Post-copyright: Digital Cash and Compulsory Licensing?

gojomo writes "AaronSw offers a compelling idea: use anonymous transferable digital cash to allocate the monies collected for creators in a compulsory licensing scheme, to avoid some of the potential problems outlined by other compulsory critiques. LawMeme calls it a "Proto Whuffie" but expects fake artists to sign up for the loot. I might call it "voucher socialism" -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing."

Comments

RIAA dollars??

[soren42]

This is an excellent opportunity for the RIAA to leverage a private currency. They could control the cost per unit in US$, and actually charge sub 1 cent prices for certain independant artists, to encourage sales.

There was a good bit on Kuro5hin about this a little while back.

Uh.....

[GreenCrackBaby]

"the idea for our compulsory licensing system is this: we tax Internet connections and CD/DVD burners a small amount and send the money to the artists. In exchange, they let us download their songs and movies off the Internet. The problem is how to decide which artists should get the money without losing privacy, accuracy, or security."

For this to work, you'd be sending your money to the RIAA/MPAA member companies, not the artists (since artists certainly don't hold any copyrights anymore).

This scheme is essentially another take on the Canadian CD Levy process (presume guilt, put a levy on blank CDs, give levy money to copyright holders). Given that the $70+ million collected so far for the Canadian CD Levy has yet to be distributed because distribution isn't clear cut, I can't imagine an even more complex system working.