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No, after a long day at work I'm not coming up with a better headline than The Register:

Big labels are f*cked, and DRM is dead - Peter Jenner

This is a wonderful interview with Peter Jenner, ex-manager of Pink Floyd and The Clash, now secretary general of the International Music Manager's Forum. Live, he's a very enticing speaker, and he doesn't hold back in this interview either. Do not read on if you object to explicit language:

You said that at In The City, the big label executives have lost 
their faith in DRM - they don't believe in it any more.

They don't. Not anymore.


And that was done by Sony BMG - what the fuck was that [rootkit
DRM] about? The other was iTunes - and they've seen how kids don't
like it.  The unitary payment doesn't suit the technology, it
doesn't suit how they're actually using downloads - which is to
explore and move around.  You don't want to pay a dollar for each
track when you want to explore music.

Ranting about the music industry majors can be a bit gratuitous, considering that everyone with an eyeball or two of their own can see the sorry state they're in. But Peter Jenner actually knows his stuff. Yes, it's a rant, but it's pretty well-founded. Whether it's about blanket licensing, the broken business model of major labels, or the sharing of profits -- Jenner gives us the works:

What's important is what's your bottom line, for Christ's sake.


The blanket licensing thing is obviously going to slash your unit
margin. The record companies have increased their margin on
downloads, because the costs have been ripped out. So they've cut
the artists royalties and raised their margin.


But because they've replaced an album with a single they've helped
destroy the retail industry, they're now in a position where
they're completely fucked.


No one's got any sympathy or love for them, because they've
systematically been shoring up their figures in the short run -
squeezing money into Universal to make up for their catastrophies;
Warner Brothers have been coping with huge debt; EMI have been
desperately trying to hold their stock price up so somebody would
buy them; BMG has been wondering how the fuck they're going to pay
somebody back money for whatever it was, so they don't go public -
and Sony are in a terminal mess.


So all of them have been draining profit. It's "get the money in,
boys, get the money in. "


So they've raped them. They've raped their whole business model,
and no one's got the time or energy to think about their
business.

via drm.info

A judge in Santander, Pais Vasco Cantabria, Spain, has ruled that a man who had been sharing music files on the Internet has not commited a crime, as El Mundo reports (in Spanish). Instead, his activities were found to be protected by the Spanish right to make private copies.

The sentence says that considering filesharing a crime would mean "the criminalisation of socially accepted and widespread behaviour", and that what he has done "does not merit penal sanctions".

 His accusers had demanded that for his abominable deeds, he be sentenced to two years in prison, a fine of EUR 7.200 and EUR 18.361in damages. (I wonder where the last figure came from. Did they count the songs on his hard drive and price each at iTunes' 99 ct? Had they asked the BSA to compile the figures, they would have been even higher.)

Let's see how the industry reacts, and how well the sentence holds up. The article implies that he was sued under laws that prohibit illicit copying for profit. This would mean that in effect the charges were dismissed not because they were ludicrous, but because they were simply not applicable.

It is good to see, in any case, that the judge grasped the fine distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit filesharing. The part about this being socially accepted conduct is of course the cherry on top of the pie.

via netzpolitik.org 

UPDATE: The Register also has the story. It says that the Spanish authorities are taking the logical next step: Since putting a man in prison over filesharing has been ruled an impractical and inacceptable criminalisation of  an accepted social practice, they're planning to criminalise the practice on a greater scale:

Justice Minister Juan Fernando Lopéz Aguilar says Spain is 
drafting a new law to abolish the existing right to private copies 
of material.