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Canadian Songwriters Propose Collective Licensing
aboivin writes "The Songwriters association of Canada has put forward a proposition for collective licensing of music for personal use. The Right to Equitable Remuneration for Music File Sharing would legalize sharing of a copy of a copyrighted musical work without motive of financial gain, for a monthly fee of $5.00 applied to all Canadian internet connections, which would be distributed to creators and rights holders. From the proposal: 'File sharing is both a revolution in music distribution and a very positive phenomenon. The volunteer efforts of millions of music fans creates a much greater choice of repertoire for consumers while allowing songs — both new and old, well known and obscure — to be heard. All that's needed to fulfill this revolution in distribution is a way for Creators and rights holders to be paid.'"
I'm moving to Canada. If I can churn out an album a week I should be swimming in money before I know it.
deus does not exist but if he does
Probably the same way the blank media levy is collected/distributed: lump sums given out to the songwriters' and musicians' guilds, which is then distributed by the guild on basis of need. Quite a fair way to do things, really, and one that the majority of Canadian musicians support wholeheartedly.
I agree with the proposal with one caveat: it shouldn't be applied to *all* internet connections. Just the so-called "high speed" ones. Anything 1mbit and over. Anything under that isn't fast enough to make filesharing worthwhile. More importantly, you can get a "high speed" connection in Canada that's 128kbit or 256kbit. For surfing the Internet or checking your e-mail, it's plenty fast enough. Even a 1mbit connection, which is one step above the entry level, is plenty fast enough for surfing and e-mail, and a lot of people will choose these slower services because they are priced much lower than an actual high speed connection.
We shouldn't be applying a levy of $5/month to a dialup Internet account that, itself, only costs $2.95/month, especially when the purpose of that levy is to combat a practice on the Internet that the $3/month connection simply isn't capable of. I'd happily pay an extra $5/month on my 7mbit cable connection, however, if it got rid of the legal grey areas surroudning file sharing. (how it's legal for me to download, sorta, but illegal for me to upload, for example)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
What about the three separate connections; two DSL and one cable, that I administer for remote locations to the business I run the network for? I have the firewalls and proxies set up to stop employees from downloading music and video, so should I have to pay $15 per month for a "service" which I am, in fact, expressely forbidding the networks to access?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't really see how this tax is going to work when I can usually get someone else's internet connection for free and generally that's not a big deal however with this tax how will it work? Also, could this harm city-wide wifi? I'm all for this if it comes to the US (the price is a bit steep but if it keeps the RIAA from attacking citizens its a good thing) but how will it work when there are multiple connections per person and one person can use other people's connection.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
It is indeed an interesting concept. The biggest problem with copyright is the tension between the public and artist both claiming ownership of the same piece of culture. (Actually, the biggest really would be piracy undermining it, but that's not really relevant) This has the potential to solve that tension, with the public paying for and owning their culture, while still paying for it, and encouraging its creation. However, I have a few reservations:
1) This approach would eliminate the more creative approaches to copyright. The artist would get paid, and that's that. There'd be no room for stipulation of other conditions, which would eliminate licenses like the GPL, if applied to software.
2) The system could get complicated while apportioning out funds to the artists. Do we pay all artists the same, regardless of popularity, or cost of production? That would discourage excellence or the creation of the more expensive artworks (like movies). Or do we implement a complicated and probably flawed system for measuring popularity of shared works and base all payments upon those measurements?
3) Which works do we buy? We can't possibly buy every single work that would qualify for copyright, otherwise we would be paying for every single cease-and-desist letter out there among other things. We need a system, or an organisation responsible for choosing works to be bought. It could be the government, but that will lead to the inevitable censorship issue. It could be a private organisation, but that leads to questions of profit motive and lack of perspective. The unfortunate truth may be that art is far too broad and varied to be effectively regulated.
Basically, the idea has potential, and we should probably concentrate on ironing out the kinks. When it's ready, we can then perform a parallel trial with traditional copyright, and see which consumers prefer. If the tax is large and well apportioned enough, we shouldn't see too much of a decline in the production of artistic works.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Anyway, 90% of the music I download is not covered by SOCAN in the first place, how do those artists get their money?
This is quite possibly the most important question about the whole scheme, because the answer is that most of the artists won't, and that ruins the entire justification for it in the first place, before you even consider the other problems with the setup.
I've seen how this plays out with other collection rackets like ASCAP, and it's very clear that especially as you move down the long tail, artists don't get paid. I know artists who *know* for a fact, their songs are being played on the radio, or in a commercial concert setting, and they're not being paid for those performances because they're too small. I know for a fact that I have tried to *volunteer* royalties to an artist where I was using their work in a setting that wasn't already covered -- and I was turned away. They don't care unless the pickings are big enough, and they don't pay out unless you pass a prevailing statistical threshold. Even some reasonably successful artists don't.
In order to get this stuff right, you have to be tracking exactly what's going through the pipes. And that currently is only possible at a point of sale or broadcast (and I don't think the rentiers have even gotten as far as bringing precision into that realm).
So a tax like this would essentially create a signle online distribution pie, fixed in size by the number of internet users, divied up amongst basically whoever some appointed gatekeeper can justify.
Terrible idea. We have enough of this going on in the industry and I think it's probable most artists and the art would be better off entirely without the gatekeepers, even if it meant forgoing the entire revenue stream. Because for most artists, that's more or less what happens anyway.
Tweet, tweet.
First, $1200 a year is too much. You have clearly exaggerated the likely costs of some things. Probably about half of that would do it. But even if that is not the case, it's still a good deal.
