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Support Grows For Blanket Music Licensing
Anti-Globalism sends in Ars coverage of a speech by Jim Griffin, who is a consultant for Warner, one of the big four music labels. Griffin is encouraging dialog on the idea of blanket licensing of music — a topic heretofore more likely to be heard from the EFF or the Barenaked Ladies. "Taking music without paying for it may not be 'morally voluntary,' Griffin says, but he admits it has become 'functionally voluntary.' No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.' So Griffin's job is to help Warner monetize digital music, and he's convinced that the issue of payment for music is nothing less than 'our generation's nuclear power.' Griffin's most intriguing idea, and one he's been pitching for some time now, is a voluntary, blanket music license; essentially, bringing the collection society model to end users. In this model, consumers would pay royalties into a pot (by paying an extra monthly fee to their ISPs, for instance) and would then have access to all the music from all the labels that participate in the scheme."
I think this may be more about the size of the debate. More like "this generation's struggle with the environmental concerns pertaining to nuclear power."
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They used to hope nuclear power would produce such a surplus that it would be "too cheap to meter". That's probably what they're referring to.
I have some direct experience with blanket music licenses, and they work well.
Churches are big users of music, both traditional and modern. They have to deal with issues of duplication and performance rights for 6-10 songs, every week. The level of effort needed to clear copyrights song-by-song would be impossible.
Ten years ago, the Church Copyright License was created, representing the catalogs of 120 publishers. After one year, they had 9,500 annual licensee holders. They now have over 170,000.
The churches pay a very reasonable annual fee, and get blanket permission to reproduce and perform any songs in the combined catalogs. There are sensible limits on what can be done legally, all basically to the effect of limiting the use to a normal church service.
A random sample of licensees are sent an audit form each year, and they record all the music they've used during the past few months. CCLI also provides software to do the accounting work, so the audit can be completely automated if the church wants.
Payouts to the copyright holders are done in proportion to the usage audits. The payout ratio is very fair. I know several song writers and performers who receive royalty checks, so I know the system really does work.
I've written some hymns myself (New Hymns for Worship), and have looked over the CCLI contracts in detail. They look pretty clean (but IANAL). Although I ultimately decided to publish under a Create Commons license instead, if I had wanted to make money, I would have definitely signed up with CCLI myself.
So, blanket licenses can work. They don't need to be expensive. They let consumers roam freely through whole catalogs of music. It's a good model.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
How are people living close to a reactor site being screwed? Did you know that more radioactivity is released into the environment by the average coal burning plant than the entire nuclear industry in the US? Did you know that more people die from industrial accidents in coal power plants in one year in the US than have ever died in Nuclear powerplants (of any cause, including natural) combined with deaths caused by nuclear accidents?
Nuclear power is many tens of times safer than the default energy production method in this country. And using Feeder-Breeder reactors, they could be 10 times safer and more efficient yet.
There is little that annoys me more than people pandering to fear of nuclear energy based on their own ignorance.
There is no greener and safer energy than nuclear (I would note that solar energy is a kind of nuclear energy).
If the downloads aren't encoded in a lossless format, and if Time Warner expands their bandwidth metering trial, then I'll be sticking with CDs thank you.
CDs are not a lossless format - They're sampled at 44.1 kHz and digitized at 16-bits. DVDs do a little better. But the only lossless format is live and unamplified.
I realize that you were probably just saying that your minimum quality standard is what's available on CD, but some of the lossy formats are damned close and I'm convinced that most people who complain about compression effects in high bitrate lossily but intelligently compressed music are just experiencing psychosomatic effects and probably couldn't tell the difference between the compressed version and the CD. (Some audiophiles with super-human hearing that have trained themselves in what to listen for may disagree.)
It's all about deciding for yourself what level of lossy is acceptable under the circumstances.
Now that all that's out of the way, most of the streaming music services fall short on this front and do not meet my minimum standard of quality on the music they deliver. (If somebody has a suggestion of a service that really delivers, my ears are wide open.) So, for the time being, I mostly just listen to stuff that I've ripped and (lossily) compressed from my CD collection (fairly large and almost all acquired used back in high school). This 'blanket licensing' thing, assuming the same level of streaming quality I've experienced with the services I've tried, would really do nothing more for me than provide a mechanism for previewing music that I may want to acquire later. And, given that it would all be RIAA stuff, I'm not sure I'd find many gold nuggets while mining through it...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Actually they could provide servers to d/l legitimate copies and use an ASCAP model and divide the revenue based on d/l volume.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I've looked into performance licensing for my company last year and I think this is similar.
If you operate a business and you play music for your employees or customers it's considered a "performance" and you are required to pay royalties. There are three or so American licensing non-profit organizations (BMI, ASCAP and others) that you pay a yearly licensing fee to. They base the fee on the number of employees or business locations or however you can work a deal with them (I believe a license from all three for a small sized company was just a few hundred dollars a year).
Having a license from all three organizations pretty much covers most (if not all) of the major songs out there. I believe BMI has some 375k songs covered or something to that effect.
So here's how it works in 3 steps:
a) You get performance licenses from all three (or depending on your song needs get enough to cover what you're playing)
b) You _purchase_ the CDs with the music or acquire the songs and play it to your employees or patrons
c) The day someone knocks on your door saying "papers please" you pull out the license
I think they're trying to do the same thing here where ISPs would allow you to get a similar type license as an add-on to your internet subscription instead of sending BMI and others a check.
You are not forced to pay the $5 a month and the RIAA will keep cracking down on people who download. If you have your license and they send you (or your ISP) a letter demanding settlement you (or your friendly ISP) can tell them where to shove it.
It's basically lawsuit insurance, they don't track what you listen to (at least that's how it works for businesses), and they guarantee you that you won't be sued by composers and writers for songs they cover in their blanket license deal.
This is my understanding of the blanket license that the EFF was describing when I looked at it last, coupled by my business performance license research.
If you can't mod them join them.
Actually I think what he meant was the expectation in the 50's that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter". If that had turned out to be true then you wouldn't be paying for electricity by the kilowatt-hour, but by paying some small average cost to cover the construction costs.
Exactly. It's not spelled out. It's just 'everyone put their money in this big pot, and we promise to divvy it up between our artists'. And it's not like this is clearly a 'rental/subscription' or a 'purchase', so it's not really covered by current trade licensing agreements.
And given todays report http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/08/jared-leto-hits.html is at all correct, that a group can have sales of over 2 million CD's and still 'owe' the label $1.4 million, do you really believe the labels will setup a system that is more than superficially 'verifiable', let alone one that results in most of the money received going to artists?
You sir, are an optimist.
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You should research single payer a little more. Ok, now that you've clicked the reply button without researching single payer a little more, you should stop before you type some more dittohead nonsense and go research single payer a little more.
Oh, and having heard the people who tell you what to think tell you to think single payer is bad doesn't count as researching.
Here's a hint: The insurance industry (and all the associated overhead of thousands of propriatary billing methods and coverage procedures) goes away, you pick a licensed doctor, go to that doctor, the doctor users their doctor powers to figure out what is wrong with you, and implements treatment procedures. Your personal cost is lowered and no one gets to screw over the rest of society by gambling with their money.
And yet, you still didn't go research single payer a little more.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.