1. All forms of art marketing, and ESPECIALLY the music industry, has shown
that there is no such thing as a "fair" price, only whatever they think
they can get. As I've indicated elsewhere, art has no "fair" price because
it is intrinsically either worthless or priceless, whichever you prefer.
Arriving at this particular licensing price is especially problematic
because it is not particularly going to be based directly on anyone's
production costs. How do you expect them to agree on a "fair" price? (Which
I notice you don't speculate about - which of course would raise the
biggest stink against this idea no matter what sum you suggested.) No one
is going to start getting usefully specific about this possibility until
you start naming price ranges so... you first! Lotsa luck.
2. The monopoly in charge of licensing will forever be subject to various
dissatisfactions if it is profiting from it's job. It will never be seen as
"fair" by all parties if it is profit dependent. The best way to accomodate
such a monopoly is to make it a non-profit monopoly. Since it is subject to
government oversight, part of that oversight could be to insure it remains
non-profit. I see no problem with this and plenty of problems if you do not.
We would need an entirely new agency devoted to this, not hand over the
responsibility to one already existing and already subject to various
special interest dissatisfactions as things are. Trust and starting fresh
from a new foundation devoted to this new idea is absolutely essential. If
you do not remove the persistent termites of vested interest, it will never
gain universal acceptance, and it MUST gain universal acceptance because of
number 3.
3. How does this idea prevent the inevitable need for any compensation
system to compete with free - all the possibilities for the unauthorized
bypassing of this licensing/tracking by individuals anywhere? If it can't
usurp free, how does it compete with it?
DJ
Negativland
>Since Sean brought it up, I thought I would repost this. Anyone who has
>been interested in this thread may want to read it since it gives a more
>developed version of my argument.
>
>It may be easier to read if you print it out.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Whitney Broussard
>To: Whitney Broussard
>Sent: 2/12/01 3:56 PM
>Subject: FW: Some Thoughts on Enabling the Celestial Jukebox
>
>
>
>Whitney Broussard, Esq.
>Selverne, Mandelbaum & Mintz, LLP
>whitneyATsmmmusiclaw.com
>212-697-4300
>212-949-0530 fax
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Whitney Broussard
>Sent: Monday, January 29, 2001 12:58 AM
>To: 'phoATonehouse.com'
>Subject: Some Thoughts on Enabling the Celestial Jukebox
>
>
>In the interests of affording you all fair warning, the following is a
>fairly long missive that covers an awful lot of ground.
>
>In it I discuss many of my current thoughts about the state of licensing
>for webcasting, some specific criticisms of the DMCA provisions
>regarding the same and specific changes to remedy the problems I
>perceive. I hope that those of you who are interested in such topics
>give the following your thoughtful consideration and help me find the
>holes in my reasoning. This has been banging around my head for a while
>now and I have only just recently been able to begin to articulate it
>coherently (although ultimately I will let you be the judge of that, as
>I have been wrong before). Perhaps it is best considered a working
>draft and not a completed work.
>
>Now you've been warned. Here we go.
>
>INTRODUCTION
>
>The webcasting provisions of the DMCA suffer from a very serious logical
>disconnect that, I believe, has lead to a great deal of trouble in the
>online performance of music.
>
>The central distinction between a digital audio transmission that is
>covered by the DMCA compulsory license and one that is not is to what
>extent the transmission approximates a "digital phonorecord delivery"
>(that is, is a fully interactive "on demand" delivery) as opposed to the
>extent that it approximates a non-interactive broadcast-type signal
>where the programming is entirely determined at the source. The former
>is not subject to the compulsory license and the latter is. In
>attempting to draw the distinction between the two, extremely
>complicated provisions have been promulgated (see, for instance, the
>RIAA's distillation at: http://www.riaa.com/Licensing-Licen-3a.cfm) and
>these provisions, curiously enough, have resulted in a situation in
>which the programming allowable under the compulsory license is
>significantly less flexible than the programming that is allowable for
>traditional radio broadcasters. I say that this result is curious since
>the internet's great power is in its flexibility and interactivity. In
>effect, the DMCA says that one can transmit music over the internet
>under a compulsory license as long as you do not take advantage of the
>great strengths of the internet. This is a very strange way to deal
>with a revolutionary new technology.
