Copyright in the Music Industry

Master's Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Law - Comparative Legal Systems, Comparative Law, grade: 53(60), Université Paul Cézanne Aix - Marseille III, course: European Master in Law and Economics, language: English, abstract: Copyright protection in the media and especially in the music industry is a widely discussed topic since several years. In fact new technologies based on Internet changed the situation for the classic business model of the music labels dramatically. CDs become more and more superfluous with the advent of digital media and thus the traditional business model producing and selling them. The music industry of course makes these new technologies responsible for their decline in sales while others argue that the new technologies moreover offer great opportunities for the industry to expand their markets. However I will not join the discussion whether online file sharing is responsible for the decline in record sales2. I rather will show that the new technologies being introduced offer great chances for new ways of producing and distribution of music, no matter the impact it has on the old and outdated business models by selling CDs. In my thesis I try to give some insights into the current dilemma, discuss the most appealing proposals advanced by legal and economic scholars and, finally, provide my own suggestions without neglecting the current political circumstances. Therefore I will give some background information of what is actually going on right now in the markets for music in the second chapter. Then I will shed some light on the basic foundations of copyright, its economic impacts and of course its inefficiencies according the music business. After having analyzed the economic consequences of current copyright laws I will introduce and comment on some recent suggestions to ameliorate the inefficiencies. This will be proposals from single changes of particular parts of copyright to radical abandonment of copyright law at all. In order to ameliorate the dilemma given I will give some suggestions for the short respectively the long run. Unlike the existing literature I will therefore consider current copyright policies in major markets which I will shortly introduce. Furthermore I will argue that copyright might be seen differently in different markets. These are the end-consumer market, the intra-business and the extra-business market as being introduced in the following.