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Cringely Proposes a Music Sharing Alternative
WEFUNK writes "The I, Cringely 'Pulpit' column at PBS presents an interesting idea for a new business model to take on the RIAA. He suggests that a publicly traded company could legally and profitably buy a single copy of each record which could then be freely copied and listened to by its shareholders under fair use. His 'Snapster' (Son of Napster) proposal is essentially a digital music co-op that would let shareholders/consumers bring copyrighted material into a quasi-public domain. While fair use and the public domain continue to be lost in our courts and congresses, maybe the capital markets will offer an alternative." While a neat idea, it's doubtful that it'll ever be implemented. Still, it's a good read.
There is no such thing as fair use. Just ask the RIAA.
In my opinion, his idea is brilliant. Create a corporation that is publicly traded, so that everyone has the chance to 'own' rights to every CD. I'd love to see some lawyers' opinions on this.
...the retail price of a CD jumps from $18.99 to $1899.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Interesting, but probably too hard to implement seriously (especially considering the possibilities of legal battles moving to that arena if a share holder shares his/her copy with an unlicensed person). Another aspect is that it would probably hurt sales, if the large companies buy all albums their shareholders are interested in (and take some form of payment from the people, naturally, for the service), then when an artist makes a new album they will know exactly how many copies it will sell, because there are only 4350 companies with shareholders interested in their music...
"If you go to the next town, going across a desert is a shorter way." - Pu-Li-Ru-La (Taito)
I think most dl'ers are just going to continue stealing it.
Didn't my.mp3.com get in trouble even though they owned one CD of all the albums they were electronically distributing? And the judge still declared that illegal...
Essentially they operate as a co-operative. On the surface, it is the same as paying a membership fee - but on paper it is a different story (i.e. Snapster would be just like Napster on the surface, but largely different on paper).
Here's a snip from their about page:
..mork
They already have a public corporation that allows many users to share ownership of a copyrighted work. It's called a "library".
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Some services such as ConsoleClassix allow users to join a co-op for the purposes of playing classic video game ROMs... but only one copy can be played by a user at once for each copy of the game the co-op owns.
Therein lies the problem with Cringely's proposal. If I split the cost of a $20 CD with a friend (or a million friends), we can both listen to it, just not at the same time (legally).
Right?
Right. But the people they distributed to were not shareholders of the company. That's the point here.
It's a funny idea, but ultimately it's a silly one. It's the surest cause for the legislators to take away fair use, or change it so it's not so fair.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
How can this even come close to working? If the corp purchases the cd, the corp, which is considered an entity in and of itself, is bound by the copyright. The shareholders of that corp have absolutely no rights to the cd's at all (except maybe at liquidation time). Just like having shares in IBM doesn't mean I can take advantage of ANY of their assets. This idea, while an interesting fancy, is just that.
This can only work assuming:
1. Most people who share music are willing to pay for music.
2. Most people who share music are ethical, and won't give the music to non-shareholders.
I think both assumptions are questionable. (Note: if you share music, I'm not saying you are a freeloader and immoral. But is everyone like you?)
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I think the difference would be that the new company would only distribute the music to shareholders. Taken as a whole shareholders are the owners of the company. If they own the company they also own the company's assets, i.e. the music. Thus, the people obtaining the music from the company to some extent share ownership of the music they download.
No such relationship existed at my.mp3.com. The people downloading the software were customers of my.mp3.com, not owners.
United States copyright law allows you to make one backup copy of the work, for private use. So if someone downloads it, they'd have to be the only person downloading it, and once it's downloaded, it would have to be deleted off of the servers. I don't seem to recall anything about group owners being able to make an unlimited number of backup copies.
This idea is very flawed. A much better idea would be a netflix type CD rental, except they keep the CD in escrow for you and you own it rather than rent it. CDs could be bought or sold on the open 'virtual' market. You only get remote access to it. If you want physical access you pay for shipping. That remote access can be in a number of fomats from ISO,WAV,MP3 etc.
Once you have owned the CD for a day, sell it to someone else and erase your fair use copy. Next time you want to listen to it buy it again and sell it again.
Just like Cringely send some of those IPO shares to http://www.pcast.com.
Brad.
The immediate disclaimers prevent this under personal use under federal regualaltion yaday etc,
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
While on the surface it seems amusing enough there's some things I don't totally get, maybe someone else can explain where I'm wrong...
First off, owning company stock is not necesarially the same thing as wanting to own the company's product. I might want to own the product but not take on any of the risk of owningthe stock. Likewise, there are plenty of companies I'd own the stock for only for the point of making money, not because I want to personally want to use their products (stock in a pharmecutical company comes to mind)
related to this is the idea that there will be tons of people who want to own tons of stock for the point of being rich, namely the insiders or the investment bankers that want to make money off the IPO. Typically a large amount of shares of any company is held by institutions, not individuals. This idea sounds like he wants stock to be held by all the customers which totally goes against the way investments are usually held. I don't think the institutions would like this idea one bit.
Then, what happens to people who own shares of the stock via a mutual fund? People who own the stock that don't even know about the service? Or people who want to download the music but don't have any means of getting shares of stock because they can't open a brokerage for whatever reason (bad credit)?
Lastly, what happens at the shareholder meeting?
Maybe I just don't get this idea, but to sum up, the product / service a company provides is (and should be) totally separate from its stock.
There's a major (future) flaw in this:
If I buy stock in a company (even the one I work for), that doesn't mean that I can freely use any software that they buy from another vendor. Most software comes with per-seat licenses, not per-company. What's to stop music companies from just packaging only a single-user license in a CD? Replace the word 'music' with 'software' in this scheme, and it all falls apart.
Napster had 60 million users with a membership price of free (many of which were no doubt duplicates) therefore a service with a membership price of $20 should have an equal number of users? What part of "supply and demand" did you miss, Robert?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Is there any reason why we can't go out and buy a Sony share or a Warner share???
They own the rights to begin with!
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
I can see it now, Snapster starts up, buys a few CDs, and all of a sudden every new CD that is bought comes with a draconian Microsoft-style license which explictly states that you may not play the CD on more than one audio system at a time, without the express written consent of the RIAA, which comes only comes with an unrealistic royalty fee. If you don't like it, you can return the CD to the record store. Or, not.
Unfortunately, it's going to be a long struggle before the Record Industry is forced to submit to the fact that recorded music is becoming an economic public good -- because of pratically infinite distribution (at the cost of bandwidth and storage), the good has become non-rivalrous. This does not mean music will disappear, but it does mean that it will not be profitable for a music company to distribute CDs.
