Has Internet-based digital distribution benefited creators of works financially? A new paper published at First Monday looks at that question. The author, a Professor of Information Jurisprudence and Joint Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management at Bournemouth University (now that's a mouthful for a job title!) has a “maybe, maybe not” answer to that question but it's a helpful paper nonetheless, if only because it proposes some questions for new research.
The author, Martin Kretschmer, (left) is looking at the copyright regimes only in Germany and the U.K. Certainly the U.K. regime would be similar in some respects to Canada.
Here's how Kretschmer answer that first question:
The evidence here is contradictory. The often–made claim that copyright supports the creative basis of a society is empirically doubtful. There is a suspicion that copyright underpins vastly unequal rewards.
Creator and investor interests are not the same. Copyright suits investors (music publishers, labels) who are incentivised to market and distribute the works they exclusively control. Copyright also suits creators with a track record of hits who can extract favourable terms from investors.
Copyright does little for new and niche creators who often sign away their bargaining chips cheaply. In the absence of alternative compensation schemes, digitisation so far appears to have brought few financial benefits from disintermediated distribution.
Royalties from performing rights administered by collecting societies (which cannot be individually renegotiated to reflect economic bargaining power) appear to form an important and increasing part of artists’ earnings. They appear to encourage artists at the margins of full–time work.
The paper is titled “Artists' earnings and copyright: A review of British and German music industry data in the context of digital technologies” and here's the summary:
Digital technologies are often said (1) to enable a qualitatively new engagement with already existing cultural materials (for example through sampling and adaptation); and, (2) to offer a new disintermediated distribution channel to the creator. A review of secondary data on music artists’ earnings and eight in–depth interviews conducted in 2003–04 in Britain and Germany indicate that both ambitions have remained largely unfulfilled.