Voluntary Collective Licensing
Description
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a white paper explaining why voluntary collective licensing is the best solution for combining the interests of both creators and users.
URL = http://www.eff.org/share/collective_lic_wp.php
"EFF has spent the past year evaluating alternatives that get artists paid while making file sharing legal. One solution has emerged as the favorite: voluntary collective licensing.
The concept is simple: the music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to “get legit” in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway—share the music they love using whatever software they like on whatever computer platform they prefer—without fear of lawsuits. The money collected gets divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music.
In exchange, file-sharing music fans will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software works best for them. The more people share, the more money goes to rights-holders. The more competition in applications, the more rapid the innovation and improvement. The more freedom to fans to publish what they care about, the deeper the catalog.” (http://www.eff.org/share/collective_lic_wp.php)
Characteristics
"People who do not share music shouldn’t have to pay for a license they don’t need. After all, we don’t have a “music tax on restaurants.” Restaurants are free to experiment with no music, public domain music, or CC music, as they see fit. Internet users should have the same freedom. But this means that there will still be some enforcement against those who don’t pay but keep downloading. That seems fair, and enforcement to get people to become paying subscribers will look very different from today’s “mount a few heads on spikes to scare the rest” approach being used by the RIAA and MPAA.
“Voluntary for Artists. Artists shouldn’t be forced to participate if they don’t want to. That said, the vast majority of creators and rightsholders will likely opt in, rather than opt to sue individual Internet users. After all, 99% of all songwriters are members of one of the three performing rights organizations (PROs) we have today. It sure beats having to find and sue every radio station every time it plays your song.
“Not a Collecting Society, but Collecting Societies. Freedom of choice for artists only means something if they have options to choose among. Competition is critical to keeping collecting societies honest and transparent. If you compare the three PROs that service songwriters in the US to the unitary, government-backed collecting societies in the rest of the world, our system wins hands down on these fronts.
“Voluntary for ISPs. There is no need to force ISPs to offer blanket sharing licenses to music fans. Some ISPs will voluntarily bundle the license with their offerings (”buy the all-you-can-eat music package for $5 more”), some ISPs may choose not to. Universities might choose to buy campus-wide licenses in bulk in order to stop the RIAA’s college litigation campaign. Software companies like LimeWire might choose to bundle the license fee into their software, paid either by subscription fees or advertising. At the end of the day, it’s the individual fan who needs the license, and she should have lots of ways to buy it.
“All the Music, From Anywhere. Music fans have made it clear that they are going to use whatever software they like, to download anything that can be found in any “Shared” folder on the planet, including the unauthorized concert recordings, the rarities, the old b-sides, and the alternate takes. It’s time to figure out who should be paid for them, rather than wishing for a world where you can somehow make them disappear.
“Technology Agnostic. Linux, Mac, Windows, iPod, cell phone. Downloads, streaming, buffered streams. Music fans want their music in whichever format, on whichever device, works best for them. Once you’ve paid, it’s nobody’s business where your music comes from or where it ends up. It should go without saying that DRM is has no place in this future.
“Protects Privacy. Paying for music sharing shouldn’t entail giving up your privacy. While the collecting societies will need to have some metrics of popularity in order to divide up the revenue pie, we should take our cue from television, where we divide up huge advertising revenues by relying on sophisticated sampling systems like Nielsen’s. Sampling and surveys are good — a perfect census of what every person listens to is not.” (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/03/monetizing-file-sharing-collective-licensing-good-isp-tax-bad)
Rationale
“The current battles surrounding peer-to-peer file sharing are a losing proposition for everyone. The record labels continue to face lackluster sales, while the tens of millions of American file sharers—American music fans—are made to feel like criminals. Every day the collateral damage mounts—privacy at risk, innovation stymied, economic growth suppressed, and a few unlucky individuals singled out for legal action by the recording industry. And the litigation campaign against music fans has not put a penny into the pockets of artists.
We need a better way forward.
First, artists and copyright holders deserve to be fairly compensated.
Second, file sharing is here to stay. Killing Napster only spawned more decentralized networks. Most evidence suggests that file sharing is at least as popular today as it was before the lawsuits began.
Third, the fans do a better job making music available than the labels. Apple’s iTunes Music Store brags about its inventory of over 500,000 songs. Sounds pretty good, until you realize that the fans have made millions of songs available on KaZaA. If the legal clouds were lifted, the peer-to-peer networks would quickly improve.
Fourth, any solution should minimize government intervention in favor of market forces." (http://www.eff.org/share/collective_lic_wp.php)
More Information
* Report: Fred von Lohmann, A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing, April 2008
URL = http://www.eff.org/files/eff-a-better-way-forward.pdf
The legal battles surrounding peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing are a losing proposition for everyone. The record labels continue to face sliding sales, while the tens of millions of American file sharers—American music fans—are made to feel like criminals. Every day the collateral damage mounts—privacy at risk, innovation stymied, economic growth suppressed, and random unlucky individuals singled out for lawsuits by the recording industry. In the meantime, the lawsuits against music fans have not put a penny into the pockets of artists.