Thou Shalt Not Steal- Digital Media Consumption Manifesto

This was just forwarded to me.  The Digital Media Consumption Manifesto breaks down some very realistic guidelines for remaining lawful with digital media.  I personally find their pricing guidelines a bit interesting but nevertheless this is an noble effort.  Sign the manifesto if you can commit.

Piracy counts for 25% of the World's Internet Traffic

Imagine if 1/4 of all of the food sold in the grocery store were stolen.  Imagine 1/4 of all of the cars driven on the streets as having been stolen off of a dealership lot.  Impossible!  There is no way our society would allow such arrogant defiance of the law.  Well, a report issued yesterday by Envisional, a firm hired by NBC Universal found that nearly 1/4 of all internet traffic is "digital theft."  Of all of the illegal traffic, BitTorrent accounts for about 50%, Cyberlockers account for a scant 5.1 percent, illegal streaming video sites grab 1.4% and the rest from P2P.

So what does this mean for music?  According to Digital Music News, music accounts for just 3% of the media pirated on BitTorrent while hollywood grabs a solid 35%. Hopefully our friends out west will be able to make some noise to slow this trend better than the music industry has... Otherwise we might just all be doomed.

emusic.com - Ch Ch Ch Changes

Attention digital music consumers! Emusic is now carrying the Universal Music Group catalog. Awesome, right? Well Sort of...

The addition of UMG brings brands such as Island Def Jam, Geffen, Interscope, Verve, Decca, Deutche Grammophon, and Motown to the table allowing emusic subscribers to purchase these with their monthly credits. In addition to bringing on this great content, it also brings on the growing pains of dealing with the largest music company in the World. Growing pains like increased pricing, changes to the entire infrastructure, and fleeing independent cornerstone labels such as Beggars Group, Domino, and Merger.

The addition of UMG has forced emusic to run from their previous points model and adopt hard pricing for Top Line, Mid Line, and Budget items. The overall affect this will have on the end-user amounts basically to the fact that their budget items will be remotely the same value as they were prior to UMG, and all others will up the ante. Less perceived value is the end result. Because of this there has been a mass exodus of subscribers over the past few weeks. I for one am going to hang on for now and see how much it changes my experience. I certainly hope at the end of the day, turning your back on your core consumer/business model in search of an iTunes-like business model doesnt come back to bite emusic in the foot. I really love(d) the old emusic.

ps: I realize that Bowie is a Columbia (Sony) Artist- emusic added some of Sony's catalog last year bringing about pricing changes then...