>
>More importantly, the essential distinction which is drawn (interactive
>vs. non-interactive) is largely illusory and thus does not form a
>rational basis for regulation. In the balance of this email I will
>attempt to explain what I mean by this, assert that all transmissions
>over the internet are much more like a performance than a digital
>phonorecord delivery and suggest that, as a result, an excellent course
>of action with regard to the regulation of the transmission of music
>over the internet would be to allow SoundExchange (and perhaps competing
>services) to license ALL transmission of sound recordings over the
>internet under a regulated monopoly (or oligopoly) with its essential
>characteristics being very close to the current ASCAP model.
>
>WHY ONE CANNOT EFFECTIVELY REGULATE INTERACTIVITY
>
>The problem with regulating interactivity at the source (i.e. at the
>point of the webcaster's servers) is that interactivity is not something
>that can be reliably controlled at the source. It is possible, of
>course, to tell a webcaster that they cannot play three songs by the
>same artist in a row or that it cannot announce in advance the songs
>that it will play but the assumption that these regulations ultimately
>mean anything to the end user is an illusion. The fact is that once the
>bitstream has left the source, it is entirely beyond the control of the
>webcaster. To explain this point, imagine if you will a very simple
>TiVO-like program for recording webcast streams into a cache in your
>hard drive. My understanding is that such a device would be perfectly
>legal for a consumer to operate as it is a simple time-shift of
>programming that is made readily available for free. Further, my
>understanding is that such a device is also technologically feasible
>(notwithstanding attempts at encryption) for all the reasons that have
>been opined at various points on Pho by those who know much more about
>these things than I.
>
>What are the logical consequences of such a TiVO-like system applied to
>webcasting? An almost perfect degree of interactivity.
>
>Let me spell this out because it is an important concept. For the sake
>of argument, you are a webcaster and I am a consumer with an audio
>TiVO. You transmit music to me in full compliance with the DMCA. I
>time shift your entire stream by some arbitrary amount. Maybe it's 15
>minutes, maybe it's an hour, maybe it's 6 hours and maybe it's 24 hours.
>Theoretically my only limit lies in my ability and desire to allocate
>hard drive space. Hard drive space is very cheap and is becoming
>cheaper and more available according to Moore's law (i.e., each new chip
>contains roughly twice as much capacity as its predecessor, and each new
>chip is released within 18-24 months of the previous chip - see
>http://www.intel.com/intel/museum/25anniv/hof/moore.htm). Thus,
>whatever technological limitations may be present today in this regard
>will, for all practical intents and purposes, disappear shortly.
>
>Webcasting under the provisions of the DMCA, you are obligated to
>include copyright information in your stream where it is technologically
>feasible. My TiVO-like programs reads this information and catalogs my
>cached music accordingly. When I look at the directory cataloging my
>cache, the streams are divided up into discrete songs using the
>information provided by the webcaster. I am then free to playback the
>music in a playlist determined entirely according to my own wishes. I
>delete what I don't want, I save what I do want. I can record any
>number of streams to increase my choices (limited only by bandwidth and
>processing power, both of which seem to be advancing at Moore's law
>also) and I can refuse to further cache songs or artists that I already
>have or that I know I don't want. I can build as large a library as I
>might want in a relatively short time and there is nothing anyone can do
>to stop me - and, in fact, no one will ever know because it is ALL
>happening in my computer and you do not have the right to know (and I
>can technologically defeat your ability to know) what is happening in my
>computer.
>
>In short, I, the consumer, have almost perfect interactivity no matter
>what you do and I didn't pay a dime for that interactivity because I did
>not need to get that interactivity from you. I made it myself. I made
>it myself because you could not deliver it to me efficiently. Since I
>made it myself, neither you, the copyright owners nor the authors were
>compensated for the interactivity of my use and, generally, will never
>really be able to be so compensated under the current licensing scheme
>since its inefficiency will not allow for delivery of the extremely wide
>selection of music that I demand on an interactive basis at a reasonable
>price (but, if it's any comfort, it was never possible to charge
>consumers for interactivity before the internet either so query whether
>anything has been "lost" in this system - in essence, I have only found
>a more efficient way of making mix tapes from songs I have recorded off
>the radio).
>
>Now, I am sure that there are some who, at this point, are getting a
>sinking feeling occasioned by the realization that this is all extremely
>feasible and probably quite likely to occur. Given the glacial movement
>in the adoption of encryption schemes and the extreme rapidity with
>which they are cracked, principles of privacy and the legality under
>section 1201 of the DMCA of circumventing encryption for the purposes of
>fair use, this simple program is both virtually unstoppable through
>technological means, undetectable and perhaps perfectly legal. Some may
>be angry at me for pointing it out but it is what it is. Someone needs
>to point out that the emperor is naked. I am not the first and won't be
>the last and my silence does not clothe the emperor in any way
>whatsoever. In fact, discussing this matter openly is the only way to
>clothe the emperor and ensure that he does not catch pneumonia.
