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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."
This idea is a follow-up yet it's something we should be following very seriously. Right now, a country station gets to pay Madonna/Celine Dion because they sell the most albums. This could change all that!
Yeah, Madonna and Celine aren't what sell today, but what do I know...
This only pays based on CD/DVD burning - whereas most usage would occur when downloaded MP3's are played on the computer itself. I know I haven't burned more than a handful of CD's, instead using my PC as jukebox...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Voucher socialism not a bad thing? Care to explain that comment? I suppose it's not a bad thing if you happen to be one of the free-loaders getting money you don't deserve.
Why should I pay any tax on DVD drives, writable media, ISP service, etc. if I never have and never will download any artists material? All of these items which might have this proposed compulsory licensing fee have legal uses unrelated to the theft, use, or enjoyment of "artists" copyrighted material. For example, most of my HD space, DVD backups, and internet bandwidth is consumed by my own digital pictures.
If people want music, then they should pay for music. Hidden taxes that penalize all for the misbehavior of some seem like a very bad idea.
I guess if this goes through, I will have to sign up as a licensed creator of digital photographs and then assign all these "artists" tax dollars to myself.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Why on earth would you want to implement it that way? The idea is to compensate artists for their work, not to force J-Lo to to subsidize whoever it is that posers like to tell themselves they're fans of. I mean, I can't watch Temptation Island and then tell their advertisers to give their money to C-Span.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Any potential mass-market technology is going to have to be at least as easy to use as the current standard.
In the case of music purchases, which is more likely to catch on - something like iTunes, or a Rube Goldberg contraption based around voting and serial numbers?
I'm a systems engineer, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in complicated systems for getting the music I like. I buy CDs at stores or through the mail, because it's easy, the audio quality is perfect, and I can play the discs anywhere.
Is the average consumer going to be willing to put up with a more complex system like the one this article describes? I doubt it.
Like many other schemes I've seen, this one also reduces professional musicians to the equivalent of street buskers: putting their music out and hoping they make a couple of bucks off of it from the generous. If the world suddenly turned into a radically left-wing place overnight, I predict that the quality of music would go way down, very quickly. Professional musicians right now can spend months polishing up their tracks before release, because they can make a living at it. If they're just getting tips, few or none of them could. A lot of them wouldn't even bother to release music at all. I know I wouldn't.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Fake artists is either an oxymoron or a largely all encompasing group noun. If I were to record myself banging trash cans together I would be just as much of an artist as most of the crap out there. I figure if they have any right to sign up for the loot then I certainly do too. Particularly when by legal standards the non-fake artists are recording silence and claiming they own it.
If I can help this lame scheeme fall apart by announcing my intention to sign up, let me record that announcement and call it art.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
but he's also pretty sure that most of the users will be too dumb/unconcerned about the distribution of the money that they'll leave the defaults, in which case said virus/worm will succeed in screwing with where the money goes.
think about the mass of people downloading files, they're mostly non-technical users and are probably infected by various crap already.
it basically outlaws any open source.
,there have been "artists", "Mages", Actors, writers, painters, etc... forever. and 99% of the human history on this planet there has been no copyrights and no tight controls over your "intellectual property" and it did not hurt the human races artistic development at all.
If my mp3' player must talk to my cd drive to the outside servers about my special "string" then me writing my own mp3 player that doesnt do this inane dance makes me an instant felon.
Or how about My OS that doesnt do this BS they dream up? It also would be illegal?
How about telling the artists and money grabbers to simply shut the hell up?
if you aren't writing music and performing to entertain then you are in it for the wrong reasons.
Cripes
All of this is just the loud whining of the greedy no talent types.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We trust them to keep it at the initial more or less fair levels
We trust them not to take a slice of money, as an admin fee.
We trust them to remunerate the artists in the first place.
We trust them not to privatise the agency overseeing the whole shebang and sell it off to the RIAA.
We extend this trust to them, I can only assume, based upon the high moral standards recently demonstrated by our elected officials. To say nothing of those that shall come after them, chanting as they come "Times have changed. The situation is different"
And we should request this? Maybe if we're extra nice we get them to kick us all in the balls as well.
I'm with you pal - the guy who porposed this one has been sneaking hits off of Darl McBride's pipe
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Why isn't there just the simple argument for limited term, non-transferable copyrights? The artists would be able to profit from their artistry for 10 years, and then we can all trade their music like crazy after that. The RIAA couldn't bilk the money from the artists because the artists couldn't give up their copyrights to the publishers, and instead the labels would serve their rightful place as marketers and distributors.
10 years is about right. (I work hard on a song, from a couple of months to even 2 years to get it just right.) Record it, sell copies of it. 10 years later the copyright expires and I stop collecting royalties on a song I wrote a decade earlier.
The two main problems with the current system are that (1) the labels control the musicians through indentured servitude by copyright transfer and (2) the labels control the music choices through narrow distribution channels.
Limited term, non-transferable copyright. It just makes sense.
MORTAR COMBAT!
actually, I dealt with this in a rough outline of models in a September 2000 presentation I gave at the Digital Commerce Society of Boston.
Making money in a post Napster world
Much better to eliminate copyright, and give tax-paid high-speed free internet access to the entire population, including "artists". The non-monetary gain of that should more than compensate them - think of the wealth of information they have just been granted access to. I predict that's what Europe will do inside of ten years, if America doesn't go completely totalitarian and decide to nuke us.
(Americans: if any of you think nuking us is a good idea, I remind you that while Europe has less nukes than you, we have better bioweapons.)
- I pay a tax on "media products".
- The government gives me a coupon for this tax.
- I tell the government who to give my tax money to.
How is this complicated, inefficient scenario any better than me directly giving the money to the people I want to? There is no garrentee that this tax money will get to "artists" as I could give all the money to myself. So it is in effect nothing more than a cumbersome charity program. Even if this system worked like he claimed it would with everyone dutifully entering in all their coupons to be reported by their mp3 player, it still has problems (many of which are shared my other compulsory licencing schemes).- Everyone has to pay the tax regardless of whether they use the media to listen to music or not. Most notably, businesses, who would have to pay since they use the internet and backup media just like everyone else.
- Everyone has has the same amount of money to give out. Therefore an avid music fan would end up splitting his coupons between hundreds of good bands. Those more complacent about music (the majority) would still have the same amount of money to give out, an it would likely go to someone who sounded good on the radio. Therefore, independant bands would likely get even less money than they do now, while mass marketed music would get even more.
- What if I listen to music in differnent places. Say I mostly listen to techo on my main computer while I'm coding, but listen to completely different music in my car and in the mp3 player in my living room. Now I am back to manually divying up my coupons, lest all my money go to techo.
- It has a central weakness in the government database system. Anything with that much money at stake would be under heavy attack.
- The government, not individuals decides how much money people should devote to music. This opens more doors for lobbying by the RIAA to increase the music tax.
I have been sceptical about all of the compulsory licencing ideas floating around, but this one has got to be the worst yet. All we need are good internet resources for the discovery and purchase of music, and there would be no need for illegal music sharing. We are starting to the latter with iTunes and what not, but the former needs more work.