EFF Lawyer Argues For Compulsory Music Licenses

An anonymous reader submits "Fred von Lohmann, lead intellectual property lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote an op-ed in the Daily Princetonian urging compulsory licensing of copyrighted music. The system would allow internet users to copy music freely and legally, in exchange for a flat monthly fee to be shared by artists and record labels. He says schools like Princeton might be a good place to test the approach."

Comments

Cut out the middleman

[Diabolical]

Why not cutting out the middleman. The RIAA and their foreign counterparts are there because in the past there was no easy way to distribute recordings without having to travel around the world to sell your songs and keeping track of your royalties. With the internet that part is easily solved.

Besides, recording in itself is made possible for everyone due to computer technologies. You don't have to let your songs pressed at a plant anymore. Simply distribute by means of mp3 or any other audio format which you like. This way the artist finally gets payed a decent amount of royalties without some overgrown organisation eating it all.

If it is possible to test this thing out with decent artists (or popular artists, whichever comes first) it could be considered a correct test and results would actually mean something.

But i'm afraid the record companies won't be jumping up and down with joy to actually test this.... ;-)

And as far as marketing is considered, the internet has shown to be a remarkably good medium to spread things that are considered good in both the quality and ideology sense of the word.

Re:It cant be free forever but

[HanzoSan]

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=inte rnetNews&storyID=2539761

Ice T sells his music directly to users on Kazaa. IF Eminem did this Eminem would make plenty of money but nooo, Eminem would rather bitch and moan about how Kazaa is robbing him.

Its his own lazy ass thats robbing him, maybe if he release a new CD on kazaa for $5, he'd make a fortune.

Isn't the CCLI something like this?

[Ridgelift]

Isn't the Christian Copyright Licensing International something like this already? Churches pay an annual fee so that they can freely print and perform worship songs. Rather than reinvent the wheel, why not look to something that's already in place?

Take a dose of reality.

[Andy Dodd]

Just because Princeton has higher tuition rates doesn't mean that the majority of students don't receive financial aid. If anything, MORE students receive it rather than at a cheaper school because it's needed more.

FYI, Princeton made headlines in NJ in the past year or two for a plan to drastically increase financial aid (which is already pretty good to begin with - A family friend of mine is going to Princeton on a pretty good package.), in order to directly compete with cheaper schools.

Note: You still have to be Really Damn Smart to get in. But Princeton, along with all of the other Ivies, are need-blind. (The exception is Brown - Unless things have changed they are the only non need-blind Ivy - Now THAT is a rich kids' school!)

His flat fee is just one way to implement C.L.'s

[geekotourist]

I think some are misreading his essay as saying the "obvious right answer" = the ISP flat fee. Actually his "right answer" = compulsory licenses, with flat fees as one possible way to do this.

To quickly summarize his article: 1. The RIAA's antiP2P fight hurts many and helps no one, 2. Artists need to be paid, 3. Compulsory licensing pays artists, 4. One method of CL could be an ISP flat fee, 5. Many other CL methods exist (examples given) and could be used...

Re:Mod parent up!

[cpt kangarooski]

FYI, RIAA was founded in 1952. Radio became popular in the 20's and 30's. Though a lot of radio at that time was not music. It was used for shows, the way that TV is now. In fact a fair number of TV shows started out as radio programs.

Napster tried to argue for this two years ago

[nmordo]

For the record, this idea was floated by Hank Barry, CEO of Napster at the time during a senate hearing. Here's an article about it.

Pipe dream?! It's already happening in radio/tv!

[AdamD1]

I find it odd that everyone refers to this as a "pipe dream" when it's precisely the way all broadcast media works today. It's called performance rights. I think it's exactly what should be used in light of the weird product versus performance entity that online P2P sharing represents.

If you hear a song on TV, radio, in a restaurant, on a jukebox: artists do indeed get paid for you hearing the music. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, SOCAN, and numerous other organizations around the world exist precisely to monitor how much of whose music is heard by whom, how often, in what capacity, etc. The Internet - and in particular P2P sharing - could be monitored in this exact way. In fact Napster would have been the easiest of the P2P tools to perform this kind of tracking, and for producing exactly the "P2P Charts" this guy was talking about.

Additionally: the logging for radio play (including XM / Sirius) is now much more precise thanx to organizations like BDS (Broadcast Data Systems) which actually reads in the coding on all CD's ever played on any radio station so that even if I have only one tiny indie recording, and it gets played only one time on one tiny station: I get paid. It used to be much more arbitrary and artists didn't see a dime. All of that is much more tightly monitored now.

As it sits right now: part of your cable bill (or satellite, or XM Radio or whatever) already does go to numerous performing rights organizations, in a very coordinated way. I don't see why people think this is a pipe dream: it already exists! It's just one more method of logging for these organizations (who are, by the way, non-profit.)

Blanket licensing is what should have been used in the first place. Instead: labels and the RIAA see the files as physical goods, instead of the potentially transient files they usually are in the hands of most consumers.

$0.02

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