Once the RIAA is forced to accept that, and takes the huge accompanying profit cut, their real business will be the promotion and distribution of the music itself -- it will lower its overhead by allowing P2P-style downloads (let the consumers give up their bandwidth), and will profit by sponsoring artists tours.
The downside is that record stores will, for the most part, go out of business. Were that there was another way to save our slave-wage friends who are knowledgable, but in every war, there are casualties.
But sorry, Cringely -- Snapster won't work for long. The fight for free music will be much longer than we hope.
Really, people, step back and look at what we're talking about here. Who cares if it is technically legal? Clearly it is a loophole if it is legal, and that hole will quickly be closed by lawmakers.
The other point is, why would you want to do this? Does no one here understand the basic concepts of economics? If people don't pay for music, there won't be any music -- or, at least, there will be very little. It costs money to produce. The artists need to eat. Sure the RIAA is evil, but two wrongs don't make a right. How could anyone seriously consider a plan like this without realizing that it is wrong?
Why do you people believe that you are entitled to free (or absurdly cheap) music? If you're unhappy with the RIAA, don't buy their music, but don't steal it either. You have no right to use something that someone else spent time and money to produce if you are not willing to use it under their terms.
The doctrine of fair use was originally adopted by judges ruling in early copyright cases. Ultimately, Congress incorporated the doctrine into the Copyright Act of 1976, where fair use is now codified at Section 107 of Title 17 of the U.S. Code. In creating section 107, Congress listed four factors to be considered in determining whether a use is fair or not:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
These factors are essentially the same factors that had been used over the years by judges, and Congress's stated intent was to preserve the fair use doctrine as it had evolved. However, as many courts have pointed out over the years, whether something constitutes fair use is very fact-specific. It is difficult to craft a clear, bright-line rule that explains which particular uses of a work are fair use and which are infringement. In short, the exact parameters of fair use are often determined based on the facts of specific cases.
Just from a quick look Cringely's idea, while novel, seems to violate several of the 4 criteria. This would be copyright infringement for comercial gain on a massive scale. No way any judge would believe that this falls under the intent of fair use.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
Cringely has always struck me as a moron.
A simple perusal of copyright laws would show anyone with half a brain that what he proposes is illegal.
Fair use allows for the end user to make a copy for PERSONAL use. Not corporate use, not public use, not any other use. Personal, baby.
Survey says....
BZZZT!
Whatever. Considering the average mp3 @ 192kbps
is 4MB x 100,000 mp3's = approximately 390GB served to a large user base. For $100,000.
This guy may have ran his idea by some lawyers, but he didn't ask anyone here...
People you forget Fair Use only applies if you do not in any way make money off of the copy..
So Cringely is quite wrong in this concept..
Now a non profit org that gives a used music cd for someone to use in exchange for another music cd fromtha tperson..would probably be very legal..:)
Don't Tread on OpenSource
What if you just had an library of every piece of music ever made and allowed only one person to check it out at a time? It works for books24x7.com. No copying of CDs, effectively eliminating the copyright issue entirely, and it would allow users to sample music to their heart's content. Have a search engine for genre, etc., etc. and you'd be all set.
Something that didn't make the cut for story submission...
I have been watching morbidly as the RIAA tries to make felons out of normal people. I am disgusted by these tactics, and it saddens me that the United States government would even momentarily entertain the thought of fining or jailing people for wanting ownership of that which gives America a cultural identity.
We don't all have common backgrounds, or live in similar situations. What ties Americans together as a nation is a longing for freedom, and the music that provides our identity as a generation, or as a nation. It is along this line of thinking that I wrote the following, and I would appreciate constructive comment on it.
We are not criminals!
We are not criminals. We are the proud citizens of these United States of America, and we want our culture back. For too long the music industry has branded us criminals -- thieves who would fight to take what is not ours, unwilling to support those who influence our lives and shape our culture, our national self-image. Yet there is no sign of the media calling off its plan to define and control our culture.
The music industry claims to have the interests of artists in mind while persecuting those who would attempt to make free certain parts of our culture. With the belief that work should be compensated fairly it is self-evident that artists deserve fair compensation for their work. However, the music industry routinely uses the "work make for hire" clause of the Copyright Act of 1976 to rob artists of their right to profit from their own creations by working with whichever publisher they choose.
If the music industry holds fair compensation in high regard, perhaps they could consider a business model in which an author retains ownership of her own works. If they are unable to fairly compensate artists, it is not the fault of the consumer. Business does not exist in a vacuum, and it is unfair to produce legislation which aims to preserve a monopolistic industry's position without significant consumer benefit. We want the right to experience the music of our lives at will without being forced to use our dollars to vote for the music industry's dominance.
While the popular media industries demonize citizens whose lives are most strongly tied to their products, they are fighting hard to retain their status as the group solely responsible for driving American culture. These self-proclaimed owners of our national identity strive to ensure that our lives are pervaded with their music, their movies, their values. They force their media into our lives; billing movies and albums as not just mere entertainment, but "events" which will affect our lives. One can hardly watch television or a film or listen to the radio without being subjected to mainstream music. Yet rather than rejoice and celebrate their successes they cry out at the realization that culture is a hard thing to bottle.
We do not consider it fair that the media surround us with the same sounds and images, over and over, yet we are criminalized for trying to integrate them into our culture. We have a right to our culture, and to not be regarded as criminals for demanding ownership.
A company cannot own a common term; trademark laws are such that trademark owners must take action to prevent their trademarks from falling into common usage, lest they become public-domain terms. The curious lack of a similar concept in the media domain means that our lives can be immersed in elements which become part of our cultural vocabulary, yet current law dictates that most of us will die before gaining ownership of our cultural identities.
We want ownership of the media that pervades our lives.
Well, that's it, folks. If I had bandwidth I'd turn it into a petition of sorts, but as it is all I can do is put it up here for comment, in hopes that somebody else will be inspired to take some action.
Please do comment -- I'd like to hear what people have to say.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
Every idea or discussion I hear seems to always forget about the artist.
So under this plan, if an independent artist (pays their own recording, cd pressing, etc) has their disc bought for $14, is lucky enough that just one single is downloaded 100,000 times at $0.05/download, then $5,000.00 is made and then artist only receives (maybe) profit off of a $14 sale. If that is not motivation for artists to side with the RIAA I don't know what could do it.
We have two extremes here.
Do you really think #2 is the right answer? Don't give me the standard lines about "music sharing increases record sales." Sure, it might, right now, in the limited sense it's going on. Okay, what if copying anything you want is legal.
