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Ask a Music Producer/Publicist About Filesharing and the RIAA
Bill Evans is one of those people in the music business who doesn't get a lot of public exposure, but keeps the wheels cranking behind the scenes. He's not just a musician and techie, but a publicist whose clients include Numavox Records artists Kerry Livgren and Michael Gleason as well as progressive rocker Neal Morse; he's produced (among many others) songs for the Burning Annie soundtrack and the Kansas Tribute Project. Naturally, since he makes his living in the music business, Bill is not 100% in favor of unrestricted filesharing. But what might work? And what might not? Let's find out what this music biz insider thinks -- one question per post, of course. Answers to the "Top 10" questions will be published soon after he gets them back to us.
We've got lots of rockin' tunes, such as Stomach Ulcers, She's Butch, Chinese Water Torcher and Roadkill on the Don Valley Parkway.
Actually, we broke up in 1987 after our buddy Colin smashed a garage window during our Hallowe'en concert and the garage door opener jammed up, but I'm sure I can rally the troops and we can dust off our awesome $200 guitars and vintage 80's keyboards (don't forget those cool Simmons drumpads) and learn a couple of chords again.
Oh, our singer is somewhere in Africa, shouldn't be too hard to find - hey John, if you're reading this, give me a buzz - we're gonna be famous!
Bill, why does Kansas suck so much?
Oops. You're right -- that's what I get for reading Slashdot first thing in the morning. Sorry about that.
Your system would certainly solve a number of common gotchas related to IP, such as trying to get an "at cost" replacement copy when your current legitimate copy is damaged. It would also help services like BeamIt that mp3.com tried to offer, where you ran a program that would verify you had a physical CD and, after that, it would let you stream music from that CD wherever you went.
However, I think that the way you propose things has too many problems. First, it sounds like you're killing off the library (or at least the non-public domain parts), as your licenses to a given work are non-transferrable. I think the current system, where the physical copy serves as the defacto license and it can be passed around but can't exist in two places at once, is a pretty nice compromise between the rights of the copyright holder and the rights of the public.
Second, I think there are too many practical concerns relating to managing the licensing rights. I know I'd love it if the sum of all the IP I purchased were virtually attached to my identity and always at hand, but I'm not willing to make the sacrifices necessary for a DRM implementation that would securely do this.
There's also an issue of IP effort sometimes being related to the physical format rather than the more intangible creative work. For example, getting a movie from film form into DVD form and VHS form isn't as automated as you'd expect. There's enough room for error that screwups have happened (such as with the Back to the Future DVDs). For higher quality releases, you'll have someone like the movie's cinematographer supervising the transfer.