[Steven Cherry recommends that Congress "order some form of compulsory or blanket licensing for downloaded music." This has become a common refrain. But it sounds off-key to me. It presupposes that lobbyists with the ear of Congress or the Copyright Office will come up with a solution that will benefit the public more than a marketplace where people can contract freely. By treating all music equally, a blanket license may ignore differences in quality. More importantly, such licenses impose government "price controls" and restrict the freedom of the content owner to negotiate their own price for a license. I license my photos. If the Feds told me I could charge only $XXX when I think my photos are worth $XXX+$YYY, I'd be angry about the lost revenue. The folks at Cato have talked about this in a bit more detail here: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-423es.html Also in the article, Cherry correctly says that the Feds currently tax blank CDs as a sop to music owners upset about piracy. But, amazingly, he suggests that the "tax could be extended to memory sticks, data CDs, even hard disks." Perhaps we could also tax blank paper because of those piracy-enabling photocopiers? --Declan] --- Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 16:53:49 -0500 To: Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> From: Steven Cherry <s.cherryat_private> Subject: IEEE Spectrum - Getting Copyright Right Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-UIDL: 28a2b558541b7c9bc1148cca1892baab http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/feb02/copyr.html Getting Copyright Right Mandatory copyright licensing legitimized the early radio and cable TV industries. Can it do the same for the Internet? By Steven M. Cherry, Senior Associate Editor -- Steven Cherry, +1 212 419 7566 Senior Associate Editor, IEEE Spectrum, New York, NY <s.cherryat_private> http://www.spectrum.ieee.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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