Sunday, December 8, 2002

What's the difference between radio and p2p? Will compulsory licenses save P2P? Fascinating paper by copyright scholar Neal Netanel on compulsory licenses and P2P. The idea is that P2P nets are themselves valuable, but imperiled by copyright law, whose purpose is to make work available to the public, but which often fails in this regard. In order to compensate artists and promote use of file-sharing, Netanel proposes that ISPs pay a small fee per connection that is passed on to an ASCAP-like collecting society. The collecting society uses part of the money to search the web, to seek out Nielsen-family-like volunteers and to monitor sharing networks, and uses the data gleaned to disperse the rest to artists. Under this scheme, artists get paid, P2P nets flourish, ISPs have a much more valuable commodity to sell, and there's a strong impetus to develop ever-better file-sharing nets. It sounds like a kinda far-out idea, but it's not all that different from the compulsory license that saved radio over 50 years ago, when broadcasters were expected to seek out licenses for each and every song they played, something too expensive to realistically undertake. The advent of compulsories -- which were not without their own problems, to be sure -- saved radio by requiring that broadcasters pay into a kitty which would be paid out to the artists whose music was discovered through statistically valid random sampling of the airwaves. Link (788k PDF) Discuss [Boing Boing] BINGO! 2:47:21 PM

night terror #2 last week jackson had another night terror. He was very drowsy as we put him to bed... he literally fell asleep in paulette's arms, and didn't stir as I moved him into his crib. Paulette even commented on the similarity with his first night terror. An hour later, he started screaming and crying, seemingly oblivious to our presence, just like before. We cuddled him and walked him around his room until he woke up enough to relax, and then he promptly fell back to sleep. 1:12:22 PM

stomach flu had a really bad case of stomach flu on friday night, so bad that we had to leave the LeapFrog part just minutes after we arrived. I was barfing outside the car window, and was up all night, every half hour with bad dhiarea (?). I could feel it moving thru me.. ug! 1:08:29 PM