Interview: Warner Music boss Edgar Bronfman

Fri Dec 1, 2006 9:50pm PST

By Adam Reuters

SECOND LIFE, Dec 1 (Reuters) - Warner Music Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman sat down in Second Life on Friday for a broad-ranging interview about CopyBot, the balancing act between the content industry’s copyrights and the creativity of its customers, and the time he caught his own kids illegally downloading songs.

The following is an edited transcript:

Adam Reuters: How has the music industry, from production to marketing to distribution, changed in the MySpace, YouTube era we find ourselves in?

Edgar Bronfman: It really is all about the sense of community. There used to be a sense of community if you remember a really great record store where you could go through all the albums and talk about your records. Now you can have that sort of sharing in a virtual community or on an Internet community, and therefore do it much more broadly.

It not only gives access to far more artists on something like MySpace but so many more people can interact with each other and with artists, and so the sense of community grows. Music is very much about community and a sense of shared passion.

AP: So how does the business model work? Your artist is in the middle, you’ve got conversations on music, streaming music on MySpace, uploading on YouTube.

EB: The business models will vary with the platform. What we’re trying to do as a music company is first to enable as many uses of the content as possible to allow others to innovate. We’ll figure out what the business model is as certain things have traction and other things don’t.

We’re trying to enable as much progress as quickly as possible rather than wait to see a business model develop.

AP: Does that mean becoming a little more permissive? For example, on Second Life you can create a house and stream music, just like you’d play it in your real-life living room. But there might be some copyright issues there. Do you think the industry as a whole needs to loosen up a bit to let the new areas emerge?

EB: I think there needs to be flexibility on the part of content owners, and respect for the communities that are developing. We also feel that there needs to be some recognition that intellectual property is real property. We need a find a middle ground that allows both communities, the owners and the users, to be happy.

AP: The music industry’s approach to illicit uploading and downloading has been to take a carrot and stick approach, offering legal alternatives like iTunes on one hand and filing lawsuits against uploaders on the other. We’re a couple years into this now, you’ve paid a PR price for some of these lawsuits. Now that we’re maybe in the middle era of the copyright issue, has the equation changed at all?

EB: The approach isn’t different, but the effect is. There are now many more carrots than sticks. We’ve got all kinds of carrots. Running a red light is wrong, stealing a CD out of the store is wrong, stealing music is wrong, and that’s not going to change. What we’ve tried to do is make a distinction, not go after the casual jaywalker, but the car thief.

We don’t want to go after people who are casually downloading a few songs, but people who are massively uploading tracks. Having said that, it’s not the centerpiece of our strategy.

AP: Taking a question from the audience, McLuhan Ennis asks: “Can you give a description of the what you describe as middle ground? Say, within the context of a mash-up, what would be an example of fair use?”

EB: It’s our hope we can find a way to generally license much or all of our content for users to adapt in any way they see fit. We want people to use their creativity to take our content and do what they think is an interesting thing.

AP: So, you have seven children, have you ever caught any of them using Gnutella or Limewire or the P2P network?

EB: I have. I explained to them what I believe is right, that the principle involved is that stealing music is stealing music. Frankly, right is right and wrong is wrong, particularly when a parent is talking to a child, a bright line around moral responsibility is very important. I can assure you they no longer do that.

AP: What were the consequences?

EB: I think I’ll keep that within the family. (Laughter)

AP: We have a question from Prokofy Neva: How do you view the recent CopyBot scare, and how would you address this issue if you owned Second Life?

EB: I’m not sure I’d address it differently than I address our own issues. Intellectual property is intellectual property, whether it’s in the form of an avatar or a song or any such thing. These are the creations of someone’s mind, and it’s property as real as real estate. It needs to be protected on the one but made available as broadly as is reasonable on the other.

That balance will always be difficult to strike, and people will always disagree about the appropriate balance. But as long as the argument is what’s the balance, rather than whether we should make it available, we can make more people more people happy than unhappy.

AP: Part B to that question from Prokofy, and I should say you are also part of a venture capital fund, is whether you would ever consider buying Linden Lab.

EB: I don’t know that we would or wouldn’t, but what I can say is I really admire Second Life, it’s building something really extraordinary and terrific. I wish Phil Rosedale and the entire team really great things. I think it’s great to see people take the potential of new technologies and create a community that will be a great benefit to its users whoever owns it, and wherever it goes.

AP: So will we see Warner Music in Second Life anytime soon?

EB: I sure hope so. We already had an artist Regina Spector and we introducer her album in a virtual loft, I hope we can do more of those things, and that the Second Life community will tell us what it is they think we should be doing to enhance our experience.

AP: Do you see user-generated content as something significant, rather than a flash in the pan?

EB: I do. Virtual communities let us have millions of people connecting. To tap that creativity is fantastic, and we’ll see it more and more.