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EU Proposes Online Music System
jefu writes "According to a story in the Globe and Mail, the European Commission has proposed a unified online music licensing (and copyright) system. The article says that one of the points of doing this is to get copyright and license fees to the artists and to simplify the maze of copyright regulations that cover Europe."
When I read the title, I thought they were going to create a P2P system :P
This is a good idea, providing they come up with a system which can take part-time and amateur artists into account.
Currently (at least in Finland) marginal artists get next to nothing. Revamping the system would provide an opportunity to rectify this issue.
.: Max Romantschuk
EU proposes system for on-line music
Thursday, July 7, 2005 Updated at 2:44 PM EDT
Associated Press
BRUSSELS, Belgium -- The European Commission on Thursday proposed a single Europe-wide copyright and licensing system for on-line music, to boost the European Union's music business.
EU Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said European on-line services had to be improved to make copyrights cheaper for artists to obtain.
"We have to improve the licensing of music copyright on the Internet," McCreevy said, adding such a system would ensure "Europe's creative community will get the lion's share in revenues achieved on-line."
Currently artists have to secure copyrights in each of the EU's 25 member nations, with each country requiring separate copyrights for the right to transmit songs over the Internet, a complex and expensive process the EU head office said.
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As a result of these costs, on-line music sales in Europe have lagged behind those in the United States. Last year, the U.S. had an estimated $248-million (U.S.) in on-line music sales compared with Europe's $32.5-million.
Musicians make money from their music after registering copyrights with collective rights managers. Those managers then license songs to on-line services, radio stations, dance clubs and other outlets. All these registrations are complex and costs artists a lot of money.
The EU head office said a single system governing music rights would save money.
"The most effective model for achieving this is to enable right-holders to authorize a collecting society of their choice to manage their works across the entire EU," said the Commission in a statement, adding such a system would "considerably enhance" earnings for artists.
Léa Gris
Since allowing you to have to deal with just one copyright office to be valid for all of Europe is the exact sort of thing that inspired the European Economic Community thing that became the EU in the first place.
Unfortunately, you can absolutely bet 100% that if a system such as this is proposed or comes anywhere near to implementation, the biggest and most affluent copyright holders will use it as an excuse to grab new and undue powers for themselves-- powers which they will then never, ever let go of, and be defending in a hundred year's time as "the way things have always worked".
Thus what ought to be a plus for everyone (a unified, more efficient copyright system) is going to be a massive downer for consumers, or at least that subset of consumers who wish to be treated like consumers or citizens and not cattle.
The EU was initially set up as a free trading group. The aim has since become to create a level playing field that allows businesses from all member countries to operate in the eurozone; this isn't just free trade but e.g the free movement of capital and labour. This inevitably means changes at the political level to harmonise standards and regulations.
So I think harmonising licensing and copyright systems is a natural step, and a good one SO LONG AS it is not seized as an opportunity for radical reform in the favour of corporations over the citizen, e.g. extending the lifetime of copyright.
As much as TFA says the system is supposed to increase revenues for artists by streamlining things, that's great. But I suspect most of what will happen is that another government-mandated program will be too slow and inflexible to allow its supposed beneficiaries to profit from a rapidly changing business world.
Chalk one up for the people who can't even get a constitution done. Do you really want them involved in your label? Software patents, anyone?
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
let the project be discussed by politicians, artists and fans. Lock all the managers, producers, studio owners etc in a dungeon, take their phones away from them, close the exit with a concrete wall, and don't let them contact the outside world until the project is ready. Otherwise it will be another horrible "all your base" takeover of your rights.
Actually, once the project is over, don't let them out either.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Everyone who makes music available for listening to, should have to publish the name and address of the copyright holder and the amount of money that you need to send to that person in order to be allowed to make a single, permanent copy of that music {i.e. on a medium which cannot be prepared for re-use using generally available equipment -- to re-use a CD, you would have to melt it down} plus an indefinite number of temporary copies. The licencing fee would be the same for any party. If any money changes hands at the time the music changes hands, and the licencing fee is to be stopped out of the transaction charge, then this must also be clearly stated.
Example: I buy a CD of Lester Norton's greatest hits for £12.50. It says in the booklet that Norton owns the copyright on all his music and the licence fee is £1.50 for the album. My friend wants a copy of the album. I make a copy of the CD, and send a postal order for £1.50 to Lester Norton. He gets his money, and my friend saves the best part of £11. Everyone is happy.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The problem with that is that open DRM is an oxymoron. If it's open it can be bypassed. DRM works only if there is a secret component that can't be bypassed to get at the raw data, and that inevitably means that access to the implementations of it has to be covered by restrictive NDA's.
