>
>
>
>Part I - Music vs. Law
>
>
>
>This <http://www.riaa.com/Licensing-Licen-1.cfm>RIAA-Licensing,
><http://www.ascap.com/weblicense/webintro.html>ASCAP and SESAC Licensing
>and Digital Copyright thing is so bloody confusing. Will it not allow
>for simplification?
>
>
>
>A review of the entries posted on Pho in the last three years shows a wide
>range of topics with most assumptions either based on the music industry
>s recent historical precedent, a period since about 1950; or on emerging
>online music business since around 1996. Presently, the recording
>industry is driving a well-financed legal initiative to apply legal
>restrictions that extend business principles of the recent historical
>precedent into the digital domain, a space that is evolving faster than
>expected as, each day, new technology affects a hundred other
>technologies in a thousand unpredictable ways.
>
>
>
>Here we are, having kicked around the issues for about three years, and
>not one of us really knows where it will wind up.
>
>
>
>How can this be?
>
>
>
>For one thing, the cumbersome structures of the historical precedent that
>we re trying to forge into our digital future introduce contradictions
>and inconsistencies that are impeding, rather than facilitating
>development. The problem is we live in a rapidly contracting future and
>no matter what gets said or done today, the playing field changes
>tomorrow. More precisely, what gets done today, has changed as of
>yesterday.
>
>
>
>Question: How can legal structures of the last fifty years be reclaimed
>in the digital future?
>
>
>
>Answer: They can t. It is all but impossible to reconcile the two...
>there are no structures that can contain digits. As soon as they re
>built & the digits sail right through.
>
>
>
>A book I recently read offers as its title a simple statement: "Somebody
>Moved My Cheese". Nowhere is this ironic message more applicable than in
>the world of entertainment. Somebody moved the cheese and now the
>Senate must re-write the law.
>
>
>
>What s the chances that the legislature will show us the way? Slim to
>none. Calling on lawmakers to add complexity to codes already burdensome
>is a kind of backwards thinking that further retards us, in my opinion.
> Lawyering the solution just leads to protracted litigation. The cycle
>never ends.
>
>
>
>More to the point, we've moved beyond the capacity of a governing body
>numbering in the hundreds of people who barely agree on the time of day to
>deal in a timely manner with what is going on here. Even if the legal
>process could catch up with the digital process, which it will never be
>able to do, the playing field will change again. It s as simple as that.
>It will be years before a vote is ready to be taken. By then, great
>opportunities will have washed down the drain
>
>
>
>
>For the last fifty years, the weight of law has traditionally been used
>to create a structure whose purpose it is to limit access to music s
>magical vibration. A business gets built around the "main attraction" &
>Music Business.
>
>
>
>Essentially, music business creates a hierarchy of exclusivity. "Star
>treatment" results, which leads to "star power". From that control, gold
>is created. In the world of brick and mortar, seats in performance venues
>are limited, so no one has ever questioned the built-in scarcity of the
>star s product. Realistically, there is no way that every musical act
>can find a stage and no way that every fan can get a seat. A value is
>established by that limitation, applied at both ends of the performance
>contract limiting the number of star acts as well as the number of
>seats available for audiences.
>
>
>
>Sale of recordings in the brick and mortar world limits access in a
>slightly different way. Here, the venue is retail shelf space that limits
>the number of artists who are allowed to express themselves. The small
>percentage of artists who are promoted, are encouraged to fill a space of
>time on a CD with sufficient titles to maintain threshold pricing. Just
>enough vibration, but not too much vibration.
>
>
>
>It goes without saying, that the first order of music business is finding,
>then OWNING, the best vibration to which access can then be metered.
>Typically, the disks are bought by fans who are looking to access one or
>two of as many as twelve or fourteen tracks that are sold. Value is
>forsaken in a world where money forms the essential exchange proposition.
>
>
>
>But on the Internet, money turns into digits. As information and monetary
>digits intermingle, intrinsic value becomes an exchange on multiple levels
>and this is inherently different than the money-value disconnect that
>occurs in the world of brick and mortar. In the digital domain, value is
>connected to an infinity of concepts of which the aggregation of money
> is only one. Musical digits, in this space, are interchangeable in
>their essential composition with digits that define value for a wide
>range of otherwise strictly monetary vehicles. An infinity of values are,
>therefore, able to be devised by allowing the digital streams to merge.
>This is why some advance the argument that the digits should be free.
>
>
>
>Instinctively, we know that music, as well as all intellectual property,
>has value beyond its capacity to monetarily pay its owner in a retail
>exchange. For a few dollars, a buyer receives a the creator s combined
>knowledge of experience and skill, a knowledge of expression that the
>buyer can then internalize and share with others. The value is a shared
>resource accessible through the cultural continuum . But because the
>object sold is a universe unto itself, that is, the CD or book is an
>object that exists physically only in the space it inhabits, its value
>beyond the few dollars exchanged when music is sold becomes intangible.