A studio spends $100 million dollars making a great movie. Last night I watched Gangs of New York. Fantastic...amazing...Scorsese is a fucking genius. I don't know how much it cost to make, but I'd imagine a shit-ton of money. So, they spend all this money, use all this talent, and equipment, and employ all of these people. The master copy is made. Immediately, somebody gets their hands on it, makes a copy, and puts it on the Internet. Everybody and their brother downloads it. Somebody copies it onto DVDs and sells it for $3 + shipping. How does the studio make money?
Don't tell me it's off ticket sales because people want to see it on the big screen...unless they own all the theaters, it won't do any good. I'll open up a theatre, buy the DVD for $3, and charge $4 for a ticket to see it on the big screen, then charge $8 for popcorn.
Is this the world we want? How will artists make money? Will it all be ads and product placements? Should Daniel Day Lewis have to say "Drink Pepsi" after every stabbing?
There should be a happy medium between options 1 and 2. So, what is it? Should there simply not be big-budget movies anymore, because the idea of "owning the bit pattern on the DVD is nonsensical?"
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
However, there is still a distinction between the assets of the corporation and the assets of the shareholders. The assets of the corporation do not become the assets of the shareholders until the corporation liquidates, and then the shareholders are last in line (as various governments, followed by those who are owed money by the corporation have first crack at the assets). Even then, each shareholder would get it on a pro-rata basis. If the corporation bought 50,000 CDs and had 5,000 shares outstanding, you would ultimately be able to get 10 CDs for each share (assuming no one was ahead of the shareholders in this example) you held, and you would be the only shareholder to get each particular CD.
If I own stock in a company that owns the rights to, or I don't know, KFC's chicken, I have the right to that recipe? If they want to give that info out?
The thing is, you become a part of the "they". If 51% of the shares are voted to do something, then it is so. So, if you ever get 51% of the company, it's your call and yours alone. (And, at that point you get to stack the board of directors with people who agree with you...) If a bunch of people who agree with you combine to make 51%, that works too.
Cringley's company of course would have that trap door. As a publicly traded company, they'd always be subject to a hostile takeover by the pro-RIAA interests...
The US Supreme Court has already ruled (I can't find the link at the moment, try "supreme court wordperfect" or something similar) that it is legal for you to buy one (1) copy of (say) MS-Office, and install it on all 3,000 workstations at your company.
The trick here is that since you only have one (1) license, only one (1) copy of the software can be active at any time.
A similar thing already exists in the physical world, it's called "loaning a book to a friend".
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
This may make RIAA extinct, but there's no revenue stream for musicians, and it's worse than Napster/KaZaA as presumably all the titles will be perfectly ripped and organised, thus providing even less incentive for people to go out and buy.
Coupled with the dismissive "Oh, it only takes $500 per hour to do a recording", and with profits being skimmed to support the pyramid scheme, Cringely sounds like one of these guys who think the cost of the average recording looks like this:
1. CD and box, 10 cents
2. ???
$19.90. Profit!!!
I think you're missing the fundamental "hack" the article implies.
If I own part of a corporation, and that corporation owns a recording, do I not have rights to that recording? Provided there is nothing in the corporate charter prohibiting this, I see no reason it wouldn't work. The difference between this and my.mp3.com is that the users own the service they are using.
The only hole I can really see is in the distribution method. If it's provided by a corporation as a service to its shareholders that's one thing, but if it's provided by a separate company? I'm not sure. Of course, I'm NAL.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
Fair Use is law of spirit more than of letter -- there is no bright line distinguishing what exactly it is. I don't think you'd find a judge that would let this proposal weasel through.
If such a concept was possible, every company would just buy one copy of software for all their employees. The software is bought by the company, and the employees are agents of the company. In addition, in the tech industry employees usually own stock in the company. But there's a pretty large amount of case law showing that each employee needs their own license for the software they use at work.
The same would go for music.
my blog
I have an mp3 collection, not an audiophile collection. This is pop music we're talking about ...
of this wonderful company? in particular, what happens when they become a majority stockholder?
there's no place like ~
OK, I thought of an improvement.
We'll sell shares in the Library of Congress. They will be issued to all citizens of the US, and the government can come up with some sort of service to collect revenue to fund it. Then, we'll have the right to a copy of anything in the Library of Congress (inc, tm (r)).
Now to figure out some way to trick all of the producers of copyrighted works into giving a copy to the Library of Congress...
The idea is brilliant, it might even be legal, but the sad truth is, that the whole business would be probably tied up in the courts for 2-3 years with noone being able to hear any of those purchased records, the price of the shares falling to a few cents, a lot of wasted money and disappointed shareholders who don't want to hear anymore about it after the first year of legal troubles. The problem is not the idea itself, it is the fscked up legal system that allows to drag out the proceedings endlessly and bleed out anyone who hasn't got a few million dollars in his bank accounts.
That is not to say i wouldn't buy a share or even a few shares when it starts. Even betting on the off chance that something good results from this is better than just sitting around watching the RIAA turn back the wheel until we're back at feudalism. And at least it will tie up some of their lawyers in the courts. Yes, by now i'm so pissed off with the record industry that i'm willing to give away money if it hurts them in any way.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Read the RTMark FAQ if you don't instantly grok the above.
Once the corporation has been established no one is going to the lose their shirts, e.g. college kids won't be forced to give up their life savings. All you can lose is whatever the corporation owns. I think the only thing that breaks the corporate shield is worker's comp.
So Cringly is pulling an RTMark, but instead of activist reasons he's using it to trade music (which could be seen as an activist reason too).
Bravo.
Now here's the fun part. Why not live our lives as corporations? People complain about corporate power all the time, so if we can't beat them, lets join them. What if everyone made a corporation in their name and put all their assests into it? From there you can add shareholders (family, friends) then safely and legally swap MP3s, share ownership of just about *anything*, hire people to do your job at a cheaper rate and pocket the difference, wear a world's sexiest CEO t-shirt, take out loans, form off-shore tax havens (why pay tax?), have a great time knowing that whatever you do will be the fault of the corporation not you personally, etc.
Excellent "What is a corporation" primer here.
Damn straight. I'm off to become a corporate entity.
MP3.com owned 300,000 CDs, but the usership of MP3.com was not limited to MP3.com. I'm not saying that Cringely's idea would work, only that the MP3.com involves different legal issues.