It's called the doctrine of first sale and it has been recognized time and again by the US and other courts that it also applies to instances of copyrighted works. It's fair use.
The doctrine of first sale has even been used to challenge End User License Agreements
Therefore is the following is self evident that copyright legislation should grant the following rights under the concept of fair use:
1. Acknowledge the supremacy of the doctrine of first sale : When you purchase an instance of a copy of copyrighted work, your rights to view,use,modify,combine,inter-operate with, dispose or resell that one instance should not be impeded by either legislation or technology. This fact has been recognized time and again by the US courts.
2. The doctrine of first sale applies to both physical media and digital content where the receiver pays a transaction for particular instances of a copyrighted works: When you purchase an instance of a copy of copyrighted work that involves the buyer making a choice for that instance of copyrighted work and entering into a transaction with the seller, then the buyer has the rights to that instance under the doctrine of first sale. Sellers of instances of copyrighted work cannot hide behind "provision as a service": when you pay for an instance, you own that instance.
3. You do not have the right to record content without permission of the copyright holders of a live performance ( play, concert etc ) or private performance ( film theater ) held on private property or performance venue. You pay to attend a performance at a physical venue, not for a copy of an instance of that performance.
4. Instances of copyrighted works broadcast ( as apposed to downloaded ) and received by a device held by individual person or on that person's property, may not be redistributed outside of that person's household to anyone who does not receive the content though the same service. You may record an instance of copyrighted work for later viewing ( timeshifting ) and distribute a copy along to any person whos household also receives that same broadcast service ( samaritan clause ). You many not redistribute or resell content recorded from a broadcast service to anyone not receiving that same broadcast service content.
5. Although you may not redistribute recorded copies of broadcast copyrighted content outside of the terms of (4), there should be no limit to what you may do with instances of those works within your household. You should have the right to modify the works, combine with other works and inter-operate with other works. You should also have the right to transform the instances of the copyrighted work so that it operates or can be viewed on other devices (mediashifting).
6. Copyright protection extends only to the particular work copyrighted. The copyright holder's exclusive rights should not extend to the right to deny others combining a legally acquired instance of a copyrighted work with other works. You should have the right to distribute and/or sell, patches, recipes and add-on components that refer and link to the content of the copyrighted work, as long as the distributed items do not contain content from the original copyrighted work. The resulting combined and/or transformed work that contains content from the copyrighted work sources can not be legally redistributed without the permission of all the copyright holders.
We have to ensure that file formats and protocols adopted should not limit the ability to sample mix and match. To do otherwise would limit peoples creativity.
If I purchase an instan
They should have true vision and start building a micropayments infrastructure for the whole of the EU and beyond.
Then not just the holy musicians can indulge in the utopia where talk is free but the beer is charged by the litre!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
All they EU is doing is facing the reality of the way technology is changing business practices and legislating appropriately which is so normal it should not be newsworthy. The old ways of doing business in the music industry are dying. You can either react to that by suing people who download music left right and center in the hope of keeping change from happening or you can do like Apple did and embrace the new way of doing business. Piracy not withstanding going into the online music business certainly does not seem to have done Apple any harm since people do seem to be prepared to pay for downloadable music even though they have the option of downloading pirated materials free of charge. I suppose you could make the argument that the law suits have actually discouraged people from consuming pirated music and thus helped online oufits like iTunes but I don't buy that argument since the chances of being caught while downloading pirated music are still very small.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Everything that can be heard can be listened. True. But a) Quality is lost b) see DRM as a 'in case you forgot the license agreement' protection scheme. It can be bypassed, sure but heck you can also bypass the store security system.
\u262D = \u5350
As far as I understand it, what is being proposed is that artist will be able to contract a single authority to distribute the music throughout the EU, rather than having to contract the appropriate authority in each state separately.
This means that (or so it is expected) the existing copyright monopolists (typically there is one authority which has exclusive rights in a state) will be forced to compete with one another. I believe that to be a Good Thing...from 25 monopolists to 25 companies, each having a pretty small market share.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
And, of course, because we're all trustworthy, it'll work fantastically well!
Neither I, nor my friends, would ever just copy music without paying for it. Ever. It would be morally indefensible!
Oh, and the cost of the album is more likely to be about £4. and would go to the record label, not the artist. It's them that own the rights to it, after all.
