Another weird statement by the music and film industry

In an article today (that I have not found online) in Dagens Industri, Hansson, Nilson and Carlström from the film industry is complaining on what Oscar Schwartz wrote the other day. The complaints are about Oscar living in what they call a theoretical world that has nothing to do with reality. They say they of course must have the same rights to get income as carpenters creating furniture etc.

What boggles my mind is that they claim that the number of services where people can buy digital film and music has exploded the last year. I have not seen any service where I can buy music and/or film, view in on any device I want, and make the few copies I need to make so that I can listen to the music both in the kitchen and office and of course on my mp3 player.

I have been in discussions at conferences for years when the music and film industry claim people are refusing to buy film digitally for $5. Yes, that number was thrown in my face at Voice on the Net spring 2007 in Stockholm. My response that time was easy; “Please give me the URL to that service where I can buy a film for $5, and I buy a film immediately”. Picked up my computer and asked to have it connected to the beamer. Of course the person making the claim could not name that service.

Back to the article in todays paper. The authors end the article by saying that they themselves of course have a responsibility to develop services, but they also say that broadband providers have to take part in the crime preventing work, and they congratulate the investigator Renfors for a good investigation.

As long as the music and video industry refuse to develop the services and products people are looking for, and as long as they make claims like they do in this article, they will loose. They show an arrogance that boggles my mind, and they also show they have absolutely no (or extremely limited) knowledge of how the Internet works.

Luckily the people that do make decisions in this country (Renfors not included) seems to have much more clue on these issues, and I think, as a movie lover, it is extremely sad the music and movie industry is not interested in participating in discussions related to their own future. Because, what they do, is eliminating themselves from discussions related to how the future society will look like, and how we given that future society are to participate.

It is up to Hansson, Nilson and Carlström themselves whether they want to participate. I am inviting them to discussions, but as long as they have the attitude they have basically had since the cassette driven Sony Walkman was invented, there will be no dance.

The Renberg investigation…well, it contains a good description on what the world look like, but, the conclusions are naive – at best. Many of the conclusions are similar to solutions we rejected in the investigation on child pornography. Simply because it had too much impact on competition and privacy. Part from of course the most important thing, we already have law enforcement agencies in Sweden.