Eric Baptiste Weighs In On Copyright Summit Issues

With the upcoming biennial summit of authors and composers in Washington DC, The Register has an interview with Eric Baptiste, head of the International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies (CISAC), that touches on some of the hot issues. "There's no one-stop shopping anymore. We were working to put that in place in the Santiago Agreement [2000] which got struck down by the European Commission [in 2004]. It would put together all the world's repertory and enable one society to grant a worldwide license. That was a very bold move. It's a pity it was not appreciated at the time by the European Commission."

Comments

Transparency. You keep using that word.

[Tackhead]

When you move from this to nothing, to "everything is free", that's not a real economy. And nobody knows how to make the world spin with those rules.

No, you don't know how to make your world spin with those rules. They seem to be working fine for software developers, for instance. And last I checked, Trent Reznor wasn't exactly living in grinding poverty.

And it should be transparent. If you're a member of the public and you just want watch a movie or listen to a song, you shouldn't need to be a copyright expert. You shouldn't need to worry how much is going to the society, and how much is going to the real people behind those entities. We should find a way to make that disappear. It should be on a B2B level not a B2C level.

Translation: "If you just want to stream content (notice it's about listen or watch one piece of media, not own a copy of) from some centralized repository that's maintained of your control, don't worry your pretty little head about whether the artist is getting anything, because it's all going to a 'society' or 'agency' with a bunch of letters in its name. We need to obfuscate it so nobody sees it. If it's B2B, then we can finally nip that Artist-to-Consumer thing in the bud."

So there is also probably a greater unity in the content business at the higher level - we're in this together. How to agree on a licensing framework that is simpler for users of works - the users in this context being corporations.

Again, the perspective whereby neither the people creating the music, nor the people listening to the music, are customers. They're the products. The user or customer is always some form of middleman, distributor, or licencing society.

The proposal means if you went to a country with no copyright protection, you got zero. The EU is a big work in progress and you have countries that have sophisticated copyright protection from the 19th Century. Here in the UK, people understand what it is. But in many new countries the courts don't understand copyright.

It makes it very difficult for the society to maintain the value of those rights. Of course all those users would go to the copyright havens - it's an irrational business for societies to allow such a system. They would be competing against each other to rip their members off. That's lunacy.

"I don't like arbitrage. Arbitrage makes it very difficult for us middlemen to maintain the value of 'our' rights. All those users would buy it somewhere else, for cheaper. That's an irrational business for middlemen -- middlemen aren't supposed to compete against each other for customer dollars or artists' contracts. We're supposed to be a cartel, all of us working together, competing only insofar as to the degree as to which we can rip off the artists and listeners within our individual fiefdoms."

Fuck that noise, Eric.