My Journal
Instead of the well-spun press-release why has noone bothered to read the f report the commision released today?
h t/docs/management/study-collectivemgmt_en.pdf
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/copyrig
Obviously those who use the words "unified" and "Europe" in the same sentence never got the memo...
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
If you pay your tax in dollars then you will be glad to know that your tax will not be wasted on this system.
It is for Europe.
Too true. Remember, this is the same EU that brought us the EU Copyright Directive, which is pretty much Europe's DMCA. It'll take a lot to convince me that they're doing this for the benefit of consumers.
Here's a great scenario for you, based on some investigation for an amateur dance club in the UK about the possibility of burning a selection of the best tracks used at club activities onto a small number of compilation CDs, so the club DJs don't have to carry several large boxes of CDs everywhere. For reference, the club already pays a fee to PPL for the right to play the copyrighted music in public at its classes and events. It also buys the original CDs just like anyone else.
It seems the club can also pay another fee to a different organisation, which gives it the legal right to make the compilations (and even to make multiple copies and sell the spares, with a few restrictions). However, while this would be more than enough, under UK law, to make the compilations normally, thanks to the EUCD those people making the compilations could be criminally liable for doing so if they take material from any "copy-protected" CDs. After all, circumventing copy protection now seems to be a criminal act in its own right here, even if you had every legal right to copy the protected material. <sigh>
Now, if the EU were to introduce some common sense to copyright -- the equivalent of fair use rights so everyone knows they're safe making a back-up or format-shifting material they've legally purchased, for example -- that would be great. If the EU want to introduce mandatory escrow for DRM-based material to guarantee that fair use, and prohibit the sale of music in any DRM'd form that doesn't submit a copy for escrow first, that would be in the interests of consumers and yet still consistent with protecting the legitimate rights of copyright holders.
I'm guessing this is neither of those things, but then this is also the EU that just threw out software patents, so there is some hope and perhaps I should keep the faith. Time will tell...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm against this kind of unificated legislation. There're several reasons, one being that they will most likely try to base it on the American broad copyright.
The swedish copyright which I think is great, makes it possible for only items which reaches a "work of art" level.
This means silly stuff like cease and desist letters cant be copyrighted to keep them secret from outside parties except the legal advisor.
Now, other sources of cultural exchange such as the pirate bay would most likely also be forbidden. Where even "linking" to the source of copyright will be forbidden. I'm not against allowing artists a fair pay for their work. But there's still a thin balance between making a system which is good and a system which limits freedom to the point it's silly.
I dont want a system which allows companies to extort minors.
from the big labels. I mean, draw up a simple law which brings a level playing field? With no loopholes? Mark my words, before you know it somebody will start talking about this disgusting "fair use" thing again!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Bypassing DRM of any description is trivial. At some stage, the digital signal must be converted to a reasonably high quality, analogue signal. This can be redigitised and now contains no DRM metadata -- just a list of numbers saying how far to move the loudspeaker cones, which can then be copied indefinitely without introducing any additional loss of quality. No DRM scheme is able to know the difference between a loudspeaker and an analogue-to-digital converter; and even if someone did find out a way, they still could not be sure that there was no microphone trained on that loudspeaker.
However, there is usually a place to get in upstream of the DAC. Since the specifications of many PC sound cards are published, it would not be difficult to make a device which sits on the computer's bus and pretends to be a sound card -- but in reality is storing the raw zeros and ones fed to it. These again are just numbers saying how far to move the speaker ones. A device like this could only be defeated by declaring entire makes and models of sound card obsolete, which would not be a popular move and might well be illegal under the WEEE directive.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Am I the only person here that is angered by this news item - and the way it's served to us?
First of all, everywhere in the article, we get excerpts saying "the artists pay too much money", "it costs the artists too much". Which is of course, totally BS, because the labels pay for these, as the artists don't own the copyright!
In other words:
The EU is spending our (I'm a EU citizen) money (all these procedures cost money), so that the record labels spend less trying to restrict us, while at the same time we are going to get the same price for the BS records they serve us?
You'll be seeing me again in a record store buying a CD in...2078. Because no way in Hell am I going to download a drm'ed version from an online store!
the key word here is artists; not the industry. i couldn't care less about popular artists not getting their royalties, but less popular artists need the money. i thought mp3.com was great back in the days before it became what it is now. the sad fact is for people who are interested in underground music there is sometimes no way to get this music other than p2p. a paid system which supports these artists is long overdue.
88%?
