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The mobster Meyer Lansky supposedly said once: “We’re bigger than General Motors.” Perhaps that parallel might come to mind for the clueless record industry, which has been so late to embrace the concept of file sharing. Here’s an item from SFGate.com via The Shifted Librarian:

“Free peer-to-peer music file-sharing has become larger than the multibillion dollar recording industry with a growth trend that has become ‘fundamentally unstoppable,’ a media analyst told a state Senate committee exploring Internet piracy on Thursday.

The free downloading habit among 61 million Americans and millions more worldwide is “cemented,” with only 9 percent of U.S. downloaders believing they are doing anything wrong, said Eric Garland, founder of Beverly Hills-based Big Champagne, which analyzes Internet trends.

“We see only one trend,” said Garland. “More people are downloading more copyrighted material.”

Instead of fighting the trend, which he called a losing battle, Garland said the entertainment industry should embrace digital distribution rather than file lawsuits that only make more people aware of free downloads.

But industry representatives largely rejected the advice, instead promoting legal challenges and education, including a new anti-file-sharing movie clip that will appear soon in movie theaters….

“The record business, in the digital revolution, has been a day late and a dollar short,” said Kazaa lobbyist Phil Corwin.

The TeleRead take: A lesson for book publishers–even if the analyst could be engaging in hyperbole? In cases where fair use didn’t apply, TeleRead could address the sharing issue by providing for a nonintrusive, privacy-protected tracking system to allow publishers to be paid out of a National Digital Library Fund in the case of covered book and directly from consumers in the case of others. The more pass-alongs, the bigger the payment. So the interests of publishers and readers would be closer together.

 
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