves in the foot by shutting Napster down. 

  That analysis is hardly applicable to the current problem of Pierce Piano Atlas. The recording industry was taking advantage of its ownership rights over a product that appealed to a wide worldwide audience counting in multiple millions of potential buyers, by keeping prices on CD's artificially high and restricting distribution by making the music available only in an album format - which forced buyers to pay for music they do not want in order to acquire music they want. Had the recording industry been smart enough to allow the sort of distribution model represented by i-Tunes, Napster and all that other stuff would have never gotten started - or never would have caught on in a big way. While the popular recording industry suffered a reduced profit margin as a result of file-sharing, some specialty labels with small distribution - such as classical - were forced to shut down because the reduced sales made the business unsustainable. Others reduced operations. That's a major loss for some music lovers, for musicians, for orchestras and opera companies - and indirectly, for us... 

  A much more relevant example is what happened to the music publishing industry as a result of its product being copied through new technology. It is a shadow of its former self. Sheet music is only available commercially for the best-selling old chestnuts - because carrying inventories of slower-moving items is financially prohibitive (there are commercial space and tax implications), and whatever is available is exorbitantly priced in order to account for all the copying that inevitably happens from each purchased copy. So now, instead of going to a music store and being able to find a wide variety of reasonably priced sheet music often available as single works (rather than collections), for most music one must go to a specialized music library (typically at a university or conservatory - restricted access) and make copies at a high per page cost (because they don't allow the stuff to circulate - for obvious reasons).

  The potential clientele for Pierce is very limited. Piano technicians, piano dealers and salesmen - who else? In the US, that's a maximum of what - 15,000 potential buyers? 20,000 potential buyers? Over the lifetime of an edition priced at  $36 - that's $720,000. If you subtract the costs involved in production, promotion and distribution and divide that by lifetime of an edition, you end up with not a terribly large annual figure. Maybe it's worthwhile to keep the old edition going as long as people are willing to buy it. But would anyone do the research and reformatting that an updated edition would require? I don't know... In any case, I suspect that any significant drop is sales volume would make this business not worth maintaining - especially since the owner has other sources of income... And this is why, I suspect, he has not created an on-line version of his database - because that would likely kill an awful lot of further sales. I suppose an electronic edition on a protected disk (a la Ancott - who, by the way recently ceased operations) might be something he should explore... 

  Now, David Boyce in his message titled "dating pianos" states: "But the internet has brought, and continues to bring, a "paradigm shift". So much is available on there to be found out, on any topic, and increasingly people tend to go straight there and dig for themselves. 
  I'm pretty sure that the quantity of piano-related information available on the internet is going to increase, and it may not be all that long before someone puts a website together that has much of the factual information in the piano atlases."

  All very true. But this is a short-term, unsustainable phenomenon, in my opinion. Much of it has to do with the novelty of the on-line medium and the availability of  large amounts of "low-hanging fruit" - information that is readily available and can be transcribed, digitized and posted without too much effort. So lots of folks who think that they are providing a valuable public service post all this on websites - just for the fun of it. But, information that needs to be laboriously collected, verified and put into some sort of usable order is not quite so attractive to these information Robin Hoods. I suspect that as the novelty of the Internet wears off and further posting of information would require extensive research, this "information sharing" will slack off. Very few people have the resources to spend large amounts of time and sometime money to actually dig for information from disparate sources for no compensation. But unless some new business model emerges where researchers and compilers could somehow be compensated for their efforts that are posted on the Internet, the results will be much like the results of copying sheet music. At first there is the rush of "wow, look at all the good stuff we can get without paying for it" followed by "why can't we find anything we need any more? Everything on the Internet is at least twenty years old! Where's the current data?" Well, there is no longer any incentive for anyone to compile it... 

  So I suspect that it is in our interest to make sure that some sort of adequate financial incentive remains to compile and publish information about the ages of pianos from 1996 going forward. Because in the current information climate as David Boyce describes it - it just ain't gonna happen unless some independently wealthy guy with lots of time on his hands who just loves pianos undertakes the job. Or some foundation endows the work. 

  I repeat - there is no free lunch. You either pay now, or pay later. Sooner or later it will catch up with the Internet too... 

  Israel Stein 

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