Slashdot Mirror
Google Wins the Filesharing Wars?
The Importance of writes "Compulsory licensing schemes such as those proposed by the EFF have been critiqued, but now LawMeme has an interesting article that claims Google will win the filesharing wars if a compulsory license is adopted."
A Compulsory license is one which defines a preset rate for anyone to use without discrimination. Eg. The radio stations have a compulsory license that allows them to play any song they like as long as they pay the rights holder an amount based on number of listeners.
Musicians also have a compulsory license that allows them to perform or record any song written as long as the songwriter get payed a set amount.
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
Lets say that companies can go and centralize their networks - great, it will be much faster and efficient no doubt. But today the companies are not at risk any more, its the users! Users demand anonymity and centralized servers are far from it, the companies that will Prevail will be those who will give their users the best privacy they market can offer. So centralized networks will fail.
Dont just mail it - Maileet
In England and Holland you have to pay a license fee to the goverment (well a subset of it) for each receiver. It was originally a sum made up out of the number of radios, bw tv's and color tv's you had. Later this was simplified at least in holland.
From this license fee the programs were funded. In england this is the BBC who own a couple of stations and are required by the law to supply programming to the intrest of the nation. In the netherlands we have license holders who according to the number of members they have, membership fee is about 5 dollars last time I checked, get a number of hours to fill on the various radio channels and a amount of slots on the tv channels. In holland they also get income out of advertising. England doesn't have ads. Hmmmm adfree simpsons.
Because you need to pay the license fee on the basis of owning a receiver, not based on actual consumption you can say it is compusery. When the original home computers came out they used ordinary tv's, with receivers for their displays. This of course meant a hike in your license fees despite the fact that you did not watch any tv with them.
On the other hand the fee was hardly gigantic and it ensured that tv was of a reasonable quality. BBC programs are known around the world for their execellence (no I don't mean their news service). Dutch programs slightly less because of the language barrier nonetheless they used to win international prices routinely.
Plus it assured a restrained amount of ads. They are only allowed between programs. Plus programs are thightly regulated on things like sponsoring.
Okay now I explained tv licenses. You may have heard of the BBC director proposing to put all their content on the net. You see because it is a semi-goverment company paid by the citizens according to written law you could say that these citizens have paid for the creation of the content and therefore OWN the content. So copyright in this case becomes far less of an issue. Even more because the BBC can rely on its income from the licenses it doesn't rely have to worry about how the content it creates is watched. No ranting about people not watching the ads, like fox did, because there aren't any. No ranting about people recording eps, in fact they have several time olds series they lost but they found copies made by viewers, and then sharing them because as long as their is a tv involved they paid to view the content.
In holland we stopped the license fee since it was suggested that everyone owns a receiver anyway. So it is now collected through regular taxes. So it can be reasonably argued that any program is taxpayer owned.
So their are some clear benefits to doing it this way. Sure americans probably hate it but they are a silly bunch anway.
So why not use something similar for other content? Well the BBC is a monopoly, they get the all the money and they decide what to make with it. Of course there are all kinds of bounds and checks but a monopoly it is.
In holland we got competition between license holders. Currently one license holder BNN is having an ad campaign to get more people to become members of them. They need X amount of members to get Y amount of tv/radio hours. The bigger you are the more and better hours you get. Although there are some minority stations that get some according to intrest group.
But how would you do this with music? There is a lot of different companies. How would you decide how to distribute the money?
But I think that a compulsary license would work something like what I described above. In any case at least for TV it has been proven to work.
On the other hand we also have a different compulsary license in holland. Each DVD recordable has a .50/1.00 euro tax (depends on if it is + or - format) attached. Yes you read that right. The money goes to the movie industrie to compensate them for illegal copies. Of cour
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Gnutella and its ilk are a nightmare on searching. They consume an awfull lot of bandwidth on the protocol not on the actual exchange of files. For the moments that is how its got to be. But it is not efficient.
Oh and filesharing is legal people. It is copyright violation that you can at the moment be sueed for.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.