I think it's more important that copyrights exist in order to prevent others from taking your work and then slapping their name on it and selling it as their own or making copies and selling it without your authorization on the streets where the customer thinks they are buying a legitimate copy.
However, if someone says this is such and suchs work and puts it on their own media and gives proper credit it is my belief that it should be legal to do so.
This might seem strange, but copyrights were never really intended to extract money from the populace, but rather promote science and arts and to credit where credit is due.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Now if they could just get steady pricing as well, so the Brits would stop whinging about paying more. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The whole DRM thing does not work, at all, full stop.
Suppose we are using asymmetric encryption, with encrypting key P(x) and decrypting key S(x) such that S(P(x)) = x for all reasonable x. {In this application, we don't care whether or not P(S(x)) = x. It might do, it might not. It doesn't matter.} Now the player is fed P(x) and evaluates S(P(x)) to recover x. The point is, that the function S(y) has to be stated somewhere -- either in the player or on the medium. Even if the function S(y) is hard-coded into the player, a determined hacker might well be able to determine S(y) from a sufficiently thorough inspection of the player. But since the player already evaluates S(y) by design, as long as we have P(x) then we can recover x. We don't care about determining the function P(x) {we might, if we wanted to make recordings which would play on the player; but P(x) might well be published anyway, if it is sufficiently difficult to deduce S(x) from inspection of P(x)}, only its inverse S(x) -- which we actually already know, because we have a player.
What you really need is to be able to write something on the recording medium which can be read by a legitimate player, but not by pirates. That is the ultimate solution to the problem of unauthorised copying -- but unfortunately it also happens to be impossible. Not just supremely difficult, impossible. As impossible as having two things, each of which measured the same as a third thing, but which did not measure the same as each other. And the limitation is not with present-day technology, but with the universe itself.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
A major part of Trusted Computing is indeed about establishing an "open DRM system". In fact the entire system can be open source, or even GPL. Trusted Computing defeats the GPL. Trusted Computing makes the source code useless. If you attempt to modify the software then (1) the chip broadcasts that fact to anyone you connect to, and (2) the chip then prohibits you from reading the data files.
If you want more details or have any questions, just ask. I'm a programmer, I've read the Trusted Computing technical specifications (several hundred pages), and I have been researching and following the subject in depth.
The primary development work on an open DRM system is being done by OASIS. I've read some of their technical specification documents as well. In particular they are developing an open XML DRM Rights Language standard.
An interesting point is that OASIS never mentions Trusted Computing. It seems to me that they are deliberately careful about the language they use. They just so happen to use the exact same terms as the Trusted Computing documentation, and their system and features and requirements just so happens to exactly match up with the those of Trusted Computing, and they explicitly state that their standard can only function on top of a hardware security support system. So they are creating an open DRM system that will work with "any" open hardware security support system that happens to be exactly identical to the Trusted Computing Group's system.
Oh, and just a reminder... Microsoft's own website documents that the Security Support Component (SSC) of Longhorn (the operating system formerly known as Palladium)... that the chip *IS* the Trusted Computing Group's TPM security chip.
Oh, and anpther thing... Intel's LaGrande CPU security system... and AMD's Presidio CPU security system... and Transmeta's TSX CPU security system... well those all just so happen to be the Trusted Computing Group's TPM chip embedded into the CPU itself. And Intel's and AMD's Memory Virtualization systems... they just so happen to be Palladium's memory compartmentalization system to secure DRM software and DRM data against other software and to even protect them against the operating system itself.
You're right that open DRM systems are not possible with current computer systems. That is what they want CPUs themselves to be DRM enforcers, and why they want to ship DRM enforcement standard inside every single new computer sold, and why these chips will be boobytrapped and self destructing if you attempt to open them or read them or alter them.
Oh, and HP and IBM and Dell and pretty much every other major computer seller... they are already selling systems with this security chip embedded. In fact Samsung has announced that they will no longer manufacture ANY computers that are not Trusted equipped. The entire industry is gearing up for full-out Trusted Computing hardware deployment for the Microsoft Longhorn release in summer 2006. No one will realistic buy or sell a PC that is not Certified Windows Compatible. Any PC not so equipped will not fully function, and when you complain to Microsoft they will answer that it's because you have INCOMPATIBLE hardware and that it is your hardware manufacturer's fault.
Oh, and even more fun... the Tursted Computing group has announced a Trusted Network Connect project that would deny you an internet connection unless you are running a Trusted Compliant machine. In fact Microsoft has already announced that they are implementing that system under their own name... Network Access Protection.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.