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mdlbearIt's been pointed out to me that I really need to write more about my thoughts on distribution royalties. With luck I may have some time this evening; until then people will have to settle for an old essay I've recently dug out of my "incomplete" file, Forward to the Past, and the following brief notes:
The problem of electronic distribution of copyrighted material, which is currently causing so much bad blood between Web users and file-sharers on the one hand and the music and film industries on the other hand, is a solved problem, and has been for ninety years! That's when ASCAP was founded, to collect those royalties.
The key is the compulsory license, which allows anyone to broadcast a song on radio or record and sell copies of a song, just by paying a small fee. The fee ranges from a high of about $.16 (if I remember correctly) per copy for a recording, down to something that works out to about $.0007 (yes, that's seven hundredths of a cent) per audience member for a broadcast.
I note in passing that a recently proposed law, which is intended to make file sharing a felony, in essence values shared songs at $250/copy.
My contention is that sharing compressed (and hence degraded rather than exact copies) music files on the Internet is a lot more like broadcasting than like recording, and that the right thing is to set the fees accordingly.
The other factor is to consider just how many songs an average user -- or even a well-connected user -- can share, compared to what even a small radio station can share. If I saturate my 128Kb/s DSL upload capability I can ship a three-minute song (compressed to 3MB -- that's 24 Mb) in about, um, 3 minutes. A T1 like is about 10 times faster, and a cable modem with nobody else sharing the cable (fat chance!) 100 times faster.
So Joe Pirate sharing files full blast on his cable connection is roughly the equivalent of a radio station with an audience of 100. Yes, I know that there's a difference: Joe Pirate lets everyone in his "audience" pick the songs they download, while a radio station, even if it takes requests, sends the same songs to everyone in its audience. That's probably what frightens the big record companies: people can choose the music they're getting rather than having their choices made for them.
Anyway, that's the short version. Comments welcome -- especially on the numbers, which I haven't checked recently.
The problem of electronic distribution of copyrighted material, which is currently causing so much bad blood between Web users and file-sharers on the one hand and the music and film industries on the other hand, is a solved problem, and has been for ninety years! That's when ASCAP was founded, to collect those royalties.
The key is the compulsory license, which allows anyone to broadcast a song on radio or record and sell copies of a song, just by paying a small fee. The fee ranges from a high of about $.16 (if I remember correctly) per copy for a recording, down to something that works out to about $.0007 (yes, that's seven hundredths of a cent) per audience member for a broadcast.
I note in passing that a recently proposed law, which is intended to make file sharing a felony, in essence values shared songs at $250/copy.
My contention is that sharing compressed (and hence degraded rather than exact copies) music files on the Internet is a lot more like broadcasting than like recording, and that the right thing is to set the fees accordingly.
The other factor is to consider just how many songs an average user -- or even a well-connected user -- can share, compared to what even a small radio station can share. If I saturate my 128Kb/s DSL upload capability I can ship a three-minute song (compressed to 3MB -- that's 24 Mb) in about, um, 3 minutes. A T1 like is about 10 times faster, and a cable modem with nobody else sharing the cable (fat chance!) 100 times faster.
So Joe Pirate sharing files full blast on his cable connection is roughly the equivalent of a radio station with an audience of 100. Yes, I know that there's a difference: Joe Pirate lets everyone in his "audience" pick the songs they download, while a radio station, even if it takes requests, sends the same songs to everyone in its audience. That's probably what frightens the big record companies: people can choose the music they're getting rather than having their choices made for them.
Anyway, that's the short version. Comments welcome -- especially on the numbers, which I haven't checked recently.
