[advocacy] Question on Personal License

[Daniel James]

> Therefore, compared
> with GPL, there is a problem with personal license:
> how can personal license claim the right of artists'
> control on their music while denying that of
> organizations'?

As I understand it, indivdual rights are the basis of corporate 
rights over music. The problem is that people sign over those rights 
in a con-tract.

> How can artists get money while they are
> releasing their music using a format without any copy
> protection?

Or to turn the argument on it's head, how can they get money if they 
are depending for income on a broken copy protection system?

> (Can TV, film or
> game industry use Personal Licensed music by paying to
> the artist in question? 

The licence doesn't rule that out. What it does say is that they 
can't use it in a commercial product without obtaining the consent of 
the artist. In order to gain that consent, it's concievable that they 
might have to pay - it's up to the artist.

> Then, why should artists take Personal License over
> the combination of copyright and Music License?

Because otherwise they are implying that people shouldn't share their 
music. Conventional music licensing is just not compatible with the 
internet - it says you cannot make a copy, but that's exactly what 
you do when you download from an official site.

An example of how licensing authorities don't 'get it' - The MCPS (UK 
body which collects recording royalties) wants to charge a 5 pence 
royalty to music websites every time a track is downloaded. (I wish 
them luck in trying to collect). But the internet is based on 
forwarding packets from one machine to another until it reaches it's 
destination, right? So do you charge the owner of every machine that 
the file passes through?

What about web caches such as Squid? A college might have a web cache 
that holds a single copy of a popular music file. Let's say everyone 
on campus wants to hear it, and it gets copied from cache to desktop 
5,000 times. The artist gets 5 pence.

Of course in the old days, everyone would have heard that piece of 
music on the local radio station, and the artist might have got a few 
more pence - once they paid the expenses of the record company.

In the fantasy digital model of companies like Disney, those 5,000 
people are each going to pay a dollar to hear the track. Then it will 
self-destruct after ten plays. 

> Actually, plagarism is a big issue in the record industry. 

Only when it's some other record company's artist doing the 
plagiarism. Compare Blur's 'Country House' to the Kinks' 'House in 
the Country', for example.

As for the My Sweet Lord case, the idea that you can own a sequence 
of notes or chords is a bizzare one. Might as well claim that you can 
own a series of numbers... oh - they do.

Daniel 

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