Why Only Music?

The Importance of writes "Last week, Slashdot readers provided a number of answers to the question "What is Music?" in the context of compulsory licensing. Now LawMeme asks another question about compulsory licenses: Why Only Music? Many compulsory licensing schemes have been proposed to cover music alone, but most of the arguments in favor of a compulsory license for music apply equally as well to other media types. Millions share movies, P2P can't be stopped, the MPAA hasn't provided legitimate alternatives for what consumers want, etc. If music should have a compulsory license, why shouldn't movies, software, ebooks and other media also be covered by compulsory licenses?"

Comments

Firstus postus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Email is king when it comes to my desktop, and Evolution is the best I've found. I like the virtual folders, multiple accounts, search capabilities, speed, and looks. There is very little I don't like about Evolution. That's why it's number one with me.
Digital photos are big with me, too. That's why the GIMP, gPhoto, and GQview are all on my top ten list occupying the number 2, 6, and 8 spots.

For my word processing needs, I look to OpenOffice.org. I know. It's not as fast or as polished as StarOffice, but not only does it do everything I need an office suite to do, it's free. That makes it number 3 on my list.

I've been a fan of gnumeric for several years. It's still my favorite spreadsheet for Linux. It weighs in at number 4. Browsers are a different story. I've switched several times, most recently away from Galeon. These days it's Mozilla for me, and it ranks 5th overall.

Number 7 is a game. All work and no play, you know. This little jewel has been played about 75 million times since it was released earlier this year. It's not free as in speech, but Id made it free as in beer. Enemy Territory is great for killing. Time, that is.

My 9th and 10th picks are new apps. New to me, at least. Number 9 is tvtime, a really nifty Linux TV program with spectacular performance. Good enough to hook your game console's TV out up to your TV card and play at the PC, too. And in 10th spot, good enough to rank higher if only I used it more, is Scribus, the great new DTP program for Linux.

OK, those are my picks. Of course your own personal top ten are going to be driven by how you use your Linux desktop, not how I use mine.

Here are mine again, this time in order.

1. Evolution
2. the Gimp
3. OpenOffice.org
4. Gnumeric
5. Mozilla
6. Gphoto
7. Enemy Territory
8. GQview
9. tvtime
10. Scribus

Bandwidth and cheap media.

[gpinzone]

MP3 are ripe for the picking, but DVDs (or even Divx rips) are not so easy. Once bandwidth and cheap media catches up, the story will change. Besides, everyone knows you have to take small steps. First you fight hard to get it approved for music only, then you argue it should be applied for other stuff because it's unfair that only music should be protected. After a few years, people will forget to ask whay any of it should be treated specially. It will all be absorbed into the cost of doing business.

Theft is not what anybody wants

[Sean80]

Maybe this will be considered a troll. But, I feel that sometimes the posting as written needs to be questioned - we can't just take it as the truth and proceed from there.

"...the MPAA hasn't provided legitimate alternatives for what consumers want..."

In my view, this statement is almost laughable. What's the purpose of it? To justify theft? That's a very, very slippery slope indeed.

Re:Theft is not what anybody wants

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

In my view, this statement is almost laughable. What's the purpose of it? To justify theft? That's a very, very slippery slope indeed.

Here is the misconception, copyright violations are not theft. Copyright ownership is not an absolute right like property ownership is. Copyright is a comprimise struck by society with artists and writers. The purpose of compulsory licensing was to modify the compromise to maintain it's fairness. The MPAA and RIAA have no absolute right to control their members' creations. Neither do their members for that matter. If the MPAA does not live up to it's side of the compromise, we the people reserve the right to renegotiate.

No slippery slope, no theft. If we give in to the MPAA and RIAA or any of those extremists that say intellectual propery is the same as real property, then we are giving up our rights and heading down a slippery slope.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody...

-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813

How can this be lega.?

[Hugh George Asm]

It'd ludicrous to think of paying in advance a "tax" to the RIAA for blank media because we might use it to copy their music. Applying that logic to other areas, why not stipulate brief jailtime for anyone buying a knife, because they might use it to kill somebody?

Re:How can this be lega.?

[kanotspell]

I'd be fine with it if it shut them up.

Really, I'd rather pay a few unnecessary cents on every data CD I burned if it meant I didn't have to deal with DRM, suponeas, bitching about sales figures etc etc etc...

Would it be right? No. Worth the cost? ...

How

[Breaker_1]

Why would anyone would to apply this type of license to movies or ebooks? Think about it... the tracks on an audio cd don't really depend upon other tracks, meaning you can downloading (or license) one track and who cares right? You don't usually have to hear the other tracks to be able to enjoy a single track. Movies would be different, as would books... would you buy a part of a story? I don't think I would, and if I were going to have to purchase the entire movie or book to be able to buy a license for it, I'd rather go to a book store or a video store and purchase a real copy... Maybe I'm just looking at this wrong.. not seeing the true intent of the article?

