P2P Licensing

[robin_d_laws]

This NOW magazine article is extremely optimistic about the Digital Music Exchange, a proposal to legalize P2P music file sharing by charging a universal license fee for it. The DMX software supposedly logs not only downloads of a song, but the number of plays, and can even tell if it gets burned to CD. Pieces of the compensation pie are doled out

Comments

[anonymous]

If the DMX system is actually, as reported in the article, "minus digital locks or other technical protection," then it might have some traction. On the other hand, there's a disturbing implication of your computer reporting back every time you access the file ("DMX software can track how often, for example, a song is listened to and whether it's copied to a CD"). How many people would be comfortable using a system that reported to some central authority every time they read a book or watched a movie, and which book or movie that was? ("Central authority" in this case is almost guaranteed to end up meaning both "corporate marketing research" and "the government.")

Re Public Lending Right -- the link you provided seems to suggest that the "royalties" (apparently some fraction of general taxes) are based on whether any library has a copy of your book, not actual lending activity. It sounds like an interesting system (with odd exceptions -- no money for technical books, or cookbooks, or travel books...), particularly in that it rewards the authors directly, not the publishers. Which means that no publishing "industry" is going to push for a similar program in the US.

-- Peter Erwin