>
>The truth is, though, that the system doesn't HAVE to work this way.
>This is just an explanation of why the extremely complicated regulations
>of interactivity in the DMCA are based upon an illusion and an
>illustration of the fact that given the ease of skirting the DMCA's
>regulatory structure it doesn't make much sense to cling to that
>particular structure. Once we get over trying to regulate illusions we
>can lucidly discuss what really needs to be done to ensure that an
>orderly system of regulation exists to permit the exploitation of music
>over the net such that the regulatory structure takes full advantage of
>the strengths of the internet while ensuring that copyright owners and
>the authors of copyrighted works are fairly compensated for their often
>substantial investments of time and money.
>
>Before we go on, I will remind you that the essential points to
>understand so far are that: (1) once the bitstream leaves its source it
>is completely uncontrollable - the user will interact with it in the way
>the user wants to interact with it; (2) there is no reliable way of
>knowing what the consumer is doing with the bitstream once it hits the
>consumer's computer; and (3) any attempt to regulate behavior in
>contravention of the foregoing two principles is mere grasping at
>shadows.
>
>Perhaps an analogy will help for those who might not quite get the point
>here yet. Consider television for a moment and let me ask you an
>apparently simple question: When HBO shows "Saving Private Ryan" is it
>a "stream" or is it a "delivery of a copy"? The answer is: HBO can't
>reliably know. It may be both. It certainly is "streamed" to me but if
>*I* want it to be, it is a delivery of a copy. All I have to do is
>press record on my VCR and I have a copy which is undetectable by HBO
>and the copyright owner. This has been true for decades now but it has
>not destroyed the movie business, it has not destroyed the television
>business, it has not destroyed the cable business and it has not
>destroyed the video rental business (in fact, it probably created the
>video rental business). It just is. It's a part of the mix.
>
>THE BEANS OF THE COFFEE THAT MUST BE SMELT
>
>What are some of the implications of these facts, then?
>
>First of all, any attempt to regulate interactivity is doomed to
>failure. People interact with their environment and they always will.
>Media is part of the environment and people will interact with it. Stop
>thinking otherwise. It is a beautiful thing. It is the essence of
>life. Embrace it.
>
>Second, any attempt to regulate based upon the illusion of controlling
>interactivity in a digital environment will only create dissonance in
>the market and, perhaps, market failure. One can look at the litigation
>of the year 2000 as a perfect example of this. I sincerely doubt that
>ANY of the major music technology copyright lawsuits would have occurred
>if there were a fair and efficient method of obtaining licenses for the
>uses in question (perhaps there would be an on-going negotiation as to
>the applicable rates, and that negotiation may have devolved into a rate
>court proceeding, but that is a different issue). When there is massive
>demand for music over the internet but no efficient method of obtaining
>licenses to deliver it, innovators are forced to test the boundaries of
>fair use. I suggest that it would be more efficient by, perhaps, many
>orders of magnitude to make licensing on a fair and non-discriminatory
>basis simpler and less costly to potential licensees than the
>uncertainty and potential devastating costs of testing potentially dicey
>legal theories.
>
>Third, all you can REALLY know about a webcaster is what is coming off
>of the webcaster's server. All you REALLY know about what is coming off
>of that server (and I would hope that technologists on the list will
>help me understand anything I might be missing here) is the effective
>bitrate of the bitstream (i.e., the bitrate of the stream as adjusted
>for the efficiency of the codec used). One can know the order that the
>bits come out in and thus the order of the songs but, as discussed
>above, this does not mean that the consumer is consuming those bits in
>any particular way. The maximum effective bitrate, however, determines
>the maximum quality that the consumer is receiving and is not easily
>varied by the consumer in a way that would tend to extract "extra" value
>from the bitstream. Perhaps, then, it would be the wiser course to vary
>the price of licenses according to the effective bitrate, as it is a
>measure of the QUALITY of the stream., and largely ignore the
>"interactivity" since it is unfathomable anyway. This makes sense in
>that, given the inability to measure or regulate interactivity,
>measuring the quality of the bitstream is the best way to take into
>account the extent to which a transmission transmits "value" to the
>consumer and, as a corollary, approximates the delivery of CD quality,
>thus potentially "displacing" a sale (although I think the extent to
>which sales, in the aggregate, are ever effectively displaced by
>transmissions is still a fair matter for discussion and not a foregone
>conclusion). Thus, for instance, a low quality AM radio-type
>transmission would be much cheaper to license than a very high quality
>Dolby 5.1 SurroundSound mix and whether either were served on demand
>would be immaterial.