Re:Hey

[bobKali]

Yea yea yea, and without government farm subsidies 30% of agriculture would evaporate overnight also. Without steel tarrifs 80% of steel would evaporate overnight... Let's not forget that copyright originated as a means of censorship (proud tradition that) and the real "rights" to creative works belong to the whole of humanity - we're only trading those rights temporarily to encourage and reward people for creating those works for us. But we seem to be giving up more and more without getting anything back in return.

Oh, and compulsary copyrights on everything creative sounds like a great idea. Lets just levy more taxes and use the revenue to support whatever art our federal government wants to support. Long live the NEA!!!

I'm not against copyrights, but I am against the perpetual extension of copyright terms. I'm also against labeling copyright infringement as theft - call it what it is - infringement. It's wrong, it's immoral, but the owner is not deprived of the work when it is illegally coppied.

The question should be, "Why Compulsory Licenses?"

[why-lurk]

The author never stops to consider whether compulsory licenses are a good thing, instead attempting to find as many forms of content to apply them to as possible.

I don't accept that compulsory licences on music are a good thing, and I *know* they would be bad for software. Compulsory license regimes create a single large collection agency that gets to rake in money for doing nothing, and dole out money to every content creator in the related industry.

What if you write software and don't want to have all payments go through a fee-stealing middleman who allocates payments based upon rigged marketshare numbers? (See Arbitron and Payola)

What if you don't want to pay a tax (on income? on broadband connections? on filesharing software?) in order to continue to subsidize the corrupt middlemen in inefficient industries, and to compensate for the "stealing" (perceived or real) that someone else wants to do? What if the compulsory tax is estimated based upon the RIAA's guess of how many songs were downloaded each day over all filesharing networks? Nevermind whether the downloaded songs had already been paid for once, twice, or a dozen times by the same user.

Compulsory licenses should not be viewed as an ideal way to obtain free access to all of the content that corporations want to lock up indefinitely in closed formats. They are an occasionally necessary evil in relationships between one bloated industry and another (see broadcasters and RIAA).

--kirby

What people want...

[Quixadhal]

I don't want to steal music, video, software, or anything else really. What I *do* want is a clear resolution to the "problem" that the failing industries of America seem to have created.

When I purchase some bit of media, do I *own* it, like we've all assumed for the last couple of centuries... or have I purchased the *rights* to use the content?

If I OWN the media in question, then it's mine. I can do whatever the hell I want with it, provided that I don't resell it, or try to claim it as my creation. If I buy a screwdriver, I have every right to use it as a hammer -- despite what the Hammer Consortium wants me to do! If I own a CD, then I have every right to turn it into mp3's and stick them on my hard drive using a non Microsoft-Endorsed OS if I like.

If, on the other hand, I'm purchasing the rights to USE the content, then the media is simply a delivery mechanism. I want the RIAA to mail me CD's of all the vinyl records I own, and the MPAA to mail me DVD's of all my video tapes. I'm willing to pay shipping, and a small reasonable fee to cover materials. Oh, and those CD's that got scratched, I want replacements for those too since they were supposed to last for 20 years.

The industry seems to think they can take the best of both worlds, so we don't really own anything at all. THAT is why I don't buy CD's anymore. It's bad enough to spend $15 on a disc which should cost about $7... but to then have it be unusable in half the players out there, and be told that if I rip it to mp3 format I'm considered a thief... one doesn't insult one's customers if one wishes them to remain customers.

I don't see much point to downloading full DVD's over the net... but downloading digitized TV shows that your local cable monopoly refuses to carry is useful, and downloading older rips of things that aren't available is very handy. If Paramount were to make Enterprise available for download at $2 an episode (or thereabouts), I'd be happy to grab it from the source and avoid the variable quality rips, and slow connections... but they don't. I see it as a natural evolution of asking someone to tape a show and mail it to you for the same reasons.

Ummmm......

