Edward Teller. "Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution." [Quotes of the Day]
6:28:35 PM  #  

Commerce, Property, and P2P: Economics of Digital Entertainment. If there’s a copyright war between technology and entertainment, between delivery and creativity, between left brain and right brain, between people who use stuff and people who make stuff, here’s a prediction for how it ends: A pool of money, and a fair way to divvy it up, all of which will be supervised by government.

This is a safe prediction: Effective control is impractically elusive, inefficient and counterproductive, and we know it. The history of the intersection of electricity and art is actuarial, not actual control. Pleas for copy protection are elaborate misdirection akin to sending the husband to boil water while the wife is having a baby.

The real battle is where the money is: Control of the pools. Simply for music in the United State alone you can count ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, RIAA-SoundExchange, Royalty Logic, NMPA, Harry Fox, AFM, AFTRA – well, the full list of acronyms and their translations would require pages; still worse, multiply it by well over a hundred countries worldwide.

Neither can all these groups eat at the same table as hardware, software, network and other digital providers, worldwide, without raising the attention of competition regulators in Washington and Brussels. An agreement that tied, for example, broadcasters, technology companies, artists, publishers and entertainment companies worldwide would require either proactive creation by government or reactive supervision as an antitrust violation, just as U.S. rights societies operate under on-going government supervision.

Digital control is an excuse while Hollywood’s Tarzans jockey for position on a new vine, swinging from an old vine they can’t or won’t release. The new vine is surely coming, but the hands may take different places, and some may not make the transition.

As a result, technologists and lawyers fiddle with gizmos and words, whipped to frenzy by executives claiming they are horrified by consumer copying, but in the real world business is a catalog of content let loose into an uncountable audience fully-capable of video cassette and digital video recording. This is less prognostication than history. The intertwined story of technology and art is about giving your stuff up for a fair split from a pool of money.

Gutenberg’s pirated papal indulgences begat bibles and mechanized art, but recent history is more relevant. The path from acoustic to electric was far more savage than our mere gradation of change from electric to digital. Solutions born from necessity during the motherly decades of invention surrounding the 1920’s will be with us forever. [Smart Mobs]

6:27:10 PM  #