the RED market
Attached is a great blog written by tycohen, “the red menace” it’s referencing an article written last year “Russia bans DVD, CD street sales“
Most of us were already aware that there is a big problem of music piracy in countries like China, Taiwan, India and generally in Southeast Asia. I have had it explained to me that this is because the concept of intellectual ownership of something is pretty much unheard of in those countries to they don’t even know what piracy or plagiarism is much less try to live up to such a standard.
Ok, well that’s all well and good but they seem to understand what the concept of stealing is because the open market approach to selling pirated music is a huge problem over there. I know, in this blog, we often seem to defend P2P file sharing and other methods used by the music industry that have been used for piracy. But if you think we advocate piracy of intellectual property of musicians, that is incorrect. We applaud methods being developed that accommodate the new music distribution channels of this century while finding ways to capture that revenue that artists need to survive and go on to make more good music for us.
Our position is that turning the machinery of the music industry against the fans of that music is counter productive and only drives fans further away. But this business of open market sales of pirated music is something that would never even been considered in a western nation. The reason compromise approaches to digital distribution works for western nations is because we DO understand intellectual property but we also understand that it is the job of the music industry to find ways to get that material to the fans that is in step with modern technology and still pays the artists what they deserve.
So we applaud Russia for shutting down the black market on pirated music. Maybe that will cause the population of Russian music lovers to learn about ways they can get their music legally but still have easy access to the music they love. When they do learn that, they too will become part of this century and they will deserve their seat in the modern economies that are beginning to form up. And we will welcome them to those markets as legitimate consumers, not thieves.
http://thedeathofthemusicindustry.wordpress.com/2007/04/28/the-red-menace/
