Google Wins the Filesharing Wars? 200
The Importance of writes "Compulsory licensing schemes such as those proposed by the EFF have been critiqued, but now LawMeme has an interesting article that claims Google will win the filesharing wars if a compulsory license is adopted."
Compulsory Licensing (Score:3, Informative)
Musicians also have a compulsory license that allows them to perform or record any song written as long as the songwriter get payed a set amount.
Re:What's that you say? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:blablabla (Score:2, Informative)
Bandwidth is (or should be, turn uploading on leechers) shared on any network. Just the who gets what and where is centralized.
Re:Uses for P2P (Score:5, Informative)
Decentralization is just a part of the problem (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's that you say? (Score:5, Informative)
In England and Holland you have to pay a license fee to the goverment (well a subset of it) for each receiver. It was originally a sum made up out of the number of radios, bw tv's and color tv's you had. Later this was simplified at least in holland.
From this license fee the programs were funded. In england this is the BBC who own a couple of stations and are required by the law to supply programming to the intrest of the nation. In the netherlands we have license holders who according to the number of members they have, membership fee is about 5 dollars last time I checked, get a number of hours to fill on the various radio channels and a amount of slots on the tv channels. In holland they also get income out of advertising. England doesn't have ads. Hmmmm adfree simpsons.
Because you need to pay the license fee on the basis of owning a receiver, not based on actual consumption you can say it is compusery. When the original home computers came out they used ordinary tv's, with receivers for their displays. This of course meant a hike in your license fees despite the fact that you did not watch any tv with them.
On the other hand the fee was hardly gigantic and it ensured that tv was of a reasonable quality. BBC programs are known around the world for their execellence (no I don't mean their news service). Dutch programs slightly less because of the language barrier nonetheless they used to win international prices routinely.
Plus it assured a restrained amount of ads. They are only allowed between programs. Plus programs are thightly regulated on things like sponsoring.
Okay now I explained tv licenses. You may have heard of the BBC director proposing to put all their content on the net. You see because it is a semi-goverment company paid by the citizens according to written law you could say that these citizens have paid for the creation of the content and therefore OWN the content. So copyright in this case becomes far less of an issue. Even more because the BBC can rely on its income from the licenses it doesn't rely have to worry about how the content it creates is watched. No ranting about people not watching the ads, like fox did, because there aren't any. No ranting about people recording eps, in fact they have several time olds series they lost but they found copies made by viewers, and then sharing them because as long as their is a tv involved they paid to view the content.
In holland we stopped the license fee since it was suggested that everyone owns a receiver anyway. So it is now collected through regular taxes. So it can be reasonably argued that any program is taxpayer owned.
So their are some clear benefits to doing it this way. Sure americans probably hate it but they are a silly bunch anway.
So why not use something similar for other content? Well the BBC is a monopoly, they get the all the money and they decide what to make with it. Of course there are all kinds of bounds and checks but a monopoly it is.
In holland we got competition between license holders. Currently one license holder BNN is having an ad campaign to get more people to become members of them. They need X amount of members to get Y amount of tv/radio hours. The bigger you are the more and better hours you get. Although there are some minority stations that get some according to intrest group.
But how would you do this with music? There is a lot of different companies. How would you decide how to distribute the money?
But I think that a compulsary license would work something like what I described above. In any case at least for TV it has been proven to work.
On the other hand we also have a different compulsary license in holland. Each DVD recordable has a .50/1.00 euro tax (depends on if it is + or - format) attached. Yes you read that right. The money goes to the movie industrie to compensate them for illegal copies. Of cour
Re:blablabla (Score:4, Informative)
Gnutella and its ilk are a nightmare on searching. They consume an awfull lot of bandwidth on the protocol not on the actual exchange of files. For the moments that is how its got to be. But it is not efficient.
Oh and filesharing is legal people. It is copyright violation that you can at the moment be sueed for.
Re:Wrong and right (Score:2, Informative)
What really bothers me is most people that think the Internet is the Web (i.e. the html/http protocols suit and their applications) or, worse, the Internet is Internet Explorer. I remember a friend's girlfriend who couldn't understand that we each needed a copy of some game to play on the Internet ("But, if it's on the Internet you just need to all go to the game site, right ?").
Oh well, in the end the human kind will get what it deserves.
Re:If Google ever decided to do this... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:GOOGLE could do it right now. Here's how. (Score:2, Informative)
A simple HTTP GET request to the machine with the requested file is all you need.. no need to launch Gnutella or any other plugin
-dk
Re:help me (Score:3, Informative)
Re:help me (Score:3, Informative)
The Megadeth issue is about royalties, though. (Score:3, Informative)
The upcoming Killing... reissue, which will reportedly not include MEGADETH's cover of the Nancy Sinatra classic "These Boots Are Made For Walking" after the original writer of the song, Lee Hazelwood, refused to grant the group the rights to re-release the track, will contain an as-yet-undisclosed "big surprise", according to the frontman. (http://www.angelfire.com/fl2/wvummetalshow/oldne
The original version was originally released on CD without 'These Boots' due to Lee Hazelwood's delayed decision to be a right bastard. Megadeth had to increase royalties to him or drop the track. The later was chosen, the 7 track version was released and many fans never got to hear it. However, Combat Records (the bands label at the time) have since rereleased the album with the full original uncensored mix of 'These Boots' in its rightful place on track 4. (http://www.lastlabyrinth.com/reviews/revew29a.ht
The one big change on this rerelease is the band's phenomenal cover of "These Boots", originally made famous by Nancy Sinatra. After its release, songwriter Lee Hazelwood was offended by Mustaine's hilarious reworking of the lyrics, and eventually forced the band to issue later prints of the album without the song. It appears for the first time on CD here, but in a surreally censored fashion, since Hazelwood still has yet to grant permission to Mustaine to release the cover in its complete version. So instead of hearing all the lyrics, all the naughty bits are "bleeped" out. (http://www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/m/megade
However, it appears unlikely that the reissued album will include MEGADETH's cover of the Nancy Sinatra classic "These Boots Are Made For Walking", which appeared on the original version of the CD, after the original writer of the song, Lee Hazelwood, refused to grant the group the rights to re-release the version of the track that appeared on Killing..., seeing as it contained slightly altered lyrics to the original, thereby requiring Hazelwood's consent. "Sadly, we were forced to make a decision," Dave stated in his posting. "Do we put 'These Boots' on as an instrumental, do we sing it again in the original format with his lyrics, or do we just beep out all of my lyrics that I added? I decided for now, not to have it on the record if it means that we have to censor ourselves to appease this person. I have also written a statement about what happened, and why it isn't on the record, for inclusion in the liner notes. (http://www.blistering.com/news/newsdet.php3?ID=2