Derek Slater was lucky enough to receive a copy of Andersons book the “The Long Tail“. In his review he mentiones one statement:
“Hollywood economics is not the same as Web video economics, and Madonna’s financial expectations are not the same as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s. But when Congress extends copyright terms for anothe decade at the request of the Disney lobby, they’re playing just to the top of the curve. What’s good for Disney is not necessarily what’s good for America. Likewise for legislation restricting technologies that allow digital file copying or video transmissions. The problem is that the Long Tail doesn’t have a lobby, so all too often only the Short Head is heard.”
I am happy to read this. I would continue this line of thought: What’s good for America is not necessarily good for other big cultural entities (like for example the French, see their effort on “Cultural Exception“), and what is good for the French is not necessarily good for small languages and cultures, like Hungarian.
Different country sizes, different number of native speakers, GDP per capita, different scope of cultural markets, different systems of cultural production and distribution.
To what extent does the uniform global IP legislation leave space for local specifities? Can they, shold they be regulated in a single policy space? I hope to have answers in a few months.
> so all too often only the Short Head is heard
It’s actually quite tall. I prefer to think of it as the “big head”.
bodo — July 12, 2006 @ 12:48 pmwell, i guess it depends on which context you are talking about. in Hungary last year they sold 1 170 498 CDs from local artists and 2 750 034 from international artists. and that is more or less the whole market. you would not call that “big” at all. (see all statistics at http://www.mahasz.hu/m/hu/2005sales.php). In Hungary a record can go gold with only 10.000 sales (local artist, 20.000 for platinum) or 5.000 if you are international (10.000 for platinum). In the USA it is 500.000 for gold and a million for platnium.
Economies of scale of course set a lower limit under which it is not economic to put a record on the market. I do not have the exact numbers, but that must be very close to a few thousands in hungary.
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