The naysayers to this idea forget that the _critical_ component of this plan is that it must IMMEDIATELY go public. It also must limit downloads to owners (shareholders) ONLY. While the cost of going public may be significant, there is not necessarily a need to bring in investment bankers and join the NASDAQ or NYSE... The press would likely provide the marketing for free on the nightly news (due to the sheer audacity of the idea), and the employees of the business could probably sell the shares via telephone. "limit one share per customer"! (or something).
The real problem here is that by sharing the backup or shifted assets of the company among the owners in this way, IF a court later decides the idea is illegal, they (the RIAA) might then seek to recover directly from the owners... Usually by being a corporate entity, this kind of thing is avoided, but since the corporation is distributing it's assets directly to the owners, who can say.
Concerns that users may share their downloads with their non-owner friends are baseless. TODAY, even without this company, people MAY record things from TV and share it with their friends... and TV and radio are legal last I checked.
One final note. In the end, the legality of this plan would not matter. Unless stopped quickly by injunction, Current RIAA distribution methods would become obsolete technically (ok, ok, they are already technically obsolete), and practically. If this became widespread, digital distribution would be the only comercially viable alternative. The distributors would have to change or declare bankruptcy in short order. This company would need to be able to drag out any court proceedings... basically, they'd need to take a page out of Micro$oft'$ playbook. A delay of two to three years is all that is needed...
There will always be a small market for physical distribution, but the days of monopoly-via-artificial-scarsity-of-media would end. And wouldn't that be nice?
Strictly speaking, this is only if the corporation is that modern beast of commerce, the Limited Liability Corporation. You can certainly have -- and indeed, prior to the railroads, often did have -- wholly owned companies which were not LLCs. Of course, no sane investor would ever buy into Snapster if it weren't an LLC, since then the RIAA would be able to sue for that investor's personal wealth as well as that of the company.
Hmmm. I wonder if that could be a way around the ridiculous lawsuits? Incorporate yourself, then file-share as the corporation. Then.... profit!
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I think a gazillion indie bands would leap at the chance to be distributed alongside the entire catalog of digitized music, especially if the site could serve up streaming radio and indies have a prayer of getting some airplay...
What I'm really saying is I'd like to see "the Snapster Studios Records Radio Entertainment Channel Online" and 500 other startups doing the same thing, because ultimately future companies built around this business model are owned by it's shareholders, who are the users.
I'd like the artists to enjoy a larger percentage of that revenue and better contract alternatives than they are currently, under the 75 year old curmudgeon with five heads that's suing potential lifelong customers, and can't imagine why CD sales continue to drop other than file sharing (answer: the economy sucks and so does your record company, two reasons I'm not buying your CDs).
And another thing that bothers me...some record companies have blatantly hired and trained armies of would-be usurpers to take over the International Space Station! Think about it.
Vonnegut: "What is the purpose of life? To be the eyes, ears, and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool."
No, your Honor. I did not pay this woman for sex. I bought a share into the corporation that she is married to.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Because the principals of a corporation DO have some liability for it's actions. The board, the executive officers, have some liability for the actions of the company.
You can't just form a corporation with you as the sole director and owner, and escape liability, or taxes.
In a typical company, the corporate officers, and the board of directors, ARE responsible for what happens, and have a fair deal of personal liability for what the company does. Their assetts are not the company's, true, and if it's merely a matter of the company going bankrupt, they will be okay.. but in many places, if the company dodges taxes, it WILL be taken out of the director's pockets, and if the directors instruct the company to do something illegal... they can be held accountable.
A corporation exists sort of like another person, but not entirely.
While I doubt that a single copy purchase and multiple copy distribution would be reasonable or equitable to the companies and that create, produce, edit and distribute music this idea has some interesting possibilities. What if ...
:-)
Create a corporation. Corporation could either be a co-op or publicly traded with multiple classes of stock. Their would be the normal two classes of stock (Common and Preferred) plus further classes of securities particular to this business. A third type of security would be issued as something like a common stock with a reverse dividend. For example, you could buy into the company by purchasing the stock but then to keep the stock valid you would be required to pay a reverse dividend. The reverse dividend would essentially be a subscription fee at a guaranteed rate. Failure to pay would render the security void, invalidate it for a period of time, change the securities fee schedule or revert ownership to the company. The securities, having a set rate which could cause the stock to increase or decrease in value in relation to the interest rate would be fully transferable so that they could act as something similar to options. (Okay, an investment quality subscription seems farfetched but I just like the idea.)
The Corporation negotiates use rights with the copyright holders for digital use and redistribution. The contracts here would really have to do two things; guarantee unfettered access to the music by the corporation, allow the corporation to set rates as it sees fit (with no necessary relation between what the corp charges and what the copyright holder receives) and determine a payment schedule agreeable to the copyright holder.
In regards to the agreements between the corporation and other companies I think it fair to note that it would be VERY important that deals be directly with the copyright holder. Ideally this would be (in order of preference) the author/band/singer/musician, the label/producer, the major label, the distributor and/or the licensing agency (RIAA). The more intermediaries get cut out the better.
Owners or co-op members could have use of any piece of music on a sliding scale depending on purpose of use and membership type.
In determining the amount of payment for stock and reverse dividend an equitable use/cost business model would have to be determined. For example, a standard user could download whatever music I like and listen to it without limit. A club or mobile DJ user could download with specific performance rights at a slightly higher rate. A radio DJ could purchase a set of rights for rebroadcast at yet another rate. Bulk use rights could be purchased by radio stations or other rebroadcast entities allowing use of any audio for any length of time. Use rights could allow rebroadcast, restrict redistribution, set quality requirements. The market would really determine all of this so I won't go further into the business model just now..
Actual payment to the copyright holders would have to be on the basis of real and/or statistical models. This would mean that if you purchased a back library from Xunil Records of 1000 songs then regardless of what you are paid you would have to fairly report the actual use and probable use from a pre-arranged statistical model. So payment to Xunil might be a flat rate of $.10 per track, plus $.05 per download, where 450 songs were downloaded once, 100 were downloaded twice and 50 were downloaded three times. That would mean (1000*.10)+(450*.05)+(100*(2*.05))+(50+((3*.05)). But as we know one download would not mean only one use. The statistical model would have to describe the manner of compensation for any downstream uses.
The real beauty here is that the company would be handling both distribution and licensing fee collection in a single step. Effectively this would displace bypass RIAA and deprive them of influence in any future digital music marketplace. Any business model that can do this is worth a look.
Or I might be wrong.
just force the RIAA to allow music sharing with a small (as in 5 cents a song) fee for each download.
