Wired News reports that the recording industry is discovering that the present copyright regime limits as well as empowers its ability to control the music business. It seems that the ineligibility of interactive online music services (i.e. webcasters) for less expensive, pre-determined compulsory licenses from music publishers are putting a damper on some record companies own plans for online services. This despite the fact that the present rules are due in large part to the lobbying and litigation efforts of those same companies. The irony is unmistakable.
The following quotes from summarised the story for me quite nicely. From complaint against Universal Music Group’s (UMG) Farmclub.com by various music publishers:
UMG Recordings has decided to engage in the very same infringing activities that UMG itself — in a recent and highly publicized lawsuit — successfully challenged in this court.
Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Digital Media Association (DiMA), on the recording industry’s attempt to maximize their own royalty intake while minimizing that of the publishers:
They want to take as much as they can to build their own business, but don’t want anyone else to build theirs.
Incidentally, this also relates to comments made by popular pundit Clay Shirky in a recent Slashdot interview about the future of the Internet. In response to a question about the DMCA, file sharing, and this present season of litigation with regard to both Mr. Shirky noted (paragraph eight of his response to the first question at Slashdot):
Ten years from now, this nonsense will have failed. Embracing digital data for what it does well will so expand the size of the market, by lowering expensive physical barriers, that the music industry will be making *more* money than it does today.
Two years from now is a different, and muddier, story. The interesting fight today is between the music industry and the recording industry.
For what it’s worth, I wish that recording industry executives would listen less to their fears (and their lawyers) and more to the entrepreneurs.
Hat tip to Redmonk Weblog and Tomalak’s Realm
Szasz on Government “School-Prisons”
In a recent commentary for the L.A. Times Thomas Szasz, a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Suny in Syracuse, argues that government schools have become prisons established for the purpose of controlling their inmates rather than educating them. He is certainly not the only person making this point, and with many schools — attendance at which is usually required by law — being gated with metal detectors and patrolled by uniformed security guards the connection is not at all difficult to make.
If Prof. Szasz is correct, and there is evidence in his favour, then the occasional “prison uprising” (i.e. school shooting) should be entirely unsurprising.
Hat tip to LewRockwell.Com