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Kazaa, Verizon Propose Compulsory Music Licensing
akb writes "USA Today is reporting on an interesting new alliance between Kazaa, the dominant file sharing network, and Verizon, a company with revenues of $67 billion. The two companies are floating a proposal to ISPs and the computer and manufacturing industries to lobby to force the music industry to license their music. Royalties would be payed to artists directly, thus circumventing the stranglehold the RIAA has on the music industry."
The business plan amounts to $2B in revenue:
Recording Industry Association of America president Hilary Rosen calls the proposal "the most disingenuous thing I've ever heard. It's ridiculous."
The logical statement:
"It would be like me opening a video store, charging 10 times what others were charging and only offering videos in the Beta format," Guerinot says. "In any business, when you have billions of downloads occurring, you don't say we're going to ignore that market and try to create something else. You serve your customers."
Why the hell is Hillary Rosen in charge anyway? Attempting to change an industry that already exists and is going strong into what you want it to be is stupid. This is a great turnabout though, I'm glad to see some heavy hitters start going against the RIAA. I'd gladly pay $1/mo to download music legit. Assuming the majority of that $1 went to the musicians. I'm paying for the network from my own bandwidth and hard drive space, and I'm glad that Guerinot seems to understand that.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
My first thought: this is far to sane to actually take place. Then I read:
Sooo, let me get this straight: it is riciculous to directly pay the artist who produce the music.
Well, this is very telling. I sincerly hope compulsory license comes to be... it seems about the only way to tame the RIAA beast. Maybe it will even save internet radio.
seriously, why must this always be handled via legislation? We live in a free market society right, if there is a viable business model here it will be found and worked out. It should be obvious to everyone that this genie is out of the bottle.
all this "solution" would do would be to result in a tax on internet use applied to everyone "who benefit(s) from the availability of this content." Essentially this is the same thing as putting a surcharge on blank CDs. Also since it's legislated it would be difficult to change when we discover the bugs.
thus circumventing the stranglehold the RIAA has on the music industry
No! I can not say anything nice about Verizon! I'll seize to be! Curses.. foiled.. gahh.... getting dark...
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Kazaa lobbyist Phil Corwin says a $1-a-month fee per user on Internet providers alone (it's unclear whether costs would be passed along to subscribers) would generate $2 billion yearly: "We're talking about a modest fee on all the parties who benefit from the availability of this content."
I don't like this idea one bit. It's the same principle that would end up letting a whole host of "fees" into the bill that we get from our ISPs at the end of the month.
It also reminds me of the college tuition bill. The tuition, and then the tens of fees tacked onto the bill, that end up summing at nearly $1000.
Don't let people nickel and dime us to death.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
While I find the RIAA practices despicable to say the least, I can't exactly bring myself to trust Verizon or Kazaa, especially the latter.
Im not sure of whether a case of the lesser evil is really going to change things in the music industry.
The RIAA doesn't want the music control being handled by someone else, for obvious reasons. At the same time, they afraid to go into the online market properly for the fear of competition, thus they think that by suing the living crap out of anything online, it will eventually go away.
But trusting Kazaa to provide a music service? The same guys that have done a deal with brilliant digital entertainment?
Why can't a group of artists, group together, make their own online service, and provide it a lower cost than the RIAA? By being legal, this will literally force the RIAA to react with an online service thats cheaper, and thats good for consumers.
But until the RIAA have competition from the artist's themselves (and popular ones), they will continue to fight in the courts. The Kazaa/Verizon idea is a bad idea from the getgo.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
Can someone explain to me how the Kazaa/Verizon deal would not eventually end up being RIAA with a different name? I'd wager that that the artist does not see the $1/month that gets charged, because a processing/admin/overhead fee would get applied against that $1/month, and each year (because of additional compliance costs, infrastructure costs, billing costs etc.) that fee would get just a bit bigger.
Sounds like a take-over bid to me.
Fast, cheap & reliable. Pick two.
Kazaa lobbyist Phil Corwin says a $1-a-month fee per user on Internet providers alone (it's unclear whether costs would be passed along to subscribers) would generate $2 billion yearly: "We're talking about a modest fee on all the parties who benefit from the availability of this content."
Uh, NO, you charge the people who are using the service. Why the hell should my grandmother, who has no idea what an MP3 is, pay this fee? Make it $1 per month per file-sharing user. Hell, you could set it up like adult-check, where every P2P app queries the same database before allowing you to login. You pay a buck a month to the database administrators and they distribute the funds where appropriate.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Um. Let's just remember who we're talking about here...Verizon isn't any better than the RIAA when it comes to corporate citizenship...I vaguely recall them suing 2600 for registering verizonsucks.com, and they refused to install DSL in my apartment when they found out one of my computers was running Linux.
I'm an ex-musician and, in case you con't guess, I HATE the parasite, dog-scum, suckin' xxAAs with a passion.
Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen can find a nice place in Hell and burn there in agony for all eternity like the creativity deprived fuck-wited Luddites they are.
God. Just thinking about 'em makes me reach for Piperazine.
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Legislation is what makes Intellectual Property exist in the first place. It makes sense that changing the legislation could solve the problems with Intellectual Property law enforcement.
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