JULY 18, 2010 • Copyswede, the umbrella organization that administers fees for copyright groups in Sweden, is looking for a change to adjust in consumer online trends.  Currently the sale of Blank CD and DVD media nets artists income to help offset expected losses from piracy. But the sale of blank media in the country is falling off. In 2007, artists received 200 million kronor ($27 million). In 2009 that income dropped to 113 million kronor ($15.2 million). To make up the difference, Copyswede is proposing the fees be extended to devices such as hard drives, USB Flash drives, and mobile phones.

Impact: Now that the price of other storage methods is becoming competitive with disc-based memory we are likely to see a major change in the way consumers store and access digital entertainment. Disc-based medium such as CDs and DVDs have been successful almost solely because they are a cheap form of digital storage.  However, as a practical matter, disc media is less than ideal. They damage easily and have slow access times. Since it was introduced in the 1980s, it has been known that flash-based memory was far superior to disc-based memory. Flash memory is both fast and durable. The problem was that storage on flash memory was expensive. The price of storage on both flash memory devices and hard drives has come down rapidly and it is clear consumers are migrating to these options.  Unfortunately the downside is that the ease of memory storage and transfer could make piracy substantially more prevalent.