Frankly, I don't see why the current system of copyright is tolerated. It benefits only a very small number of people while harming tens of millions. Times and technology have changed, and the cost of distribution is now effectively nil. In that sense information _is_ free.
Yes, I know there are other costs asociatated with producing a work, but even those costs are dwarfed by the economies of scale involved here. If every america downloaded just one album a month at 5 cents a song, that'd be around $150 million a month. Plenty to keep the industry going, I should say. I understand that in Napster's heyday, the volume of downloads was much larger than this.
Furthermore, I don't see any reason why violations for copyright infringement should be punished with anything more than requiring the person charged to pay for each item at the going rate. Copyright violations are _not_ stealing. It's copying. That's why it's called copyright. If I steal your car, you have one less car. If I copy a song, you don't have one less song. You've lost a sale, nothing more. The degree of damage is much less.
Not that this'll ever come to pass. Something I figured out a while ago is that just about everyone is secretly hoping to be the guy to stike it rich with copyrights/patents/whatever. So even though they probably never will profit from the system, and will probably end up being screwed over by it, they'll defend it to the death forever looking forward to the day they get to be the ones doing the screwing over.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Hey! Cool! You mean my corporation can buy just one copy of Microsoft Windows and my entire corporation -- and all its shareholders! -- can legally copy it?
Something here doesn't quite add up...
Think about it. We rent video all of the time. But no one rent audio CD's. What is that?
As film director, Richard Linkletter said once, "I thought the film industry was run like a Mafia until I had to deal with the music industry!" He was trying to get rights to a certain song for a film. But my point is the RIAA are not reasonable people. They are Special People with Special Powers. It appears that there was a Secret Admendment to the Constitution pass when we were looking and They would never allow this.
I would just like my DVD rental service to have the right to backup out of print DVD's so they would have a spare when one breaks! And the public domain return to us - 28 years was plenty!
If Time Warner or Intel wanted to do this, they could. if this imaginary company wanted to share it's assets with it's shareholders, it also could.
This idea is pretty outlandish, but what it it were toned down. Does a CD have to have only one owner? Could me and 17 of my closest friends each pitch in a doller for a CD, then each rip the mp3s from the CD we collectivly "own"?
I don't know how that would work, interesting thought though.
Finkployd
Here's a (hopefully) legal and tractable alternative Cringely's idea:
Libraries can legally lend a CD because there's only a single physical copy. The big problem is that you've got to pick up and return the physical copy.
So why not use DRM to our advantage, and have our libraries electronically lend the CD (or a single track), and use DRM to ensure there's only one electronic copy out at a time. Add a "Just In Time" inventory model where you only borrow the song immediately before playing it, and you return it immediately afterward. Then each track is potentially played a large number of times, back to back, throughout the day, by different users. We'd make a request to a server that finds a library with an available copy, and maybe queue up if none is free right now.
Of course, you've got to be online when you listen to the song for this to work, and you've got to get a lot of libraries (or entities with a similar legal status that would permit them to distribute a single copy of a work) involved.
An alternative it to set up such an entity which buys lots of copies of each CD, and simultaneously distributes as many single, one-time copies as it has a right to. Perhaps the users pay a tiny amount to fund the CD purchases.
And if I want to buy the artist's masterpiece, take it home, and paint Mickey Mouse(TM) into the middle of it, so what? It's mine, I bought and paid for it, I should be allowed to do anything I want with it. Now, if I asked the artist to paint Mickey into the scene, I could reasonably expect the artist to refuse. But I'm not buying directly from artists. I'm buying from corporations that pay the artists for "work for hire". These corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder returns. If that means the Disneyfication of the Sistine Chapel, then so be it!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
This is not right!!! What, production being owned by the PEOPLE? For the people? By god, thats COMMUNISM!!!!!! Cringely is a terrorist!!
This space available.
The idea is that in his, the only people who get to download are shareholders in the company that bought the CD. Mp3.com was letting people who didn't buy anything listen to songs that mp3.com had bought. If you are mp3.com (as in a shareholder), then you did buy the CD. I still doubt it'll last long, but it's something nobody's tried yet.
What is interesting here is how if you play it right, you might get the RIAA to shoot down corporate personhood along with you. It's your best argument at least. They'd be trying to keep a company from copying mp3s for itself. Since [my non-lawyerly interpretation of] modern equal protection means you can't discriminate between corporations and individuals in the law, the only way for them to get you would be overturning Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific or just abolishing fair use rights for everybody. You just have to hope that fair use is a stronger precedent than some random contract dispute case from the 1800s. Even if they do find a nutty enough judge (or a big enough sack of Cash MoneyTM) to kill copying for personal use, I think you'll have a big enough freak-out to bring down some serious hurt down on the RIAA.
Cringley has discovered the concept of the Public library - what a genius! :) Serious, does anyone wonder what legal battles would be underway today if we tried to invent public libraries in this age?
Why the Amazons and Barnes & Nobles of this country would be telling everyone how libraries would put their businesses under and that it was just a form of stealing to read a book for free when you really know you should be paying for it and supporting intellectual property.
vince
I've seen this argument three times now: "Just because I own a share of Corporation X doesn't mean that I have rights to copy its corporately owned IP." Granted. This is absolutely true.
But Cringley's Snapster is a compnay that is set up so that owners become part of the corporation, and one of those rights of the corporation is to space shift its corporately owned media. Snapster would be set up so that this was the raison d'etre of the corporation. As part of the corporation I would exercise my corporate ability to space shift the corporately owned CDs.
Furthermore, the ownership of a CD and the ability to space shift is very different than the terms of an EULA on, for example, MS Windows. Without such an EULA, Sony, BMG, Time-Warner, etc. might be out of luck. There is no explicit restriction to how many machines may play a space-shifted back up.
Still, Snapster might not fly, but only a court can test that. These arguments about how "Snapster would be just like Microsoft/Mp3.com/etc." have not considered the terms of incorporation Cringely proposes.
blog
If this sounds good to you, you'll totally love my new plan:
1. Forward this note to five of your friends and send me and the ten people before me on this list a dollar and an mp3. Maybe on one of those cute little CDs. Then your friends will send you a dollar and an mp3, and soon you will have forty gazillion dollars (3. Profit!) and so many THUMPIN' TUNES that you won't ever have to buy another Now That's What I Call Music until they're at, like, eleventy billion. (What? They are at eleventy billion? Well, then infinity raised to the eleventy billion.)
