[cc-community] A monthly charge for music, a taxing reality or a fictional freedom?

Fred Benenson fred.benenson at gmail.com
Sun Mar 30 22:31:54 EDT 2008


I, for one, welcome our new collectively licensing overlords.

Not really, but I do find it an interesting, and definite step forward for
the music industry. For one, it's a solution the EFF has been advocating for
years:

http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing

Derek Slater also has a good post here:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cmusings/2008/03/27/warner-music-hires-jim-griffin/

Radio, television, and public performances have all had collective licenses
and while the moneys they distribute to actual musicians varies (quite low
for most) I believe it is a reasonable solution to avoiding dealing with
selling individual uses (CDs, listens, etc.) something now the internet and
filesharing makes impossible.

Obviously there are a lot of questions going forward and we shouldn't give
the music industry any benefit of the doubt considering their past behavior
towards their customers.

A solution where *everyone* is taxed regardless of the media they download (
e.g. mandatory), where there's no opt-out system for freely licensed
content, and artists see the same amount of revenues that they're seeing (or
not seeing for that matter) from typical collective licensing is obviously
not the optimal solution.

But on the other hand, a "solution" where ISP subscribers can opt-into an
agreement where they pay for the rights to transfer the music they want
(with legal and filtering impunity) in any form over the ISP's pipes and a
fair share of that (humor me here, please) fee goes to artists may be a lot
better of a solution.

The actual specifics of what will be implemented, however, has yet to be
conclusively flushed out and the majority of the knee-jerk reactions on
sites like slashdot lack the kind of attention to detail necessary for
really judging whether or not this is A Good Thing or A Bad Thing. All that
has happened is that a person who has a fair degree of experience on this
topic (and one of the good guys, IMHO) has been hired by a record company to
investigate a particular idea. I doubt there are many people who will object
to a serious investigation of such a topic by such a stakeholder -- the
results and conclusions of that investigation are surely contestable and
will be contested, but the actual investigation deserves to happen.

What is interesting about collective licensing with respect to Creative
Commons is that it dramatically decreases the incentive for licensing one's
work to allow peers to simply share it (think BY-ND licensed music, for
example) as there will be few musicians who will want to turn down the
promise of file sharing royalty checks.  On the other hand, it will be an
opportunity for artists to compete with more liberally licensed (BY, for
example) work.


F



On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 8:17 PM, Michael David Crawford <
michael at geometricvisions.com> wrote:

>
>
> Kevin Phillips (home) wrote:
> > What's the general consensus with regard to the new proposals coming out
> > of Warner?
>
> The consensus of the MusicThoughts mailing list (for music industry
> professionals) is that the artists and songwriters will see very little
> revenue from it, while the collecting agency will be rolling in dough.
>
> That seems to be the case with traditional recording societies; they
> don't see any guarantee that it will be any different.
>
> The proposal is also unfair to deaf people and those who don't like
> music (there ARE such people), and doesn't cover other kinds of media
> that's shared over the Internet, such as videos, pr0n and warez.  If the
> tax were expanded to cover all those, the fees would become
> exhorbitantly expensive.
>
> --
> Michael David Crawford
> michael at geometricvisions.com
> http://www.geometricvisions.com/ <-- Creative Commons Piano Music
> _______________________________________________
> cc-community mailing list
> cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-community
>
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