I can certainly start. I was thinking about that myself in my hotel room yesterday.
When I started at CMRRA many, many years ago—I've been there for 27 years—we were in the CD marketplace at that point. When folks released these products in the marketplace without licences, without having put in songs on those products and they hadn't obtained the necessary licences or paid royalties, I had remedies at the time. I could call the pressing company, the distributor, the retailer, and effectively tell those folks that they were pressing or manufacturing infringing goods and it's not in anybody's interest. Those individuals, those companies, would be equally as liable for copyright infringement as the person marketing the product.
That got us very quick results. The pressers would say, “That's it, I'm not pressing; I need to see copies of your licences before I continue to press.” Or, the distributor or the retailer would say they were pulling it off the shelf. We got very quick results because there were remedies. There were remedies across the distribution channels.
Those remedies today in the digital age don't exist. The principles of copyright in terms of the bundle of rights haven't necessarily changed, but it's much harder to apply it now because of the exemptions—the hosting exemption, for instance. When companies take the position that they have no liability and it's not their problem, it becomes very hard to get to the source of the problem.
The other comment I could make, without taking too much time, is that as we've gone through this transition, the industry, for a moment in time I think, was trying to focus on the consumer as the bad guy in accessing this content that was infringing. There was a sense from everyone that they needed to put some protections in place to make sure that as a consumer...you know, everybody is not a thief because they've downloaded a song from the Internet for free or what have you.
Where we're now going, and these are the changes that we've seen in the EU recently and in other parts of the world, and this is what we're advocating for as well, is that we need a way to stop the tap from reaching the consumer in the first place. We need those folks who have the control over the content to co-operate with us, and to have the tools so that there's no ramification for them if they do turn off the tap.