Today's Wired News article by Andrew Osterman, entitled "Web Music Fight Plays Out in D.C. ", provides a timely update about some interesting developments on the Digital Music Copyright front.
The U.S. Copyright Office is in the process of deciding how much webcasters will be required to pay copyright owners for webcasts. Apparently, this process has been going on for some time right under our noses.
This news, combined with the recently discovered CD watermarking technology mentioned in Steve McCannell's weblog The End of Fair Use: Copy-Protected CD's in Stores Now, sure makes it looks like the joke's on us.
Silly me. All this time, I thought we were trying to come up with a music distribution system that would be fair to all parties involved, and thinking it was just taking a little while for the music industry to understand all of its options. Instead, the record industry has been stalling just long enough to put their chosen system in place before any of us had anything to say about it.
The fact that it has all been a matter of public record the whole time is just the icing on the cake.
Digital
Performance Right In Sound Recording section of the
Panels (CARP) and Licensing Information document from the U.S. Copyright Office.A document registered to the Library
of congress by the U.S. Copyright Office explaining the target="voluntary">Initiation of voluntary negotiation period that has been in effect since February 2001.Web Music
Fight Plays Out in D.C. by Andrew Osterman for Wired News
What do you think?
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American law for Americans
An American law is for the United States of America. So how does that apply to non Americans and to non American web sites?
However as the USA sees itself as the hub of the world, it is a sad developent indeed; not only does the music industry have our hardware like DVD crippled in functionality, they have people pay for the compulsary payment for music propably without checking if any royalties are due. They preserve their "rights" and trample on the rights of their consumers.
Over time I bought some 400 cd's I did not copy CD's. And because of all this huha I now feel like an idiot.
I hope that these follies pass us by, I lost my appetite in buying new titles.