Content Delivery Networks

6Charging for IP‐Delivered Content

6.1 Lessons from the Music Industry

Around year 2000 we saw the music industry go through an identity crisis as it realized it could no longer control where its rights were exploited.

My view is that the legal notion of “fixation” – the embodiment of a copyright material in a discrete form that could be sold in a unitary and accountable way – was the only model that had a legal rights framework at the time.

Broadcast and Telecoms data traffic laws relating to video and audio distribution were immature, as discussed in Chapter 7, and audiences were not significant.

Cable, satellite, and digital terrestrial were all distinct autonomous systems that were only just starting to roll out IP. All were closed, conditional access‐based distribution networks. They were largely spectrum‐restricted in capacity so concurrency was a limiting factor to offering user‐specific services. The video on‐demand systems that were available were often NVOD (where you wait for a showing a starting within a few minutes) in order to minimize the network utilization by broadcasting those VOD shows to small audiences.

And WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) was a thing on mobile networks …

So around the turn of the millennium it looked like CD and DVD were a great fixation model, and everything felt fairly monopolized and regulated in their favor. The music licensing bodies felt that they didn’t have much to worry about.

Then the RIAA took Napster through the mill, counterproductively ...