While the music plays
Posted on August 05, 2003 @ 11:47 in General
In two very interesting columns Robert Cringely talks about what he calls Snapster: the Son of Napster. You might want to read about Snapster first, to see how the argument develops to his vision of Snapster 2.0, the revised version of the idea. Basically, what his argument comes down to, is that under Fair Use and Copyright laws, it should be possible to set up a company as a mutual fund. People can buy shares in this mutual fund and these shares entitle them to peruse the fund's assets, of which they are now co-owners. If these assets are music recordings in the form of CDs, then under Fair Use and Copyright laws, shareholders would be entitled to use those CDs or a copy thereof. A copy of the CD would easily be distributed over the internet, while the original remains in the company's warehouse.
The only limitation appears to be that for each original recording in possession of the company, only one copy may be actively used at the same time. So while one shareholder listens to Madonna's latest CD, other shareholders cannot listen to that particular CD, unless the company acquires more copies of the CD. For this system to work then, it becomes necessary to devise a scheme where a listening request for a particular CD locks it down and prevents other users from accessing it simultaneously. Cringely describes it as follows:
It is a token passing scheme, and only the shareholder with the token can play the song. It is legal to loan your CDs and also legal to loan control of your CDs, thereby justifying possession of a fair use copy at a remote location.
This little statement truly tickles my funny bone. If it is legal to loan control of your CDs or a copy of a CD in your possession, why would we need to go through a company capitalizing on the process? I as an individual can grant the right to any other person to "lend" my music, but while someone else is playing it, I myself cannot listen to that particular song or CD.
Let's say I have something like 300 CDs. I'm not listening to more than one at the time and on top of that, most of the time I'm not listening to any CDs at all. If I'm lending my CDs to other users through a P2P application and the system would make sure that each song or CD I posses is only used by one other user at any one time, then I would not be breaching any Fair Use or Copyright laws. Of course, the system should make sure that when someone has listened to a copy of a recording in my possession, their local copy is deleted after listening. Otherwise my CD would remain locked to their copy and I would not be able to play it myself.
In the end, if the whole thing holds up in court (read Cringely's more detailed discussion of that), the P2P solution might actually be more stable and scalable, because everybody participating would contribute their own music collection and you wouldn't be dependent on some company's acquisition policies. Besides, many people like Madonna, so from the start there would be many copies of Madonna's latest CD available to listen to, not just the 1 or 100 that the Snapster company decides to buy.
So why would people go on buying CDs or electronic versions of songs if they can listen to them pretty much when they like for nothing or close to nothing? I can just give a personal reason here, but if I really like an artist or band, I want that person to make more music that I like, so I'm inclined to support that musician or band. Right now my only choice is buying a €15 to 20 CD, of which the artist receives maybe €1. Depending on their contract, the artist will have to pay the record company for stuff like studio time out of these proceedings. If I could donate money directly to the artist through his or her website, I would gladly pay somewhere between €1 and 5 to own the recordings and support the artist. This money would go directly to the artist and would conceivably yield the artist more income than s/he would get from a deal with a record company. If the recording is also published in an attractive 'hard copy' format, I might be inclined to pay even more for the additional box, booklet, posters, or what have you.
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Hmm. Sounds good and I would support such a token lending system, but two points directly come to mind:
1. The system depends on deletion of lent copies after use. This is easily done with electronic copies such as MP3s, but what if the lender made a physical copy on audio CD or CD-ROM for use elswhere? It will be very difficult to enforce deletion of these extraneous copies. And keeping these copies after use, after the "lending token" has been returned, would be illegal.
2. In Dutch law, and I'm sure there are provisions like that in many other countries' laws, there is such a thing as 'naburige rechten' (don't know the English term, it would translate as something like 'proxy rights'). The Wet Naburige Rechten (see http://www.ivir.nl/wetten/nl/wnr.html - Dutch language link), among others, governs lending works of art, even when non-profit, and demands that royalties be paid. This would complicate matters insofar as a simple "lending ring" scheme would become impracticable or illegal.
Posted by Arjan on August 07, 2003 @ 11:34
re 1: Indeed... I've been thinking about that as well, but I think there's just no system that is ever going to be secure. That's why I think an alternative way of paying the artists is very important. I'm not talking about the record companies, because they can go the way of the dodo as far as I'm concerned. Paying the artists could be done through a "tip jar" system or the possibility to directly pay the artist for an "official" download of their music. I'm aware you can critique this simplistic idea in many ways, but sometimes I just think that most people are responsible and ethical individuals most of the time.
re 2: Yeah, stuff is bound to be differently organized in different countries. I know next to nothing about Dutch Fair Use law, so I was just building on Cringely's ideas here.
It's interesting though, there was a bit of a smoke the other day about Apple disabling already downloaded songs from their iTunes service on systems moved from the US to Canada (if I remember correctly). On grounds that Apple only offers the iTunes service in the US. Or something like that. Which is a complicated way of saying that there seem to be ways to geographically limit certain internet applications.
Posted by Frank on August 07, 2003 @ 15:36
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