[soakingwetcat]

Ummmm - is it because we play music all the time, and because the file sizes for your typical MP3 are so small, that even a 56k connection can amass a sizable collection in a relatively short time? Sorry - the answer seemed obvious. That and with most media players automatically retrieving tags for the songs - easy to see which ones you are missing too, can set up to play by genre, artist, album - a friggen jukebox! Who wants to pay for a 100 disc cd-changer anymore and get the same sort of things you get out of any one of the media players out there. F that. I can play by artist, genre, personalized playlists of more songs than one of those hurking monsters - and I don't have to worry about a scratched cd anymore, the machine busting on me. It's all good. Movies are harder to download - not much so with a nice connection, but slower nevertheless. It's becoming more of an issue though in the last year or so with more people hopping on broadband. Might see the Movie industry adopt the same stronghold tactics the music industry soon enough. But you know what? Good DVDs are totally worth buying, especially all the features jammed on in. I wet my pants with the Fellowship special edition, and can't wait for the two towers special edition. Ya sure - you can copy a dvd, but you need the original in some way to do it. Rent or borrow it is the only way to get all the features. I don't see too many 5gb isos out there for movies - mostly crappy divx files (though I have seen a few good ones). I've made some rather high quality divx files, but again - a good dvd has a lot of features that you can't get in divx. Now an MP3? Hell - you get it all in a nice small filesize portable just about everywhere now. The price that the RIAA expects me to pay for a CD is a total ripoff. CDs are dead anyhow - about to go the way of the LP, the 8-track, and the cassette. Most of our future is going to be wrapped up in files as a far as music goes. It's all going to be about files. Files files files. There really is no other "format" you can predict for the future. Every copy protection will be broken by someone - eventually. DVD saw it. Every game publisher has to deal with things like CD-Clone or Alchohol or whatever the years best copy protection scheme is out there. You can not regulate the behavior of 3 billion people. Too many countries. Sure - pass laws in the U.S. - think scandinavia is gonna care? Think a German is gonna blink an eye? The same goes in reverse - think the guy who really wants to play that new Japanese game is gonna care about the laws over there? Sorry - the RIAA got smacked in the face by the internet - but that's how it goes. DeBeers is about to get smacked in the face with companies able to mass-produce diamonds of exceptional quality and size. I asked my wife - would you rather have a 3 carat stone you could buy for 50 bucks, or a 1/2 carat for 2000. She said - are you nuts? She doesn't care about the fact it was man-made - its a diamond. I don't know what the RIAA expects us as a whole to say anymore - but whatever it is they want, it's just not going to happen. Better to accept it now and get on with it. I think we've screamed enough the business model needs to be changed - but they find it unacceptable. Sorry - but that's how it is. I think Itunes and a few other sites have the right idea - but it's still not going to be enough. Ya, I've heard all about M$ and the upcoming protection schemes to files - but what's to stop everyone to simply change OSs? Or it being circumvented? Or sales slump? Get the word out that people are sticking with XP, NT, 98, because they don't want such restrictions and you think Microsoft is going to care about the RIAA? Microsoft is about Money. Linux is on a good role despite what SCO says - and if Linux provides the community with everything they want minus the restrictions - well, I could very well see that as killing M$ - and I don't see that happening.

Hilights problems with compulsory licensing

[laird]

Taking the compulsory licensing model and applying it to other media hilights the flaws in the model, for music as well as other media.

One problem is in how money moves. Instead of dealing with the relatively straightforward counting of albums (or games, or DVD's) sold, you'd have to somehow measure files moving around the network. Since there's no way to accurately measure how files move around a p2p network(especially with encrypted networks like FreeNet), the division of money would be the subject of ongoing (legal) fighting. If people weren't fighting over the numbers, they'd be fighting over the formula used to split the money.

Then there's pricing. In a network where everything is the same price (free), how do you differentiate between low-value products cranked out for almost nothing and the huge, high-value productions? There are plenty of niches where the number of customers is small but people are willing to pay more (e.g. massive RPG's, enterprise software).

Another problem is that the total dollars for the music (etc.) business would be fixed, rather than fluctuating up and down based on people's desire for music (etc.). This means that there's less reward for making great music (i.e. the classics that grow the business). Instead, the winning strategy would be to crank out "OK" music as cheaply as possible to collect the guaranteed income.

Imagine a new game company introducing a great new game, Deer Hunter. That game created a new genre of game, selling through an entirely new distribution channel (cheap, simple games selling through grocery stores, etc.), which grew the game industry dramatically. In the compulsory licensing model, before launching the game they'd have to make sure that their new distribution model was counted properly, and that the proper accounting would be done. And even if they were a hit that doubled the size of the game business (which is what actually happened), instead of getting 100% more income into the industry, the new game would suck 50% of the fixed revenue from other companies, so they make 1/2 what they would have, and other companies whose "sales" didn't actually go down would lose 50% of their revenue.

media socialism

[HBI]

I would like explained to me exactly how compulsory licensing is going to produce quality art, whether in music, movies, or the written word.

Exactly what impetus does an artist have to produce quality stuff under this socialist system? Why not turn out total horseshit. I mean after all, you're getting paid anyway. Furthermore, what if I record a song in my basement. Do I get a cut? How do they gauge how large of a cut I deserve?

This sounds like one of those stillborn ideas.