>The creator knows the value is out there and hopes that value will
>result in additional sales & in the case of well-branded creators, that
>value may be more of a given. If marketing studies are implemented prior
>to sale, the value is even better able to be known. Suffice to say that
>marketing schemes in the real world abound, but they re intelligence
>quotient is limited. Distribution for the sake of distribution and we
>hope for the best is more the order of the day.
>
>
>
>Creators, if they will depend on real world sale of their retail goods,
>must depend on the layers of middlemen and managers who know the ropes
> to be assured that the value of their work can be accessed, beyond the
>sticker price and since those layers of middlemen must be paid to provide
>that service, the exchange of real knowledge becomes subservient to the
>exchange of money. Thus separated, money and value are each impoverished.
>
>
>
>The Internet does not replace the monetary systems of the analog world.
>What the Internet does is provide a domain where the value of data can be
>leveraged as one with monetary worth, increasing the value of both and
>lowering the price paid on all sides of the equation. Internet technology
>provides real time access to the intrinsic value of work sold by
>providing a precise report automation. The value of distribution is
>known. In the case of music, the listener is known as are his relative
>activities as they impact or are impacted by the act of listening. That
>value is then able to be compared with similar reporting throughout the
>community of listeners.
>
>
>
>This is why access to free information accelerates the economy of content
>owners. Rather than supplanting traditional economic systems (as was the
>mistaken philosophy of dot-com philosophies in the 1990 s), the digital
>domain creates a means by which real world economic forces can
>systematically evolve to higher states of being.
>
>
>
>Perhaps the greatest value that can be realized in the free (or freer
> ), exchange of information is what it does for the connected society.
>Knowledge leads to Truth. Free flowing Intellectual Property in digital
>form, though on the surface it may seem to be breaking the rules of
>business and capitalism, ultimately enables civilization s successful
>destiny. We are better equipped as an interconnected community to know
>ourselves. Putting that principle to work by freely exchanging Knowledge
>enables us to set right-side up the world we live in that is forced to
>function upside down, with money placed ahead of all other
>considerations. Since, in the real world, the cost for the physical
>distribution of Knowledge has to be serviced, payment must be assured.
>Nothing happens if that assurance is not in place. You know, Purchase
>Orders, Letters of Credit and the like. Though Knowledge exists that
>would serve its author and the world at large, its value cannot be
>accessed until the payment is assured.
>
>
>
>By contrast, the free flow of information in a connected community allows
>all sides of the exchange to access the value of the work at the same
>time that the exchange puts into motion a myriad of alternate payment
>systems that can achieve the desired result. In the connected world,
>Knowledge and its value are intrinsically connected, that value is
>instantly known, and its exchange precedes or closely coincides with the
>exchange of money. The result is that Knowledge flourishes.
>
>
>
>In the absence of Knowledge and Truth, Ignorance and Deception drag
>civilization and keep it in a lesser evolved state. The greatest deception
>of all is the impoverishment, for profit s sake, of our spiritual need
>to know, when it is Knowledge itself that enriches, far more than the
>capacity of money to temporarily satisfy. Music offers immediate access
>to Knowledge. With its rich use of metaphors and references to culture,
>storytelling; with its harmonic and rhythmic connection to our inner
>vibration and emotional states of being, music enriches the civilization.
>We casually accept that every culture has music. Rarely do we give it a
>second thought. Every culture on earth, including animals of every type,
>is imbued with a musical dimension. Is it possible to know why?
>
>
>
>In fact, the soul of music and the music in our soul are part of something
>so large that if we, as a civilization could fathom it at once the earth
>and moon would shudder and the sun would cry. In that rarefied equation,
>money has no place.
>
>
>
>Music is the manifestation of our ethereal dimension. We are transformed
>by it whenever the rhythmic and harmonic vibrations reach us and access
>the place we come from. The irony of Pho's discussion with respect to the
>sale of music, whether we talk about the real world or the Internet, is
>that we demean the power of music by reducing its value to dollars and
>cents.
>
>
>
>Artists know this. Deep down, they resent it. Yet they need to maintain a
>roof over their heads and to put bread on the table. A more efficient
>system of exchange is needed and it is the Internet. We are hobbled in
>our insistence to implement structures in the online world that served a
>time that is long past... yes, fifty years ago in 2001 is like five
>hundred years ago in 1901.
>
>
>
>At the end of the day what we will have discovered is that, regardless of
>the systems we implement and the licensing deals that facilitate them,
>Music demands not to be controlled by law. The law is confounded by that.
>The money changers and the businessmen demand that the magical vibration
>be kept in chains and the law is powerless to object. It is also
>powerless to oblige.
>
>
>
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