2. Seriously, I mean do you know what five times five times five times five times five is? That's huge! And that's just how much you'll have after just five 'links in the chain'. But if you don't forward this right away, you'll have lots of bad luck. Oh and also I have testimonials, but I forgot to put them here, but they are totally convincing. Oh and we'll sell stock for $20 at our IPO, no problem. Just 'cause I'm totally awesome.
DON'T BREAK THE CHAIN!!! OR RIAA AND SATAN WILL PREVAIL!!!
3. Profit!
But seriously, no matter how you slice it, Fair Use does not involve making money, even if you try to dance around with some sort of 'public ownership' hogwash. The legal restrictions on what one (or many) can do with a copyrighted work seem much more well-defined and far-reaching than the rights that one enjoys, and no reasonable judge is going to swallow this. Moreover, no sizeable popular base will get behind it because it so obviously screws the musicians (even more than they are already being screwed).
When the power players abuse the intent of the law in favor of the letter, we all cry foul. But those cries carry less weight if we start sniffing around for loopholes of our own. The real problem, as always, is that the power players get to write the laws. They have the muscle to close our loopholes, whereas all we can do is find somewhere to bitch about theirs. Until that changes, any legal tomfoolery that we manage to abuse will just distract attention from the more fundamental problems.
It's so much more attractive / inside the moral kiosk.
I believe you can already go to an organization called a "library" to do this "borrow" thing you're talking about -- for free. The only thing new that you're proposing is that they mail you the copy.
I also heard about this new place down the street called a "video rental store". I hear it's cool -- I'm gonna go check it out soon.
OK. I've read through what people have been writing and well, the moderators just like to +1 people that can write intelligently. That's the bottom line. I don't think most of the people that refute his idea know what they are talking about.
..., or because of.... Your IPO (Initial Public Offering) is determing by YOU!
;).
Several points. You can IPO at whatever the fuck price you want to. Don't give me that, oh, you can't do that because of
Robert's idea is simply brilliant. To put it simply. I work in the world where money matters, and law matters, and his idea is awesome. I see nothing wrong with it. But he is also correct with the fact that this is a small loophole which can be fixed by a quick lobby to Congress. Someone that works for the RIAA (read: intern) is reading this article, and tomorrow they will be reporting this to their supervisor and ni about 2 months this "law" will be lobbied.
I'm sorry to all the people that simply just say that this article is a bunch of horse-shit. This is one of the most comprehensive and simple (to-the-point) articles I've read recently. He's got everything covered (basics) and it is enough for "just about" anyone here to get it started. Just takes a little know how and in order to get it done before the "law" takes hold, just a few connections. I'm sure Robert (Cringley) could get you started...for a small fee of shared
Anyway, the point of this post was to say that all the people that got +5 for saying that this isn't possible. Wake up! Read something relevant. No, Wall Street Journal does NOT count. This is reality, and this is absolutely brilliant. This should go side-by-side with his "I use Linux to play DVD's" article.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
So tell us, how long have you been involved with Amway?
This is a pyramid scheme. The problem is, it only works as long people are buying into the bottom. While I agree that there are lots of alternative ways to sell music, this isn't one of them.
If I'm Joe Indie, why would I want to let someone else take half the profit for "distributing" my music (which amounts to keeping it on their hard drive and running Kazaa or whatever), when I could do the same thing myself and get all of the profit?
Which leaves us "renting" the CD through the mail. Ever wonder why you never see CD rental places in the US? Why there's not a "nettunz" to go with "netflix?" It's because they're illegal. According to USC Title 17, Section 109, "Limitations on exclusive rights: Effect of transfer of particular copy or phonorecord":
The edits are necessary for clarity because this section also has a lot of cumbersome language about software; go read the original if you doubt my interpretation. Why can actual libraries get away with it? Because the next sentence says, "Nothing in the preceding sentence shall apply to the rental, lease, or lending of a phonorecord for nonprofit purposes by a nonprofit library or nonprofit educational institution."
So, could you set up a nonprofit corporation to do this? I guess so, although it'd face all the normal challenges a nonprofit does in trying to find the money to build its collection. And, your strongly implied personal copy before return would itself be illegal. If it were used pretty much only for this purpose, and got big enough, I bet the RIAA would try to claim that the nonprofit should know there's monkey business going on and try to shut it down. Whether they could would be up to the courts.
Why? What's fair use? Corporations aren't allowed to buy just one copy of commerical computer software for use on all of their machines. Why should they be allowed to buy one copy of a piece of music for simultaenous use by all.
One copy = one user at a time. And "fair use" doesn't mean you can make a copy of music and allow multiple people to access that copy at any one time.
Fair use? A library is fair use, but libraries don't photocopy their books for each person carrying a library card.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
People, copyrights exist to control copying. Like it or not, just because you buy a CD, that doesn't make you the owner of the song, and fair use doesn't allow for wholesale copying of songs or albums or whatever.
Cringly's idea is really bad. Instead of trying to find loopholes, let's get to the three issues that matter with RIAA:
* Because of the degree of control over distribution, competition in the music industry, at least as far as price goes don't exist.
* Unfair contracts to artists.
* There's no incentive for innovation or new material for derivative work because old stuff doesn't ever move to the public domain.
-- $G
Maybe not in the US - they have them all over Japan. Yes, you can rent CDs.
The point that noone wants to discuss is that many of the CDs accquired through p2p systems are NOT canabalized CD sales. Many of these people would NEVER accquire this music at the current price point of CDs. You can't say.. "Well, there have been 10,000 copies of this CD copied, so we lost $180,000" because many of those people would simply have not bothered.
:)
I have an example, but first some assumptions... (Yes I know the joke about assumptions)
First: We will assume that there is a lot of profit in an individual CD sale. I've seen enough evidence of this that I believe it to be true.
Second: We will assume that the music industry WANTS to make as much money as possible FOR ITSELF. (As opposed to making lots of money for it's artists)
Anyway, My example/idea/experiment is this... The next time Madonna, or Brittney, or whoever's hot next week, comes out with a new album, sell it for $6.00. Or maybe $6.50. Work out a price that still gives everyone in the distribution chain at least 1/2 the profit they were making on a 'regular' cd. (Except the Label, who's profit margin would be cut to 1/3 what it is right now.)
I predict that two things would happen. First: A lot more people who wouldn't buy an $18 album will be entirely willing to buy 3 (different) $6.00 albums, thus increasing total cash receipts. Since we halved everyone's profit (Except the record labels, which we cut by 2/3'rds) the artist is seeing 50% more money, and the label is making the same money it was on the expensive albums. This would also have the effect of tripling unit sales. Second: People would be more willing to buy an entire album just to get one or two songs. This also means more money coming in. And Third, people who had been entirely priced out of the market (Example: Young Kids) would now be in a position to buy music. All of this means more cash coming in.
