Twilight for the Days of Roses and Royalties

In Anton Chekhov’s famous 1904 play, “The Cherry Orchard,” the sound of trees being chopped down signals the impending demise of the Russian czarist aristocracy. Today, the chopping sound comes from Hollywood, where the rich timbers of music- and picture-content providers are being axed in a different way -- by Internet-based hackers, millions of them, using the file-swapping technology pioneered by the now- defunct Napster.com.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson ruled that the Internet’s most popular music-sharing services, Grokster and Morpheus, were not liable for copyright violations committed by their free-tune-grabbing users.

As The Times reported, the ruling was “a major setback” for the entertainment industry. “It’s not sharing; it’s stealing,” grumped Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

To be sure, the MPAA and the Recording Industry Assn. of America are hardly going to give up. They will appeal the judge’s decision and will no doubt also pursue their claims in legislatures from Sacramento to the District of Columbia.

But Grokster and Morpheus will be hard to litigate or legislate out of existence; they are headquartered, respectively, in the Caribbean island of Nevis and the Pacific island of Vanuatu.

According to Greg Piccionelli, an intellectual property lawyer in Los Angeles, it’s too late for content providers because the content-distributing technology is out of the bag. “This decision is just another step because, in the long run, the price of most digital content -- including compact discs and DVDs -- is going to go down to zero.”

Zero, of course, is a lot less than last year’s $13 billion in CD sales. But sales are sliding fast, as file-sharing operations proliferate and broadband capacity continues to increase; about a third of Americans already have access to the sort of “fat pipes” that facilitate the transfer of huge audio files or even huger video files.

What does it all mean? It means that the money-making model of the last century, in which music companies issued a recording and then sold millions of copies, reaping huge profits on hits, is about to become as dead as the czarist regime in Russia after the Bolsheviks took over.

But just as the Romanovs left behind a fascinating legacy of extravagance, so too will the recording royalty. Those billions of easy dollars paid for lots of wretched excess, from the huge offices of executives to the entourages of divas to the crime sprees of rappers.

So what happens when the billions dry up, as neo-Napster technologies drain away wealth? Such sudden droughts have happened in the past; various revolutions have left aristocrats high and dry, no longer able to live lives of extravagance. In the United States, those who once made a killing on industries such as whaling, men’s hats and telegrams have had to find new ways to earn a living.

Of course, people will still want to hear music. So what new money-making model might emerge?

Piccionelli, the tech-minded lawyer, predicts that the music business will survive by pairing “Napsterizable” content with “non-Napsterizable” offerings. Companies might give away their music, for example -- which is going to be pirated anyway -- in the hopes that that increased visibility will generate increased live-performance ticket sales. Which is another way of saying that music artists will have to make money the old-fashioned way -- earning by performing, night after night, tour after tour. That’s the way it was through most of history; creative types from Mozart to Jenny Lind did OK.

Today’s performers, used to reigning in their Xanadus and Neverlands, can lament the ongoing hacking of their copyrighted fortunes, but it won’t do them much good to rage against the machines. The days of wine, roses and royalties are coming to an end.