[advocacy] Question on Personal License

[Daniel James]

> What MP3.com is trying to do is, I think, to
> individualise copyrights

Copyrights are individual, unless they are given up as part of a 
recording deal. Rather, I think that MP3.com is offering a better 
royalty deal because of the nature of their freshly-established 
business.

> There are, probably, two ways to avoid the
> interference by the record industry.  1. Modifying
> copyright law.  2. Overturning the copyright laws and
> building a new law from a scratch.
>
> The option 1 seems to be the way of Mp3.com while the
> option 2 seems to be Personal License.

Both MP3.com and the personal licence exist independently of the 
copyright laws of states. It's a question of how legal rights are 
asserted, not the rights themselves.

> Do you think you can persuade artists at MP3.com into
> Personal License?  Or, do you  think that you need to
> do so?  For Ogg Vorbis format itself can support the
> both of Personal License and what MP3.com is doing and
> what they are doing is, I think, also a choice.

I'm not trying to imply that Ogg-releasing artists should always use 
the licence, just that it's an option which suits internet 
distribution better than conventional copyright notices.

>The rich and
> famous artists have already gained something

But to stay rich and famous they have to stay popular, and 
legitimised peer-to-peer file sharing can help them do that.

On the other hand they can go down the Michael Jackson route. Spend 
millions on the album, then release it on a non-standard CD to make 
compression encoding inconvenient. Sit music journalists in a dark 
locked room and make them listen to the album, hoping they'll agree 
to hype it as a condition of being let out. 

> while
> nameless artists won't lose anything. 

I agree they have less vested interests in the current system. They 
can chase the dream of being the content industry's next Cinderella, 
or they can start having people hear their music today.

Daniel

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