>
>Fourth, and the very good news for copyright owners and authors, the
>scenario I described with regard to the rampant caching of transmissions
>can be almost completely eliminated by the efficient licensing of
>on-demand delivery of music on the internet (and other types of
>interactive and quasi-interactive deliveries). Caching is a
>technological means to an end and if you deliver the end through more
>efficient means the inefficient means will be unnecessary. Put into
>plain English, there will be no need to store anything if what you want
>is readily available for a fair price. To analogize, consider the
>current situation with the delivery of water. We all (except you LA
>pholks) have decent quality water readily available on tap at the turn
>of a knob for a fair price. As a result, we know that it will be there
>when we want it and we tend not to fill buckets with tap water and store
>them for later. In fact, the idea seems fairly ludicrous. Nor do we
>fill buckets from the tap and give them to our friends and neighbors
>because they have water on tap too, so why bother? Interestingly
>though, the availability of decent quality water for a fair price does
>NOT stop people from buying water in stores. People continue to buy
>water in stores even when they know they can get it "freely" elsewhere.
>This occurs for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is
>convenience and perceptions of quality. With regard to convenience, it
>is worth noting that most people seem to want to listen to music (and
>experience other forms of entertainment) in "hands-off" mode and thus
>the convenience of programming that suits the listener's tastes without
>a high degree of consistent interaction (accomplished through various
>types on inference engines or trusted human filters, for example) will
>likely dominate the market in contrast to true delivery on demand which
>demands a high level of the consumer's attention (perhaps one could
>refer to this type of mediated programming as "anticipated demand"
>delivery). Quality can be similarly upsold to the consumer through the
>savvy pricing of licenses according to the quality of the bitstream, as
>mentioned above (i.e., low quality streams can be priced so as to allow
>for the delivery supported by advertising alone, medium quality streams
>can be priced so that they can be supported by reasonable subscription
>fees and extremely high quality streams can be priced so that they would
>tend to appeal to fairly affluent audiophiles who, for the near future
>at least, can also afford the infrastructure to permit that type of
>delivery).
>
>Finally, if the business model is adjusted so that on-demand delivery is
>readily available, and thus caching is for the most part inefficient and
>unnecessary, the essential act of delivering transmissions over the
>internet will be closer to a performance in its essence than a delivery
>of a phonorecord. This is the Celestial Jukebox. The Holy Grail of
>online music. And like the terrestrial jukeboxes with which were are
>all so familiar, it will provide its users with the experience of music
>and not, in the main, the artifacts of music. In fact, being the
>celebrity-worshipping, totem-obsessed, fetishistic species that we are,
>I seriously doubt whether anyone who can afford a real musical artifact
>with glossy color pictures, artwork, lyrics and thank you's (and perhaps
>access to special areas of the artist website, additional
>heavily-encrypted tracks or other features that can add value and are
>based upon using the "CD as the key," in the parlance of Michael
>Robertson) will ever really be satisfied to simply possess an abstract,
>intangible, colorless bit sequence representing the music that moves
>them so deeply by the artists they love so much.
>
>PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER
>
>I hope by this point that I have, at the very least, supplied some food
>for thought on the question of whether regulating interactivity is not,
>in a very real sense pointless, and perhaps even somewhat dangerous in
>that it creates severe dissonance in the marketplace and threatens our
>traditional notions of consumer privacy (a point that I, admittedly, did
>not dwell upon but a nonetheless important, and perhaps constitutional,
>concern). Perhaps I may even be so lucky as to have persuaded a few of
>you that these assertions are true, or at least true enough to give
>serious consideration to suggestions which are based upon them. Thus I
>want to address now the remaining piece of this puzzle - the fair and
>efficient granting of licenses for performances of music over the net.
>
>
>The statement of the US Solicitor General in the United States amicus
>brief to K-91, Inc. vs. Gershwin Publishing Corp sets forth the need for
>efficiency in performance licensing quite eloquently:
>
>"The extraordinary number of users spread across the land, the ease with
>which a performance may be broadcast, the sheer volume of copyrighted
>compositions, the enormous quantity of separate performances each year,
>the impracticality of negotiating individual licenses for each
>composition and the ephemeral nature of each performance all combine to
>create unique market conditions for performance rights to recorded
>music. If the market is to function at all, there must be...some kind of
>central licensing agency by which copyright holders may offer their
>works in a common pool to all who wish to use them"
>
>These words are as true with regard to the performance of sound
>recordings over the internet as they were when they were first written
>regarding the performance of songs over the airwaves. There is
>absolutely no way that anyone can create the Celestial Jukebox without
>the ready availability of fair and non-discriminatory licenses to do so.
