The Isle of Man may soon implement a “blanket license” whereby Manx broadband users could download as much music as they like in exchange for paying a “fee” (also known as a “tax,” since this would be non-optional) to their ISP that would supposedly be as low as $1.38/month. The Manx proposal sounds a lot like how SoundExchange administers a blanket license in the U.S. for web-casting of copyrighted music:
the money collected by the Internet providers would be sent to a special agency that would distribute the proceeds to the copyright owners, including the record labels and music publishers. They would receive payments based on how often their music was downloaded or streamed over the Internet, as they now do in many countries when it is performed live or on the radio.
As Adam Thierer has noted, Larry Lessig has endorsed at least a voluntary version of this idea, but Adam has raised a number of tough questions: Continue reading →
I’m finishing up Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig’s latest book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy and wanted to make a brief comment about his call for a “simple blanket license” to solve online music piracy.
Overall, I thought Prof. Lessig made a good case regarding the benefits of “remix culture” and why copyright law should leave breathing room for the various derivative works of amateur creators. On the other hand, Lessig still too often blurs remix culture with “ripoff culture” (i.e., those who aren’t out to create anything new but instead just take something without paying a penny for it).
To solve that latter problem, Lessig again endorses a proposal that William Fisher, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others have made for collective licensing of all online music, but he fails to drill down into the devilish details. He says, for example, that “by authorizing a simple blanket licensing procedure, whereby users could, for a low fee, buy the right to freely file-share” we could “decriminalize file sharing.” (p. 271)
I respect the fact that Lessig is at least acknowledging a problem exists and proposing a solution to it, but the collective licensing approach will be anything but “simple” in practice. As I have pointed out here before, collective licensing proposals and efforts almost always become compulsory in practice. They inevitably involve government mandates to determine (1) who pays in, (2) how much they pay in, as well as (3) how much gets paid out and, (4) who gets the money.
Continue reading →
Is there any other issue under the tech policy sun today that creates stranger intellectual bedfellows than collective licensing of online music? After all, as I noted here before, on the pro-collective licensing side we find mortal enemies EFF and RIAA (at least Warner) in league. And on the anti-collective licensing side, we have Mike Masnick and Andrew Orlowski. If you locked those two guys in a room and tossed out any other copyright topic, they’d probably end up killing each other with their bare hands. But somehow they agree on this one (albeit for somewhat different reasons).
Anyway, I continue to have mixed, but generally skeptical, feelings about online collective licensing. There are countless thorny fairness issues on both the artist and consumer side of things. What’s the pay-in rate? How is it set? Who all pays in? Who gets paid out, how much, and by what formula? And God only knows how you deal with those parties (whether they be ISPs, consumers, or even artists) who don’t want to be a part of the scheme.
For these reasons, I’ve always felt a voluntary collective licensing scheme for the Internet is challenging, if not impossible. It would have to be compulsory to be a truly blanket license that covered all music, all users, and all platforms. I’m not too fond of that approach, but I think that’s where we are likely heading in the copyright wars. After all, that’s how it has been resolved in many other contexts historically. But that doesn’t give me any comfort since those other systems have been a mess in practice. This 2004 Cato study by Robert Merges provides some details and makes the case against apply the compulsory licensing approach to the online music marketplace.
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Posted in: Copyright, DMCA, DRM & Piracy 
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