Patently wrong?

Today's Wired News has a comment by MIT professor Lester Thurow, in which he says some interesting things about Patents. For instance:

If they can't find some way to lock up music, music is going to end. Eventually, there will be no professional musicians, because there's no way to make money, and we're left with a world full of amateurs.

What I think what he meant to say was "If they can't find some way to lock up music there's no way for the big music corporations to make money". Lets face it, music and music professionals have survived for hundreds of years, if not longer. Its the role of mega-rich music superstar and the huge multi-media music industry that are recent phenomena that are endangered.

While it is true that the ability to make a direct and perfect digital fascimile of music and carry it around in your pocket, or broadcast it from your computer are recent. It is also true that the current rampant free copying of music without permission from the owner is at best unethical, at worst going to impact the ability of some people to make a lot of money for the time being.

However the Apple iTunes service flies in the face of this argument. Its well on its way to 50 million paid for music downloads and show no sign of stopping. And personally if the fee was more like 50 cents even I'd be using it - yes that's significantly less than the price of a CD, but a CD gives me a perfect digital copy, not a compressed one, and I have no rights or media restrictions attached with a CD purchase (so far). Whenever I'm tied into a particular format or playback system I'm unhappy. I don't mind using a proprietary format so long as I can migrate to a new one for free or at neglibile cost. So I think 50 cents per track is a reasonable discount for buying something that doesn't give me a perfect digital original, and doesn't let me easily play anywhere on any CD player.

That's why I like CDs - if I have the original CD I can always re-rip my music and move on and CD compatibility is likely to be around for decades to come, since lets face it, in my life time I'm looking at buying and storing music on long line of optical media from CD, to DVD to enhanced DVD to who-knows-what next. Probably in 10 years time there will be a completely physical medium free system in operation - of the download anything you want from the air kind (but it wont be ubiquitos), or at least a download onto your hard-drive based device at the store. But I believe that optical systems will survive.

Ultimately I think the music industry needs to go away and "we are not evil" companies like Magnatunes need to flourish. They are helping re-discover the music experience with musicians getting the music directly to the listener and perhaps purchaser and putting the element of trust back into life. Personally I feel good that a musician can trust their audience enough to show appreciation when its due and I applaud Magnatunes efforst in this direction.

When I was a kid trust and honesty were drummed into me from an early age, they go hand in hand. When a society has a population with those kinds of values it can make huge savings by not being forced to make huge investments in security, protection and enforcement systems. Furthermore it can reap huge benefits by not having an intimidated and fearful population that feels the need to medicate itself to blur the grim reality of life into a sickly three score years and ten me-centric joyride.