A
friend recently forwarded this
rant about EFF's
position on file sharing, and it begs for a response:
Why don't we all focus on figuring out ways to distribute media that benefit both consumers and creators? The EFF doesn't care about doing that; I know, I've asked them. They suggest setting up a system in which people pay a voluntary fee for using p2p apps, but they can't be bothered to come up with a way to ensure that I get paid for the ten copies of my song that get downloaded a month as surely as Blink 182 gets paid for the ten million copies of their songs that get downloaded. That part of the big glorious picture is really hazy, because they don't care about creators. They care about placating Big Media.
Huh? "Big Media" would gouge their Cthulhu-eyes out with pitchforks before adopting an EFF plan, even though it benefits the artists that they claim to protect.
I don't know who jzellis talked to at EFF, but something has been garbled. EFF supports an approach to file sharing that draws a lot from radio. In that medium,
stations pay songwriters through big rights-clearinghouses. Creators get paid, but the music
feels free to the listener. The problem is that radio stations make payments based on statistical sampling, DJ diaries, and dumb luck. If a song is only played ten times in a sampling period, it's more than possible that it will be missed - and the creator won't get paid.
But if applied to P2P, this kind of system could actually be more fair to artists than today's radio licensing. On the air, accurate sampling is prohibitively expensive. On the Net, it can be transparent and relatively cheap. In fact, the monitor-and-destroy technologies of RIAA darlings
Audible Magic are
perfect for the job. One of the three major songwriters' unions is already
experimenting with the technology. If it takes off, more small artists will be better off than before.
I appreciate jzellis' willingness to question EFF's suggestions. But he/she is wrong to say that we're not interested in paying artists fairly.
.:link:. | Thank,
Pat!
Joshua Zachariah Ellis here (I'm definitely a "he", by the way.)
The person I spoke to was Fred von Lohmann, at the Future of Music Law Conference early this year. I've also mentioned this stuff to Doctorow in passing, once when I was interviewing him and a couple of times at parties.
The key phrase I'm sticking at here is "big rights-clearinghouses". When I spoke to Fred, it seemed like nobody had really sat down and concretized this part of the equation. When I asked him who this might be, he said something about ASCAP or BMI. Your site doesn't suggest to me that this has all been figured out since then, either.
Sorry, I'm not signing up with ASCAP or BMI. Why should I? It costs me money, it's a lot of paperwork, and the way they handle payments is controlled by the big publishing companies and the labels.
Your proposed system puts all the burden of responsibility on the artist, while leaving none for the consumer. Any idiot can happily click away and get whatever he or she wants...but I've got to go down and file my songs with the boss man in order to get paid, three months or six months or a year down the road.
Compare this to a system where I use micropayments to sell my music online, which I do. (Full disclosure: I work for BitPass, the micropayments company...but I joined up with them early on because I saw the potential for content creators like myself.) Somebody wants my track, they click, they buy it, I get paid immediately and they get what they want.
Can you explain to me how this system is problematic? Particularly compared to the whole sampling/monitoring/rights-clearinghouse solution, which strikes me as being about as elegant as a car crash. My system is mostly decentralized -- other than the actual payment system, anybody can set it up for themselves or a group of artists or (as in the case of my site Mperia) anybody who wants to sell music. It requires very little from either the artist or the consumer other than a willingness to transact with one another.
The consumer is also guaranteed that they're getting exactly what they want, when they want it, which is not the case with P2P, where reliability of download is proportional to the general popularity of the media you're trying to download. (In other words...go on Gnutella and try to find a copy of one of my songs. If you do, you're probably connected to *me*.)
My system doesn't prevent piracy, but hell, neither does the one you propose, and God help anyone naive enough to think it will. Piracy will always happen, whether it's in a flea market in Bangladesh or on a rogue P2P network based out of a country with incompatible copyright laws (like Iran, for example).
When I say you're trying to placate Big Media, I don't mean that you're trying to get them to adopt your plans. We both know they won't do that. What I mean is that you're trying to keep them from passing laws that wipe P2P out of existence, by offering even the remotest possibility that they could make some money off the deal.
None of the artists I know (and remember I run an online music store, so I deal with a lot of artists) care much about P2P one way or another. It doesn't offer them the same avenues for expanding their audiences that the Web does, because P2P is a strictly pull-based medium. People use P2P to search for what they want, not what they don't know they have. So far, most artists simply see P2P networks as a place where people go to steal their work.
I suppose we might just be coming at this from completely different angles. I want to get rid of the existing music distribution system entirely, because it sucks. Maybe that's not what the EFF is interested in. I don't care about making P2P work. I care about making online music work, and the technology used is peripheral to that.
Your system might be one useful avenue, but it's not going to be the single method of music distribution online, I guarantee you of that. But nobody's willing to even consider anything else. You've been pushing P2P so hard in the media and the courts (not to mention the court of public opinion) that it's starting to sound like some magical curative for the entire intellectual property issue. And it simply isn't.
