Good Article on iTMS, the RIAA, Compulsory Licensing, the DRM and Other Acronyms
The Register has a good article up on the ins and outs and interrelations of a number of digital music related things: online music sharing, the business model of Apple’s iTunes music store, the Recording Industry Association of America’s unearned hold on your wallet, why we all share music even though we like music artists, and some possible solutions. The peg on which author Andrew Orlowski hangs all these hats is the fact that Steve Jobs has publicy confessed that Apple doesn’t make any money from charging $0.99 a download for music from the iTunes store: an odd thing if you consider that digital music distribution should be all-but-free once you have the infrastructure in place. (unless, of course, there is a sinister monopolistic cabaal* in place struggling to hamstring free market competition in the name of free market competition).
If you are interested in some or all of those things, you might enjoy the article.
Digital media presents with a particularly nasty social problem: we love to share and enjoy our common culture, but we want the artists to be rewarded, too. But when the distribution medium is as careless and fluid as the Internet, dues are easily overlooked. We’re simply too lazy to reward the artists. However, inspired by NGO-backed initiatives as the move to low-costs drugs, a global consensus is coalescing around the idea of something called “compulsory licensing”.
This can take many forms, but if you want it simple, it means a cent on your income tax, or your blank CD purchases. Are you still standing? Good, for this creates a vast pool of wealth from which the artists can be rewarded. It’s not alien to most people: we pay taxes everyday for roads we don’t use, or healthcare for neighbours brats we’d rather see strangled. But that’s how society works: with a bit of give and take. And if it means the artists gets a guaranteed income, that, we can generally agree, is a good thing….
It doesn’t make Steve Jobs feel warm and fuzzy, however, because he thinks he sees a real nasty, short-term business opportunity. Always a nervous kind of character, one to jump too early, Jobs sees a window of opportunity, by tying Apple to be the RIAA’s slave.
When that 99 cents leaves your wallet, the RIAA monopoly swallows most of it, and the credit card companies swallow the rest. As the supplicant in this relationship, Apple is left holding the can.
*i originally had linked ‘sinister monopolistic cabaal’ to the RIAA homepage, but I notice that it seems to be unavailable. I remember reading that vandal hackers have been playing merry hell with them, perhaps those attacks are ongoing.