Ok, not exactly yet another SOPA, PIPA, diary. (I mean, aren't they dead? Didn't we win that one?)
They passed the DMCA (which is a turd for other reasons) and there was a compromise in there. Websites were protected from liability for copyright infringement when hosting third party content. That means uploaded by users. For this protection they had to agree to abide by DMCA takedown notices and remove copyrighted content when requested to by the copyright holder.
That was the compromise. Didn't exactly work out the way anyone wanted it to, especially the entertainment industry. So SOPA and PIPA and the son of SOPA, etc. on into the future.
Like most compromises the DMCA sucks. This situation needs a total rethink.
I am not trying to convince you that I am right. I have seen the future and there is one inevitable conclusion. If you understand anything at all about what I'm ranting about please follow me below the orange squiggle.
I made up the two laws of music distribution on the internet a decade ago.
1. Everyone has an audience.
If you and your buddy are in Jr. High and you only know two chords but you write and record new songs every week and post them to your MySpace account a bunch of people will find you and really like your music. (of course)
2. Nobody ever heard of anybody.
You hear it all the time. I've been on that website but I never heard of any of the musicians on there. Well, nobody ever heard of anybody. This is the democratization of the mass market at work. Musical genres are so fragmented that the closest thing we have to a star everyone has heard of is the latest winner of American Idol.
It used to be everyone listened to the top 10 and there was only one top 10. If B.B. King or Frank Sinatra had a hit you would hear them along with The Four Seasons or The Beatles.
Now there's a hundred top tens each claiming a declining audience and none of the cool kids listen to anything on the top ten anyway.
Everything comes in threes. I knew I couldn't stop there but I didn't know where to go. And then it hit me.
3. In the future everyone will get royalties
Which brings us to the inevitable solution. The answer that the DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, etc. cannot prevent. It's inevitable.
Ready for this?
Statutory Royalties!
When the entertainment industry railed against radio statutory royalties were the answer. When they railed against LPs, cassettes, and so on statutory royalties were the answer. They are already distributing statutory royalties for streaming radio on the internet, a distribution method totally indistinguishable from downloads except in some lawyers fevered imagination.
So why not statutory royalties for downloads? Of everything. Music, pictures, videos, text, whatever they think of next. If you make a YouTube and get half a million views why shouldn't you get a few pennies? If your blog post goes viral and stirs the pot aren't you deserving of recompense? If you record your concert and it' s a hit on the Live Music Archive (part of the internet library at http://archive.org) don't you deserve to be paid?
It's practical.
If there's one thing computers are good at it's counting downloads and accounting in fractions of pennies.
It's fundable.
Since the pile of internet users grows closer to all humanity all the time a very small tax on bandwidth that can be administered by a non profit quasi governmental entity proscribed by law would do the trick. Any number of other options are available. What you do not want is the funding to be the responsibility of the distributors. That leads to cheating and the whole system of statutory royalties depends on a verifiable fair count.
It's inevitable.
SoundExchange is currently distributing royalties for audio streams. Broadcast radio and television, as well as mechanical reproduction already pays songwriter royalties. This is not the model I expect to see in the future. I expect it will be free to publish and free to download whatever you want and that the revenue stream will be invisibly built into the infrastructure. Sites hosting media will be required to comply with counting procedures probably by allowing log access or running reporting software. This will be painless since the funding stream is independent of the hosting sites. These sites will, of course, pay for their bandwidth and any taxes included in that expense.
In the future everyone will get royalties.
Yay!
Thanks,
Hairy Larry