ASCAP Refuses To Debate Lessig

An anonymous reader writes "Back in June ASCAP oddly declared war on free culture, specifically calling out Creative Commons, EFF and Public Knowledge, making a number of false statements about all three. The war of words continued as the three groups responded politely, pointing out the errors in the statement from ASCAP's Paul Williams. Larry Lessig wrote a blog post where he asked Williams to debate these topics, saying that it might help if they could get away from making false statements. Williams has now publicly declined to debate saying that it's not worth his time, and once again attacking these groups for trying to 'silence' him. It's difficult to see how a request for a public discussion and debate is an attempt to silence, but that's ASCAP's position and they're sticking to it."

Comments

Re:Debates are almost worthless

[IICV]

Wouldn't that come out in a debate?

Presumably yes, which (I imagine) is why they don't want to debate him. Seriously, listen to some of his stuff - it's very well thought out.

Also, I think you'll find that arguments and legislation have "changed the truth" exactly as frequently as debates have: never.

Of course they haven't, and I didn't mean to imply that legislation is capable of changing the truth. The truth exists independently of the positions we may take in an argument or the laws we might pass. That's why (as I said) the laws we pass and positions we take in an argument should be based on published (scientific) literature and well-reviewed statistics, not on ideology or dogma. I'm a proponent of evidence-based legislation, just like most doctors nowadays are proponents of evidence-based medicine. Unfortunately it seems like modern politicians think that's a bad idea for some reason.

Re:Idiot

[N7DR]

Amazon gives authors of e-books 70% of purchase price? When I'm ready to publish I'll pay for software to produce content in a manner that Kindle users will be able to easily read my content and sit back and watch as either the $$$ roll in or the cob-webs collect (depending on if my content is any good). Either way, I'll already have moved on to my next project.

Actually, if you're sensible, you'll first read the contract that Amazon requires you to sign. You may or may not decide after doing that that giving up substantial rights is worth seeing the material appear on a particular company's platform. Different authors have reached different conclusions on the matter.

Anent Amazon and the Kindle in particular, you may want to read: http://www.sfwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Amazon_digital_publication_distribution_agreement_annotated_v3_080329.pdf.

Re:Debates are almost worthless

[russotto]

ASCAP doesn't represent music industry executives. They're still asshats, but they're not THOSE asshats. They claim to represent songwriters and composers, but there's a persistent claim that only the top-played ones get anything, and the little guy can go piss up a rope when he wants his (admittedly small) share.

Re:Idiot

[dgatwood]

ASCAP is going to become irrelevant as content producers such as authors move to distributing digitally exclusively so that they get more money from the purchase of their works.

Unlikely. This suggests that you don't fully understand what ASCAP does. ASCAP does the following:

• Collects money from radio stations that broadcast your work. Until radio dies, this will continue.
• Collects blanket license fees from performance venues that are distributed to folks whose works are performed. This is unlikely to ever stop being important. Those performance venues make money because of live music, little of which goes to the performers. As such, pushing the burden of licensing onto them means that composers don't get paid, pure and simple. No direct sales system for composers selling copies of sheet music/lead sheets is going to change that.
• Collects money from sale of audio CDs and distributes it to its membership. This will likely diminish to nothing pretty soon if it hasn't already.

Note that none of those have anything to do with performers selling works to the general public. Artists obtaining mechanical licenses so that they can record someone else's works do so either on a one-off basis through a contract or by going through HFA/Songfile or similar. ASCAP has nothing to do with that process whatsoever (except occasionally being a source of information when trying to find out who wrote a particular work). Similarly, artists selling works to the public neither license anything from ASCAP nor are members of ASCAP unless they are also composers or publishers.

Re:Debates are almost worthless

[ChaosDiscord]

This isn't just a "different beliefs" situation. ASCAP's Paul Williams is stating outright falsehoods about the EFF and Creative Commons. (I hear he's also stating falsehoods about Public Knowledge, but I don't know enough to judge.) Their statements border on the insane. (EFF: "If an artist wants to share their music more widely, we offer tools to make it easy to share some, but not all of the rights." Williams: "The EFF wants to force you to give away your music for free!") I do agree that ASCAP is unlikely to change their public stance as a result of a debate or other discussion. They're either willfully ignorant or they are liars.

Re:debate = attempt to silence

[Phroggy]

For those who missed it, Amazon screwed something up and determined that they couldn't sell "1984" on the Kindle, despite the fact that they had already been selling it, so they activated a remote-delete feature nobody knew they had, and removed the e-book from all of their customers' Kindles. Amazon soon resolved the original issue, then offered an apology and either a replacement or a check for $30 to affected customers. Had it been any other book, the whole thing wouldn't have been so ridiculously ironic...