Canada music fileshare plan no solution
p2pnet news | Music:- An engineer friend of mine, one with an extremely literal mind, is fond of telling me that it is structurally impossible for a bumblebee to fly. There is too much mass for its wings, he says. Too much drag and not enough lift. He often says this as we are standing in his garden while we are being divebombed by bumblebees that, because they cannot fly, are apparently climbing trees and simply jumping at us from great heights.
I was put in mind of bumblebees when I read the p2pnet story about the Canadian proposal to compensate music creators by imposing a $5 a month fee on all ISP accounts.
Maybe the most important thing about the proposal is who is making it. For the first time, organizations representing the creators of music are treating p2p as something other than evil incarnate and recognizing that it is a permanent part of the landscape. I have trouble seeing that this has got the wingpower to take off.
The proposal made by the Songwriters’ Association of Canada (SAC) and Canadian Music Creators Coalition (CMCC) to impose a flat $5 per month fee per ISP account to compensate the creators of music by legitimizing p2p filesharing should, if nothing else, spur some really focused discussion of how creators might get paid in the future.
For a number of reasons, the specific proposal might not be anything close to an actual solution.
First of all, the $5 only covers music. I think we can expect the video creators, and the text creators, too, all wanting their share of the pie, and $5 won’t be enough to satify them all. That means that the ISP may need to tack on as much as $15 or more to cover all the interests “harmed” by uncompensated p2p transfers of copyrighted works. That means as much as $180 a year in additional charges, which is a subtantial amount for many households.
It’s when you consider what the proposal would require to put it in place and have it work that the mind truly starts reeling. In examining this, you have to keep in mind that I judge every possibility by a very simple litmus test: does it help the artists to get paid?
If it does, it is fundamentally a good thing. If it doesn’t, it isn’t a fundamentally good thing.
With that in mind, any compensation system must do several basic functions:
Collect the money.
Collect the data necessary to determine who earns the money.
Pay the right amount of money to the right people as quickly as possible.
The collection of the money in a flat-fee situation like the proposal is truly the easy part. The ISP simply adds the fee on to the monthly bill. Every month, the ISP sends a check for the aggregate fees to the collection and distribution agency. The agency has the right, of course, to audit the ISPs to make sure they are paying everything.
One problem with money collection in this proposal is that it contemplates every ISP account getting billed, whether or not the owner of the account uses p2p or not, or whether or not the p2p user is transferring copyrighted material or not. There are situations in which taxes and fees are incurred on a universal basis, regardless of actual individual usage. In the US, many jurisdictions fund local schools through property taxes, even though the individual property owner may not have children in the system.
The rationale often given is that the value of the property is enhanced by the presence of a good school system, and this is commonly true, although the connection between paying property taxes and the presence of good schools is often tenuous; places with high property taxes don’t always have good schools. It is even more difficult to draw a connection between an ISP offering legal music transfers and a universal charge for uploading and downloading, so the school tax idea doesn’t precisely fit.
A universal fee is easier to administer, because you just put the $5 on everyone’s invoice. If you are only going to bill file sharers, you need to separate them from the non-sharers, and then you have to separate the sharers of non-copyrighted material from the sharers of copyrighted materials, and then you add the $5 to only that smaller group.. This is not going to be easy, especially as it would appear to involve getting to know what is in those transmission, and privacy of our correspondence, as illusory as it may be, is still important to us. We like to think that no one is reading our email, so we may not be comfortable with the idea that some program is figuring out what is in all those packets we’re sending p2p.
Unless the proponents of the Canadian proposal find a way to overcome this obstacle, the idea is dead in the water before the first $5 is collected.
But this problem pales when compared to figuring out WHAT is being transferred, and who deserves to be paid a share of that $5. Paying the money out is a whole set of problems unto itself. There’s a whole lot of drag, and not a lot of lift to this bumblebee thing.
Fred Wilhelms – p2pnet
[If the corporate music industry had any ethics, Wilhelms would be its 'ethicist-in-chief,' wrote CounterPunch's Dave Marsh. Wilhelms is an entertainment attorney based in Nashville, Tennessee. You can contact him at fred.wilhelms @ gmail.com. ]
Also See:
compensate music creators – Canadian musicians’ file sharing plan, December 5, 2007
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December 7th, 2007 at 9:04 am
Wasn’t the fee on blank media supposed to do something similar? At first is was to compensate for copying. Eventually the story was “its still completely illegal. the fee is a form of fine for scofflaws” and people had gained nothing but now paid more for their blanks. There isn’t enough money in the world to compensate everybody for the money they think they would have made if only things were different. Maybe they will begin compensating me for the stock trades I was going to make but didn’t, at least in those cases where I would have made a profit.