>If we insist that each license for each song and each sound recording be
>licensed in a separate transaction, whether we do so out of fear or
>avarice, then, like the Holy Grail, the Celestial Jukebox will be
>forever out of our reach. We will not have proven worthy. We will have
>squandered a precious opportunity to make the entire body of music
>permanently available to everyone forever for a fair and reasonable
>price (and perhaps for free at a lower, advertising-supported quality).
>Countless works will be lost to posterity because they will be relegated
>to the graveyard of those which do not seem "important" enough to
>justify the transaction costs of their individual licensing. Millions
>of voices will be silenced by the inexorable grinding of the wheels of
>commerce. By definition those voices forever stilled will be the voices
>of the disenfranchised, the marginal poets, the little guys, the
>obscure. In short, the very people whose diversity makes America a
>great country. Granted that, to a certain extent, this music could be
>made available in non-interactive webcasts under the current regulatory
>but query whether anyone will actually do so if they are busy attempting
>to keep the greatest number of listeners from changing channels. In an
>on demand-enabled world, however, there will be a much greater incentive
>to have a truly complete library of works from which to choose.
>
>WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE RESULTING MONOPOLY
>
>While a "central licensing agency" with the ability to grant licenses
>for all levels interactivity is absolutely essential to the creation of
>the Celestial Jukebox (and many will consider SoundExchange a natural
>choice for the central licensing agency), it would, by definition, be a
>monopoly (or perhaps, arguably, an oligopoly if the decision is made to
>promote competition between agencies, as is the case currently with
>ASCAP, BMI and SESAC). Whether it is a monopoly or an oligopoly,
>however, it must be tightly regulated to ensure that its power is not
>abused and competition between varying delivery systems is not smothered
>as a result. One can look at the history of ASCAP and BMI and their
>consent decrees for some extremely useful guidance in this regard.
>
>In short, ASCAP (and I just happen to be more familiar with the way this
>PRO is regulated so if there are material differences in the way BMI is
>regulated I would be interested to hear them) is a tightly regulated
>monopoly (or, perhaps more accurately, oligopoly) which must grant
>non-discriminatory licenses to publicly perform musical compositions
>(other than the performance of "grand" rights, which are beyond the
>scope of this email, but may find an analog online) to all bona fide
>entities on fair and non-discriminatory terms. The fairness of these
>terms is, in the first instance, determined by examining similar
>licenses for similarly situated entities as the license rates and terms
>must be non-discriminatory. The parties are free, however, to argue
>that there are dissimilarities (for instance because music is not the
>only source of entertainment or value in connection with the services to
>which the performances pertain) and thus the license should be at a
>different rate, which will then be the subject of negotiation. There
>also must be a "genuine choice" between different type of licenses (such
>a blanket license to cover all ASCAP music on an "all you can eat" basis
>for the entire service or a program license to cover all ASCAP music "in
>that program") so as not to favor one particular business model over
>another. There is also the ability for the licensee to obtain rights
>directly from the copyright owner if the licensee chooses to do so
>(when, perhaps, the license is enough in the best interest of the
>copyright owner such that the copyright owner would want to agree to a
>reduced fee or gratis license).
>
>In the event that the parties can't ultimately agree on a fair price,
>they submit the matter to the rate court and a fair price is determined
>by the government. The most recent ASCAP consent decree provides for
>substantially streamlined determinations by the rate court so as to
>further reduce inefficiencies in the determination of a fair price. Of
>course, going to court is almost always more onerous and expensive than
>not, and businesses prefer not to have the government involved in their
>dealings whenever possible, so this creates a strong pressure for the
>parties to reach a negotiated solution and I would imagine that it is
>fairly rare for either party to avail themselves of this method of
>solving differences.
