I don’t exactly think of The Huffington Post as a host of constructive dialogue, given their hosting of a recent attack on a revered civil rights leader and congressional stalwart. And I didn’t exactly welcome its founder’s recent testimony before Congress, in which she somewhat sanctimoniously dismissed a century’s worth of investigative, breaking-news and community journalism as, well, yesterday’s news.

But the site has hosted two recent posts I found welcome additions to the copyright debate, even if, not surprisingly, many HuffPost commenters did not. The first I’ll direct you to is by Michael Lynton, a tech industry veteran who now is Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment (full disclosure, a Copyright Alliance member). Here’s an excerpt:

Some of that damage has been caused by changing business models (the FTC just announced an inquiry into the impact of new media on the newspaper industry). But the primary culprit is piracy. The Internet has brought people with no regard for the intellectual property of others together with a technology that allows them to easily steal that property and sell or give it away to everyone, with little fear of being caught or prosecuted.

Lynton notes that he is no Luddite, having run a dot-com and given he is pushing Sony Pictures Entertainment media across multiple digital platforms. But he “cannot subscribe to the views of those online critics who insist that I “just don’t get it,” and claim the world has so fundamentally changed because of the web that conventional practices concerning property rights no longer apply,” and argues that it is in the best interest of society to have rules in place that respect property rights in the digital space.

Another interesting post was recently authored by Laura Tunberg, a respected consultant with whom I’ve had the pleasure of sharing a speaker’s dais. Tunberg, a media industry veteran who knows firsthand the admirable armies of people who are behind creative works, argues that piracy is now perceived as hip and cool, at the expense of American workers:

We should start making a better effort at making sure people understand that this is about jobs and the economy. The bulk of the movie and music industry jobs are good solid middle class jobs.

The impact on middle class workers, present and future, gets lost in a sea of rhetoric. The issue has become polarized and the good guys look bad and the bad guys look cool.

Tunberg argues that despite the new business models being deployed by creative industries, they need to do more to meet demand, and recognize the power of new technologies. She says the recent prison sentences handed down to the Pirate Bay founders is welcome in sending a signal that piracy is not only wrong, it is illegal:

What’s the lesson here? It is important to protect creativity - and that just doesn’t mean actors and directors. It means struggling writers, make up artists, set designers and assistants. We need to actively pursue these bottom feeders that sell America’s creativity for their own benefit while simultaneously educating our young people and challenging them to come up with new business models to match today’s technology. That would be heroic.

Our children should understand the relationship between technology and entertainment-they have always been intertwined - (what industry first embraced technology, motion pictures, it is called the camera) and cannot live without each other.

Happy reading.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 8:40 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under blogging, copyright opponents, creators, economy, internet, p2p, piracy, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.