Music Piracy 2: The Road Back
The battle over the future of music appears to be coming to an end, but a new and hopefully smaller skirmish is about to begin between those pushing ISP taxes, and those favoring voluntary licenses.
The argument is no longer about whether or not the industry should compete with pirates or fight them, but how exactly the labels should compete. Last week it was announced that Warner Music Group had hired Jim Griffin to figure out a way to implement a $5 a month surcharge on your monthly internet bill, which has come under fire already from the tech community for being too much like a tax, or as Micheal Arrington put it, a protection racket. “The plan essentially comes down to telling ISPs that they can avoid any copyright infringement liability if they pay the fee on behalf of customers” Arrington writes, “and while the government wouldn’t be directly involved, the willingness of law enforcement agencies and the judicial system to enforce civil and criminal copyright infringement laws is the stick by which Griffin will convince ISPs to jump on board. It’s government endorsed extortion, nothing more and nothing less.”
One concern is this move would chill innovation in the music industry. Another objection is that the labels rejected this same idea years ago. “People were excited about this idea in the last days of Napster,” Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, told Frank Rose at Wired. “But the music companies were not only not receptive to it, they considered it treasonous. Now the music companies are desperate — and people are saying, ‘No, we had that conversation, and you said we’ll see you in court.’”
The other solution being put forward by the EFF, music lawyer Bennet Lincoff, and in fact, most of the file-sharing community, is a voluntary licensing scheme, which in my opinion makes a lot more sense. As the EFF’s Fred von Lohmann writes:
“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.”
When need a solution that allows for many organizations to operate, at different price points in different markets and doesn’t concentrate power. File-sharing communities are already criticizing the tax suggestion, but are open to the idea of a free-market solution. This isn’t just an economic/technological fight anymore, it’s also cultural. Piracy has become a youth movement in its own right, and if the industry wants to win this fight, it needs to come to the table with this community in real and meaningful way.