(Short Tangent: If they did this, The Electronics arm of Sony would give every Record Label a big wet sloppy kiss as they cranked out more and more mega-CD-changers....)
This kind of pricing has precident. Anyone remember when Taco Bell used to sell it's regular taco's for like $1.79? They decided to swap volume for price, and they are now one of the Big Three Fast Food Chains.
But it won't happen.
Since the record industry makes it's profit after they pay everyone else, it is in their best interest to keep unit sales low, and costs high. Why go to all this trouble just so the ARTISTS can make a few more bucks? The Label doesn't care if the artists album goes Platinum or not. Just as long as they are raking in the bucks.
On a personal note, there are MANY artists who I own SOME albums of, but not all. If CD's were priced like tacos, I'd own the entire catalog of many musicians, just to say I had them all.
Specific examples: They Might Be Giants, Madonna, and The Nylons (Who?
Also! I'd go out tomorrow and buy up the entire back catalog of "Weird Al" Yankovich. I single out Weird Al because I already own all of his music, but much of it is on Vinal and Cassette. I'd have no problem re-purchasing on CD if the price was right. I bet you'd do the same thing.
Nipok Nek
Why choose white shoes?
I would assume it's because the video rental business is established and of course benefits the MPAA. In other words, no one has a vested interest in shutting it down. But how come I can rent (thru Netflix) a Norah Jones concert DVD and yet I can't rent a Norah Jones music CD? I need a legal explanation here.
Thanks
Message-ID:
.html). I am not a
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 16:26:36 +1000
From: Sam Johnston
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To: bob@cringely.com
Subject: The Business of Music
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Good Afternoon [Robert Cringeley],
A regular reader of your column, I write from Sydney, Australia to
provide some feedback about your 'One Possible Future for a Music
Business That Must Inevitably Change' article
(http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpi t20030724
lawyer, so I cannot comment on how successful your model would be
although at first glance it seems to be taking advantage of a loophole
that would soon be plugged. Worse still, initiatives like this are
clearly not in the spirit of 'fair use' and may jeapordise the future of
fair use provisions. I believe the test is 'would it replace a sale',
and on that front you're buggered in a similar fashion to mp3.com.
That said, you have correctly identified the (diminishing) role of music
companies. I currently have some guys in my office churning out HDTV
ready broadcast quality footage using a $1,500 Mac, $500 in software and
a $10k DV camera. Admittedly these guys won the 'Best Comedy' section of
Tropfest (http://www.tropfest.com/) using similar technology earlier in
the year, and thus possess some amount of technical and creative
ability, but the point is that they are not requiring hundreds of
thousands or even millions of dollars of equipment to generate content.
I trust the same applies to the music industry.
Now, if new electronic distribution companies were set up which would
allow content creators (note I'm using the generic term, rather than
musicians) to sell their content with a 95/5 split (or thereabouts) in
the creator's favour rather than the current (reversed) situation, and
if the cost of the content was adjusted to maintain similar returns per
sale, I believe we'd all (with the exception of fat record company execs
and content creators who require significant investment - eg hollywood
studios) be much better off. All of a sudden we're paying 90-95% less
for content. Distribution is much cheaper and so the distributors are
still able to make a profit (which is more in line with effort
expended). Content creators still get $x/sale. However, content
consumers are suddenly able to stretch their content budget much
further. Say I spend $300/annum on CDs - that might be worth 20 CDs
which are bulky, inconvenient and prone to damage. Instead, I get
something like 20 times that, and in a format that is convenient. Note
that even if I spend 1/20th of what I spend today, the artists are no
worse off.
Users don't bother sharing it because:
- the distributors have fast, distributed networks as opposed to slow,
intermittent connections that are oh so common on P2P networks
- their files are high quality, and are able to be converted (ideally
'peeled') to lower bitrates for portable devices
- the integrity of the files is guaranteed by checksums and/or digital
signatures
- digital rights management (if any) is transparent and unobtrusive.
an identifier - maybe a watermark if it could be implemented without
quality degradation, or simply a header and digital signature (without
which integrity could not be guaranteed) could be used in cases of
copyright violation.
- i can still be sued by the distributor or industry associations and
the value proposition is simply not worth the risk. this process is self
funded, and without a secure way of ensuring my identity is concealed,
is an effective deterrent.
- significant value is added in the way of being able to download
content at multiple sites, maintaining and sharing playlists, etc.
I don't know about the legality of his proposal, or even if his business estimations are reasonable, but he forgot the most important point: the artists
By his reasoning, CD sales would drop enormously, as anyone subscribed to the service would have access to the music, but the artists wouldn't see any kind of compensation for their work. In a "best case scenario", where everyone used this kind of service, any given record would sell only as many copies as there are service providers, plus a few CD's to those who insist in having the original packaging. How long do you think this would last?
Not being a lawyer, I found Cringely's idea very imaginative and stimulating. Other readers have mentioned possible legal flaws, but I think the scheme has an even bigger problem: it ignores the fact that we really don't need a music downloading business. Of any kind. The recording industry might need one, but musicians don't need one and the public certainly doesn't. The idea that anybody has to make money distributing individual copies of songs is an artifact we can afford to lose.
In an editorial mentioned on Slashdot a couple days ago, Doc Searls said something about television that I think is highly relevant: that it is a mistake to think of television shows as products and viewers as customers. Searls points out that the television industry makes its money selling eyeballs to advertisers. Shows aren't the product, they are merely bait that converts ordinary people into ad absorbers who might buy products later.
Likewise, from a musician's viewpoint, recordings are a way to convert people into future concert ticket buyers. It's been pointed out abundantly on Slashdot and elsewhere that musicians make money by performing, not by CD sales. What musicians get out of distribution (of any sort) is the fame that generates better gigs. For some reason everybody seems to have a hard time letting go of the idea that somebody has to make money selling copies of songs.
Try looking at it this way. The recording industry is in the position television set manufacturers could have been in if they had thought of building tv's like pay phones, collecting the coins, dictating which shows could be broadcast and demanding most of the rights. If that were the case, television set makers would now be right in the middle of the fray over video file swapping, claiming to be losing money with every download, probably also claiming to be protecting the creative artists who produce the shows (but who get none of the coins), and perhaps suing everybody like the RIAA is doing.