On the other hand. What would the benefits be, if every single book, film, piece of software, picture, etc. was yours to download whenever you wanted (because if it were legal, everyone would upload everything they had and there would be very few Bittorrent leechers).
Let's say you buy a Starbucks Latte for $3.50 every morning of every day. That would come out to roughly the same sort of money you are talking about. Now if someone told you that you could have the entirety of digitally reproducible human culture at your fingertips for the cost of one cup of coffee a day, wouldn't you be stark raving mad to turn them down?
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
If I'm not doing anything illegal, why would I pay an extortion fee on my internet connection which presumes that I am?
How do I know that the artists I listen to get paid from this? They're not Canadian, and they're not mainstream. So, whatever statistic they come up with isn't going to pay the people whose music I listen to.
I buy CDs because I like music; I love music in fact. I like to have the physical CDs, both to be sure that the artist gets paid, so that I have the physical medium to play, or to rip to MP3, or to read the liner notes, or,just because it's something tangible and I'm a materialistic bastard and I like to see a full CD rack (or, several, in fact).
There are record labels who I will buy almost anything I see with their name on it, because they've helped me to find a whole bunch of music I really love. I want them to get paid too; because they make it their job to find music they think I'll like, and that carries value to me.
I fail to see why I should fork over $5/month to some comittee so they can decide that Avril-fucking-Lavigne needs a cut of my music money, or that Ann Murray must have lost some money because I have an internet connection.
It's a complete cash grab, it presumes that I'm doing something naughty, and it's completely arbitrary and unfounded. I spend $500-$700/year on CDs, don't think that you're entitled to another $5 just because someone else downloaded your music without paying. And, before you point out that's about 1% of my music budget, it is the principal of the thing. I'm not intending on subsidizing anyone else's music habit.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In France about the same thing was supposed to pass with the local version of the DMCA (it was called "license globale").
In the end, it was shot down, by means of numerous violations of the way laws are voted (changing the text minutes before the vote, with a very large text). Of particuliar interest was how film industry lobbyist came inside the national assembly building (which is strictly forbiden); right after this, the law didn't include films anymore, only music.
As for the criticisms: how is this different from television?
The fact: the product is easy to distribute to everyone at the same time, with no additional cost;
The conclusion: everyone who is able to receive it pays for it.
Then you distribute the money based on a statistical evaluation of how much each artist is viewed, just as public TV does (for exemples, piratebay statistics or the like).
I really don't see how it is a problem or even a new idea.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
back when napster was good, and used by 60+ million people, the record industry should have just bought it and charged $15 a month for access, filesharing and mass copyright infringement would never have happened and the record industry would be on a record high, now artists, are proposing a broken version of the same system out of desparation due to the horrible way in which they have been screwed over.
Being a Canadian, this probably affects me more than the majority of readers here.
I might go for this, but the implementation would be tricky. What I have in mind is the following.
1) Do not tack this directly onto the internet bill without consent of the user.
2) Should be $3.00 or lower, scaled to the quantity of songs downloaded
3) Should take the form of a hook (like an encryption key) that identifies the user of a file sharing app has having a legitimate license.
4) The key should be able to confirm that the license is legit and up to date, and nothing else (no way to trace a key to a particular user).
END COMMUNICATION
not really- that $5 is buying you the right to download music just as other taxes buy the rights to other services, just because you don't go to a park or use the library it doesn't meant that you shouldn't be taxed for it.
Blanket fees are much easier. We have a similar system in Germany, where all blank CDs/DVDs and all CD/DVD burners have a levy attached (currently about 8 ct/hr playtime). The money is collected by the GEMA, an association managing the publication and copyrights of songs. The GEMA then distributes the money amongst its members - which are musicians, not record companies.
There are a lot of catches, though. For example, the GEMA is not free of scumbaggery. For example, it distinguishes between "serious music" ("E-Music") and "entertainment music" ("U-Music"); while a pop song might get valued at twelve points, an orchestral piece of 60 minutes might get 1.200. Assuming that the pop song has a length of three minutes that makes the orchestral piece 66% more valuable per time unit. The distinctio between E- and U- music is not entriely obvious.
Also, GEMA demands that you register each and every sngle song with them, which makes your entire work subject to their terms - releasing songs for free on the internet is problematic because that requires you to renegotiate your entire contract with them. Also, once something is registered, it stays registered until the contract runs out. Plus, German law automatically assumes that every song is registered with GEMA unless the artist explicitly states that it isn't.
As for releasing songs on the internet - you have to pay royalties to GEMA if you release your own songs on your website. You get them back because it's your songs you're hosting, but you vave to pay them nonetheless. The only way to circumvent that is to not offer downloads but only streams. Which just isn't the same, of course.
There's also some squabling over who gets how much; artists with many performances get more money, for example.
But in the end, the system works. It's not too pretty, but it works. If someone polished it, it might even shine.
I think Canada already has a similar system, but brobably with less beaurocracy, because they're not Germany. (Seriously, we'll never have a riot in Germany because you have to file protest marches with the police some time in advance and until the rioters got permission most of them would've calmed down already. Nobody would do a riot without going through the proper channels before. That would be against the law, you know.) Extending such a system to online downloads could work rather well.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Moral arguments matter a great deal to me. I'm just not prepared to make the crass and unjustified generalization that everything "collectivist" is necessarily bad. Only Randian fanatics and other dupes believe that. Economics is more complicated and nuanced than bad novelists or Rush would have you believe.
;)
I guess I should go visit the Stalinist tyrannies of Canada, Australia and Sweden before my beliefs make the gulag inevitable.
You sound just like that mad dude out of Bioshock BTW.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS