1. Copy”right” terms reduced to a single, non-renewable, 14-year term: The MAFIAA’s own “research” indicates that the vast majority of what they put out are commercial flops, and, further, that the vast majority of the sales for an album are within the first two years (If I recall correctly.)
See the problem? If Copy”Right” is about commercial privilege (and we know it is), then any copy”right” term lasting longer than what is absolutely ‘needed’ commercially is stupid/evil. Of course, as we also know, there are many ways to profit from “content” — gouging the hell ot of anybody who wants to use it, for one (hence their antipathy to stuff like “fair use.”
If a fourteen-year monopoly isn’t enough “incentive”, then I dunno what will be.

Plus, if everything automatically goes Public Domain after fourteen years, that eliminates all the “licensing” bullshit, in terms of sampling and derivatives and such. (Sample clearance is really lucrative, so the “industry” won’t go for this, even if it makes sense.)

2. To even get the 14 year monopoly privilege, “rights-holders” should be explicitly required to register their “content”, and include a version of it in some sort of widely-available, or explicitly “open” (non-drm’ed) format. Upon expiration of copyright term, the non-DRM’ed copy of the “content” gets seeded to every p2p service, and made available on some form of “archive” site — maybe a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive would work.

These two changes would pretty much eliminate all the bullshit we deal with, while STILL allowing the opportunity for the coercive monopolies the MAFIAA says it “needs”, so as to be profitable.

The only problem is, they’d basically deprive the corporate scumbags of their REAL source of “profits” — gouging everybody for clearance and re-use of “their” content — and we can’t have that

here is how it works why is nobody picking up on this!

here is how it is going to work going to use a music file as an example.

1. the client they will be using is a DRM client that adds a layer of DRM to the content you download.
(i.e. authorized download giving control back to the content provider)

2. User A pays for a song from the pirate bay YES THEY have to pay then piratebay knocks of 1 dollar
on the understanding you use your own bandwidth to transfer that same file to other users who’s bought it will its 1:1.

This means you provide the bandwidth for them to sell their content lol they don’t have to do a damn thing.
now you sheep are their distribution and what do you get in return?

1. a DRM file you can’t do anything with other than what they want you to do with it.
2. use of your bandwidth to help their business and you get 1 dollar of the purchase

NOW you know how it works and whats happening now p2p.net Run that story! dig deep and you will find it 100% right.

I remember one big fail

Joost.

Joost tried to do the same, but even with all the investor money they burnt, rock star founders, rock star CEO, and all the contacts in the world, the big content owners didn’t sign up.
Joost had all the money and influence to get an audience as big as the piratebay but they couldn’t do it because acquiring all that content is pretty much impossible thanks to copyright laws and bureaucracy.

There are too many rules, and deals already signed when it comes to content, and content owners are very hard to hand content left and right legally, even when great platforms for legal content distribution are present it seems they prefer their content is acquired ilegally. Even Hulu has such problems and it’s backed by NBC Universal and Fox.
They always end up pissing their userbase because of contracts that allow them to publish content online for only a few weeks at the time since they have to cling on to old TV distribution style contracts…

There needs to be a generational turn over for big media to get it

Sorry

“content via BitTorrent actually is helping decrease the distribution costs, but as we’ve seen, the entertainment industry likes to ignore that, and assume that the entire value is in the content, not in the distribution.”

They assume no such thing.
Their business model is based on controlling ALL aspects of the process: creation, distribution channels, and “content” itself.

They want a monopoly on distribution, every bit as much as they want one on “professional” level recording/copying gear, and the “content” itself. Think of it this way: distribution may be “expensive”, but failing to monopolize distribution is far more “expensive” because it would actually open them up to things like competition (which, as we all know, is actually a *bad* thing, from the point of view of corporate capitalism.)

So let’s say this actually worked, and created a viable platform where p2p could actually be “leveraged” in this way:

1. It’s remarkably easy to get “professional” level gear nowadays (You can build up a good quality DAW — digital audio workstation — using off-the-shelf parts, and readily available software, for example.)
We’re no longer in the era where the “major labels” were the only ones to have multitrack tape capability, or suchlike, so there’s really no credible reason for “labels” to exist on the “production” side of the equation.
(They’ve always know that decent-quality gear in the hands of mere “consumers” — or even “indie” folks — was bad for their business model, hence their tendency to try and get stuff banned or lobotomized. — Valenti’s “Boston strangler” bullshit, and region-coding in the DVD standard, as just two examples.)

2. Assuming this actually worked, what’s to stop “indie” artists from leveraging p2p (like they’re already doing?) P2p — Whether it’s BitTorrent or not, drastically lowers — or even removes — one of the biggest barriers to entry, in that you no longer have to have warehouses full of storage space, big “professional” burning equipment or record-lathes, or suchlike, to have a potentially global audience.
So they’d totally lose out on the “distribution” aspect of their business-model, too, because why let the albums rape you, if you can just to your own distribution and build up your fanbase that way?

3. The last part — paying folks to do what they’re already doing (p2p filesharing): great idea — except that, yet again, there’s absolutely nothing that the MAFIAA can bring in, that people don’t already have. (Hint: every p2p network is basically the equivalent of a bottomless “server-farm”, which is why such vast amounts of data are easy over p2p networks.)
So they can’t even make out by selling server-farms, or dedicated hosting, or suchlike, because the network itself will contain millions of folks all happily “hosting” the content *and getting paid to do so.*

No, only way the MAFIAA corporate pigs can actually make out on something like this (which is a really great idea, by the way), is to gouge the hell out of everybody for the use of “their” back catalogs. (You think the Public Domain scares them? Anything they “allowed” on the p2p network would be completely out of their control forever, afterward.)

So something like this would amount to the complete and total, final, irrelevancy of every “label” in existence, simply because it would pretty much eliminate any REMAINING barriers to production, distribution, hosting, bandwidth, etc. — and the prospect of a “side-income” from simply seeding files is actually pretty damn cool, too.

Absolutely no way the “labels” are every going to go for this, specifically because they recognize that the ONLY “value” they bring to the table is monopoly leverage — lose ONE side of it, and they lose it all.

Hope this made sense.