The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that they will not overturn a ruling in a lower court that asserted downloads of songs do not equate to public performances of the songs. ASCAP, the organization that represents the vast majority of songwriters in the country, and who licenses songs on their behalf, had taken their case to the highest court in the United States, hoping to get a different outcome than what they received in a New York appeals court. ASCAP’s claim is that millions of dollars in revenue for them and their clients are now in jeopardy as a result of the rulings.
The real question is, “What does this mean for the music industry, and for music consumers?” If the Federal Government’s position is that music downloads do not meet the legal requirements for “public performance” does that drastically change the game for record industry executives and artists? One effect could be lower royalty and licensing fees for content providers like Rhapsody, Spotify or Pandora. If their fees to ASCAP are reduced, will that then trickle on down to the consumer, allowing for memberships and track purchases to be cheaper as well?
While some of the answers to the questions posed may not have answers just yet, it seems readily apparent that the shift in paradigms that the Internet is going to provide to the music industry is not one that is lost on the government, or the courts. It would seem that now everyone is going to have to come to grips with the fact that things have changed, and that the old business model that record labels were using may need to be either severely modified or thrown out completely.
Classifying Internet downloads as not being public performances comes down to an issue of whether or not the music is actually being played at the time of download. Since the content is only being given to the user, and not played, the court ruled that there is nothing to be able to link that file transfer to an actual performance of the song. This therefore separates a music download from a song being played on the radio.
The much bigger implication from this ruling, however, is in the prosecution of those who download music illegally. If the Supreme Court’s statement that “Music is neither recited, rendered, nor played when a recording (electronic or otherwise) is simply delivered to a potential listener” is applied to when a person downloads a track from a mirror site or any other service allowing for peer-to-peer sharing, then one could perhaps extrapolate that labels will now have to prove that those tracks were downloaded illegally and listened to in a setting that would fall under the definition of a public performance.
It remains to be seen whether the court’s ruling will have a massive impact on the industry, or if things will continue to stay in the status quo for now. Over the past few months though, with the advent of new products like cloud storage and internet streaming services like Spotify hitting the markets with a splash, the clock seems to be ticking on the old way of doing business for the record industry. Technology and innovation will likely end up forcing a streamlining and shifting of focus onto delivering content in a more cost friendly way to consumers and to those companies who give consumers access to the material. This decision from the Supreme Court seems like just one more step in that direction.
Note: This was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Join the Yahoo! Contributor Network to start publishing your own articles.