>
>Most importantly for the current discussion: (1) a license cannot
>generally be refused; (2) the license must always be at a fair price;
>and (3) the central licensing agency cannot favor certain licensees over
>others (much like the anti-price discrimination laws at retail - this is
>an important element in regulations designed to maintain competition in
>industries that have a strong tendency to consolidate and thus should
>also be an essential part of the regulation of the licensing of music
>for use on the internet). These precepts would form a cogent starting
>point for a discussion of the regulations that should apply to the
>central licensing authority with broad authority to grant licenses for
>on demand (and other interactive) uses in order to ensure that its
>monopoly power is sufficiently constrained to avoid its great potential
>for abuse. In any event, further research into the history of ASCAP and
>BMI and the successes and failures in attempts to regulate them would
>most certainly be in order as it is as true as ever that those who do
>not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
>
>CONCLUSION
>
>It is important to recognize that the concept of a Celestial Jukebox is
>something of a misnomer. There will be many Celestial Jukeboxes. The
>sky will be filled with them. A thousand points of light twinkling in
>the velvety firmament. The entire catalog of the audio collection of
>the Library of Congress and them some, every song imaginable, will be
>available to every lover, every person in need of comfort or sympathy,
>every aspiring musician and future Mozart, every person wistfully
>recalling days gone by. Our cultural memory will be dramatically
>enhanced, etched in silicon and woven into the network upon which our
>lives increasingly depend. We will forestall, or perhaps completely
>avoid, the cultural Alzheimer's that is the inherent danger of basing
>reward for intellectual endeavors upon notions of scarcity.
>
>The ready availability of fairly priced interactive licenses will allow
>for a myriad of business models to grow, many of which have been
>referred to above, many of which are only now in the earliest planning
>stages and many of which have yet to be dreamt. Webcasters will be free
>to compete amongst each other upon a wide variety of parameters such as
>price, quality, interactivity, programming, reliability and ubiquity,
>just to name a few. Webcasters will also be able to adjust their
>businesses models to suit the desires of the consumer as market forces
>evolve and push them to try innovative new services.
>
>In contrast, imagine if you will the situation under the current
>licensing scheme in which a webcaster has managed, at great effort and
>expense, to license the right to distribute a large catalog of music by
>executing an enormous number of individual licenses. These licenses
>would likely reflect a very narrow business model as it is highly
>unlikely that all of the potential licensors would be willing to grant
>the same broad rights to a given licensee. What now happens if that
>business model proves to be wrong and, in some part, needs adjustment -
>as almost all business models do? The webcaster would be required to go
>back to each of those licensors and attempt to negotiate the relevant
>changes which, assuming it could be done at all (which is no small
>assumption), would entail the unnecessary duplication of enormous
>transaction costs incurred. The net result is that each webcaster
>offering interactive services is currently effectively locked into a
>business model that could prove ruinous over time and is totally
>incapable of evolving to meet consumer demand.
>
>Under a central licensing authority with the broad authority to grant on
>demand licenses, the necessary changes can be negotiated with a minimum
>of transaction costs and, if agreement could not be reached the
>webcaster would have the right to avail itself of the protections of a
>rate court to ensure that it was treated fairly and consumer demand thus
>satisfied. And, in fact, the availability of the rate court proceedings
>will greatly encourage the parties to reach a fair and equitable
>agreement amongst themselves instead of risking the uncertainty of
>litigation. Under this scheme, business models may evolve as necessary,
>there is greatly increased consumer satisfaction and the copyright
>owners and authors are guaranteed fair compensation. Certainly this is
>the definition of a winning proposition for all. Shouldn't this be our
>pole star in the quest to enable the Celestial Jukebox?
>
>The internet can and should be humming with the public transmission of
>musical works in satisfaction of the public's seemingly insatiable
>demand for the music it loves so dearly. Each public transmission can
>and should be fully licensed at a fair price, giving the webcasters the
>certainty of being able to avoid litigation in their unceasing quest to
>satisfy consumer demand and generating enormous amounts of performance
>royalties for the copyright owners and authors. There need be no reason
>for the consumer to "steal" music because it will always be there
>waiting for them at a fair price. The very ubiquity of the delivery of
>music will be the factor that generates wealth instead of the needless
>and destructive reliance upon notions of scarcity.
>
>All it will take is for us to collectively let go of the illusion that
>it is possible to stop the consumer from interacting with the culture,
>step back and look at the reality of the situation with a penetrating
>and insightful gaze and consider rationally and dispassionately how best
>to satisfy the valid concerns of all the stakeholders in this business
>of cultural production and enjoyment - copyright owners, authors,
>webcasters and the public alike - with a keen eye towards the future and
>using history as our guide and our ballast.
>
>I hope these thoughts move this process forward in some small way and I
>continue to look forward to hearing the perspectives of others in this
>regard.
>
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