December 7th, 2007 at 10:39 am
You’re absolutely right about that, but I think it’s worth noting that not everyone uses blank CD’s to burn music (a lot of people simply use it to store photos, home videos, etc; back up important files, and move data from one computer to the next). However, we’re all forced to pay the same fee regardless of how we use the discs, in a move that’s essentially a compromise. The industry gets fairly compensated, but because it’s a fee that every consumer must pay, it’s kept to a minimum.
However, this new business model raises some issues. He mentions that film companies, software companies, etc, may also want a piece of the pie, and the monthly fee will only get higher. And since not every internet user engages in P2P filesharing, it seems unfair to charge such an exorbitant amount to every consumer. For this reason, it only seems logical that, rather than automatically adding this fee to everyone’s internet connection, consumers should choose whether they want to partake in it or not. Of course, this also means that the ones who do want to take advantage of it will have to pay extra, but those who think it’s too expensive will have the choice not to participate. What’s more, is that if a similar system is introduced for other types of content, everyone will be able to choose which ones they want and which ones they don’t.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
This has needed saying for a long time. Everybody goes on about how the movie guys and the music guys would make even more money if only they weren’t so backward. Digital is their future and all that. Well what if its NOT! The business landscape is littered with enterprises that flourished and died. Been to a circus lately? An opera? How about a vaudeville show? Yes, classical music concerts, ballet, and most recently live theater and certainly live tv….all dead or dying. Or kept on life support by rich patrons who cover the losses of theater troups and artists. What if the music business and movie business as we know them are about to join this group of dead enterprises and all because of us? To paraphrase Danny DeVito…..I can answer that for you in two words:
WHO…..CARES?
Care about them? They didn’t care about YOU. They bled you dry! They sold you LPs and 8 tracks and cassettes, VHS tapes, Beta tapes, laser discs and you spent thousands for your collections. Their businesses are running at 100% to 80% of what they made 10 years ago. And your collections of media…….worthless!
They’re dead alright! They’re just not broke. Let ‘em take their money and their film libraries and the record masters and try to start a new enterprise, one that has a future. If they don’t make as much money….well thats the breaks. there are no promises or certainties in this world. In any case they are doomed in the long run. Why? Because even if the courts did this and the ISPs did that and the new govt guy does the other thing…they are dead. People have only so much time and money to spend, even if they go deeply in debt and stay up all night. Years ago there were no role playing games, no online gaming, no internet, no “guitar hero”, no “facebook” no none of the most popular distractions of today. And people worked LESS! Yeah, look it up. We have less time to play than we used to. These new activities have sapped the desire to shlep over to a movie theater and get ripped off. Who wants to buy a record and run home to play it. Big deal! Old stuff! Go online and kill some trolls….now thats something to look forward to.
So guys get with it. Find your place in the new order of things or go down the drain. Sure, you will take some poor students with you. The kamikasi attack is always the last strategy. But a generation or two from now, kids will get bussed (or teleported) to THE MOVIES as a school field trip so they can see how their forefathers lived back in the privitive days.
December 8th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
HERE IS OUR SCAM PLAN
If we, as music owners and publisher get paif more if our music is somehow moved along though the Internet, we will set up several computers dedicated to only do one thing…mail FREE copies of our songs to our one million person mailing list.
And I will patent the idea as a method of business in the US Copyright Office. Our license for the patent will be sold to further maximize our income.
We sure will make a bundle in Canada and elsewhere with our ideas.
December 8th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
There are ways to protect the system from being gamed. One million emails sending the same song at the same time ist going to set off some alarms, don’t you think?
December 9th, 2007 at 5:57 am
One million emails sending the same song at the same time ist going to set off some alarms, don’t you think?
Performance rights orgaizarionASCAP and BMI license over 75 million songs. Surely no one will suspect if they get a million hits per day. And surely no one will know how many are legit and how many are because of fraud. Just as is done with radio aiplay data.
Also a music publisher with 200,000 songs would not be above a scam as the one I described. They already have scams to get more than their due from the performance rights orgaization (thay are in the PRO boards) and to pay less than due to songwriter, all of which is suspicious but no one investigates or does anything about it.
December 10th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Just who is going to collect and distribute this money; SoundExchange? From what I have read they don’t have a great track record paying musicians.
December 11th, 2007 at 4:35 am
“Just who is going to collect and distribute this money; SoundExchange?”
For the idea to work it must cover all copyrights (literature, graphics, science, etc). There is no known worlwide (or otherwise) capable organization of doing what would be required, nor even serving as a model for a new organization.
All known money collecting societies that cover only one subject such as music for only one countriy, have been corrupted (infiltrated by the enemy may be a better description) from the start and are useless because of dishonesty and useless record keepig.