Obviously all that is unnecessary and sounds ridiculous, but it might not seem so if we were used to it. After a century of constantly feeding quarters into televisions, it might well seem like something was morally wrong unless someone was getting paid whenever a show was viewed.
There is in place right now plenty of infrastructure to freely distribute the songs of anybody who wants their songs distributed. What musicians and the public get from this technology is a way to eliminate the filtering imposed by the music business, do the distribution automatically, get the exposure for free and let the public pick the winners. Replacing the recording industry with a different middleman is completely unnecessary.
Why does it have to be a public corporation? Why not start a non-profit corp with only your friends/acquaintances. Everyone who joins the 'partnership' sells their CDs to it, and in return gets access to all of the CDs that the corp owns. You don't need to go public to try to acquire capital, everyone just contributes assests they already own. Only actual money needed would be for a little bit of computer hardware and some bandwidth.
You set up some kind of server that contains all of the music, and only allows one person to have any particular track "checked out" at a time. (Officially. If you're the type of person who really wanted to 'bypass' the one copy limit, you're not likely to be called on it because it's not a multi-national organization with millions of file-sharers. Just a couple dozen people who all kinda know each other. But 'one copy in use at a time' is the "understanding" everyone has of how it's setup.)
In all honesty, you don't really need THAT many people in your group to cover most of your music needs. In this type of setup, having one million people all contributing the same Britney Spears CD doesn't benefit you in any way, so you might as well not have them. You'd form your group with people who have similar tastes in music (or widely disparate tastes, if you want to broaden your horizons), and when a new CD came out that many people wanted, only 1 person actually has to buy it.
I guess this is kind of the Gnutella version of the article's Napster idea... decentralized, only members join the servers, which are run by the members themselves. Would work out better in my opinion.
I wish people would realize that the only way to get rid of the RIAA is to give an alternative to the Artist that create the music and not come up up with a grand scheme to defraud the whole industry. There are thousands of working musicians that put in a lot of time and effort to create the music that many of you believe should be free. Well, they need to be paid, or else there won't be any more music. Now, if you want to modify this idea and have the publicly traded corporation hire musicians to create music owned by the corporation and available for it's shareholders, that would be legal and quasi-ethical as long as an independent musician could still sell his product to the general public. At this point, when you steal music, you are hurting the artist far more than the RIAA. I know this isn't what most of you would like to do, so come up with some means for an artist to freely own his work and get paid for it while making it available to the public for a reasonble fee.
Let's say you and a friend go to the store to buy CDs. Getting there both of you discover that neither one has enough money alone to buy the CD they want, so you pool your money to buy the CD.
Now who has ownership of the CD? I'd say you now have shared ownership of the property. Could both of you make a copy for backup, probably. Could both of you transfer the music to MP3, yes, however my understanding of the law would say that the mp3 copies of the song could not be used at the same time. There is the problem.
Otherwise Blockbuster could make DVD copies of all there VHS tapes and form a a mini-partership which would allow all parterns to have unfettered access to the material.
I think Cringley is onto something though, morph his idea into a music rental system, similar to Blockbuster. Form a company, buy CDs (you'll need multiple copies of popular CDs) and offer streaming access to that music though a subscription service.
However the max amount of people who can listen to the same song at the same time is limited to the number of copies of the song that have been purchased. Example you buy 10 copies of CD "X" you can now offer out 10 streams of each song on CD "X", if an 11th person wanted to listen to that song they would need to be queued.
Would probably be legaly viable now would it be practical from a business view.
I have no
According to the "Origin of Phrases" page:
One red cent
Meaning: A single symbolic penny.
Example: I refuse to pay even one red cent for the work until you complete the whole job.
Origin: The "Red" refers to both the color of a penny (one cent) and the image that used to be on the penny, an American Indian head. Redskin is a slang term used for American Indians.
Before today's Lincoln penny was the Indian Head penny.
The Indian Head penny was first issued in 1859 and looks just like that as issued in 1908 (before the Lincoln Cent). The only difference was that those from 1859-1864 were of a different copper-nickel alloy while 1864 started the common bronze, which was used until 1982. (You didn't know it changed then, did you?)
The copper-nickel alloy has a reddish tint, which turns redder with time and skin oil.
Before the Indian Head penny was the "Buzzard Cent", as the One Cent coins in 1856-1858 were called. The flying eagle on the coin was damned as an ugly bird and it wasn't popular.
However, it was the first "small cent" using about the same size as our penny today. In the half century before this, One Cent coins were about the size of today's Half Dollar! (of course they were also worth something then)
I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
If they can get people to pay to hear them play, all well and good.
If they can persuade people to pay money for recordings og their work, even better.
But for a situation to arise where people are forced to pay where a free alternative is available is totally illiberal and against all rational concepts of a free market.
Before copyright, only the best music survived, because it was worth supporting (in an abstract, not an economic sense).
Now we have a morass of pop-pap and gangsta-rap, thrash metal and tuneless, inane crap thrust down our throats by the marketing fools, and they expect us to part with our money like good little drones.
And I'm not a classical music snob - I merely prefer to listen to properly crafted music played by musicians who have a love of what they do, rather than mechanically generated studio pap.
Patronage - let's go back to it. There was plenty of music around then, all played by real people who ate, payed rent and enjoyed life.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
"Under your proposal, any artist, with or without a label, would sell exactly one CD to, well, the entire world, because people would be crazy to not participate in "Snapster" if it exists."
Based on Napster, Kazza, etc . . . that does not seem to be the case. emmnemm had probably the most downloaded album ever, yet he still went platinum.
"The only way to raise the price that Snapster will pay for your albums is by "getting established." The only way most bands will be able to do that is... big shock here... sign a contract with a big, evil record label (now a "marketing service") who is entitled by the contract terms to something like 95% of the sale (not sales, sale) of each CD the band releases under the contract."
Not true. IT is the way it is currently done, but it is not the only way. Point in fact, if it was the only way, music radio would never have started.
Music Radio stations need music. If big corpration stop providing it, they will go to the local talent. The raio station would need to pay a fee every time a song is paid. There is your money.
I would also like to note, if all new musician refused to sign the current contracts, the contract will get changed. Contrary to what music companies will tell you, they need to to survive.
I know it would be hard to resist the money, but I would wager most muscians could hold out longer then the reccord company, espcially if it was done en-mass.
Sure, the musicians will have to eat hot dogs and top ramen for another year, but how much would a record company loose if the didn't sign new talent for 4 quarterin a row? there stock would plummet and they would loose millions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on