Unfortunately, nobody's been interested in talking about alternatives, or helping to support them, or even entertaining the notion that anything could be more important than P2P. And considering that P2P is a distribution structure with far more advantages for the consumer than the artist, does it really surprise you that it comes off like you don't care about artist rights, or put them a distant second to consumer rights?
I support the EFF in most of its pursuits; I have an EFF t-shirt and a bunch of EFF stickers on my PowerBook and I send my contribution yearly. I've known John Barlow for years, and I respect him a lot. But I still believe that the artist is being neglected here, particularly the independent artist, who doesn't even have the dubious protection of a label.
I am glad somebody finally bothered to address these concerns, though. And I'd like to hear more of your comments.
Joshua Zachariah Ellis here (I'm definitely a "he", by the way.)
The person I spoke to was Fred von Lohmann, at the Future of Music Law Conference early this year. I've also mentioned this stuff to Doctorow in passing, once when I was interviewing him and a couple of times at parties.
The key phrase I'm sticking at here is "big rights-clearinghouses". When I spoke to Fred, it seemed like nobody had really sat down and concretized this part of the equation. When I asked him who this might be, he said something about ASCAP or BMI. Your site doesn't suggest to me that this has all been figured out since then, either.
Sorry, I'm not signing up with ASCAP or BMI. Why should I? It costs me money, it's a lot of paperwork, and the way they handle payments is controlled by the big publishing companies and the labels.
Your proposed system puts all the burden of responsibility on the artist, while leaving none for the consumer. Any idiot can happily click away and get whatever he or she wants...but I've got to go down and file my songs with the boss man in order to get paid, three months or six months or a year down the road.
Compare this to a system where I use micropayments to sell my music online, which I do. (Full disclosure: I work for BitPass, the micropayments company...but I joined up with them early on because I saw the potential for content creators like myself.) Somebody wants my track, they click, they buy it, I get paid immediately and they get what they want.
Can you explain to me how this system is problematic? Particularly compared to the whole sampling/monitoring/rights-clearinghouse solution, which strikes me as being about as elegant as a car crash. My system is mostly decentralized -- other than the actual payment system, anybody can set it up for themselves or a group of artists or (as in the case of my site Mperia) anybody who wants to sell music. It requires very little from either the artist or the consumer other than a willingness to transact with one another.
The consumer is also guaranteed that they're getting exactly what they want, when they want it, which is not the case with P2P, where reliability of download is proportional to the general popularity of the media you're trying to download. (In other words...go on Gnutella and try to find a copy of one of my songs. If you do, you're probably connected to *me*.)
My system doesn't prevent piracy, but hell, neither does the one you propose, and God help anyone naive enough to think it will. Piracy will always happen, whether it's in a flea market in Bangladesh or on a rogue P2P network based out of a country with incompatible copyright laws (like Iran, for example).
When I say you're trying to placate Big Media, I don't mean that you're trying to get them to adopt your plans. We both know they won't do that. What I mean is that you're trying to keep them from passing laws that wipe P2P out of existence, by offering even the remotest possibility that they could make some money off the deal.
None of the artists I know (and remember I run an online music store, so I deal with a lot of artists) care much about P2P one way or another. It doesn't offer them the same avenues for expanding their audiences that the Web does, because P2P is a strictly pull-based medium. People use P2P to search for what they want, not what they don't know they have. So far, most artists simply see P2P networks as a place where people go to steal their work.
I suppose we might just be coming at this from completely different angles. I want to get rid of the existing music distribution system entirely, because it sucks. Maybe that's not what the EFF is interested in. I don't care about making P2P work. I care about making online music work, and the technology used is peripheral to that.
Your system might be one useful avenue, but it's not going to be the single method of music distribution online, I guarantee you of that. But nobody's willing to even consider anything else. You've been pushing P2P so hard in the media and the courts (not to mention the court of public opinion) that it's starting to sound like some magical curative for the entire intellectual property issue. And it simply isn't.
Unfortunately, nobody's been interested in talking about alternatives, or helping to support them, or even entertaining the notion that anything could be more important than P2P. And considering that P2P is a distribution structure with far more advantages for the consumer than the artist, does it really surprise you that it comes off like you don't care about artist rights, or put them a distant second to consumer rights?
I support the EFF in most of its pursuits; I have an EFF t-shirt and a bunch of EFF stickers on my PowerBook and I send my contribution yearly. I've known John Barlow for years, and I respect him a lot. But I still believe that the artist is being neglected here, particularly the independent artist, who doesn't even have the dubious protection of a label.
I am glad somebody finally bothered to address these concerns, though. And I'd like to hear more of your comments.
Posted by: Joshua Ellis on September 25, 2004 05:04 AM