[LAU] ASCAP Assails Free-Culture, Digital-Rights Groups

Patrick Shirkey pshirkey at boosthardware.com
Fri Jul 2 02:05:17 UTC 2010


On 07/02/2010 10:58 AM, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 8:51 PM, Patrick Shirkey
> <pshirkey at boosthardware.com>  wrote:
>
>    
>> The system that ASCAP is promoting for is only viable in a debt based
>> economy. They want to ensure that people who claim ownership of the artwork
>> can get a cut of the money that is earnt from using the art/product for
>> financial gain after the money earned has been counted. In this case I think
>> it would be more appropriate for them to campaign for laws that require up
>> front payments by the industry for work that is intended to be used for
>> financial gain. It would give it's members a better chance of seeing some of
>> the cash they feel they deserve and force the industry to be clear about how
>> much money they intend to earn and are willing to part with for that
>> opportunity. It would also move them away from supporting and contributing
>> to a debt based economy which only serves the goals of the elite.
>>      
> i have an account on CD Baby. there's a release there (you can check
> it out if you want, its by a group called Global Illage). how does
> what you've written above relate to my use of copyright in connection
> with this activity?
>    

Fair question. I think my answer is in line with your angle. Not sure 
though. I may be far far away in rant land by now to make any sense ;-)

I don't think your use of copyright to sell a CD on CD baby has much 
relation to the above. But if you are a member of ASCAP and I make a 
copy of your work and share it then it is likely they would not be happy 
about me doing so and would seek a payment in lieu or some form of 
punishment. If tehy are paid they would at some point be expected to 
pass on a percentage of it to you although history has proven they are 
not very good at doing that for a large proportion of their supporters.

If I intended to make money by distributing the product of my creation 
and a fundamental part of my work was derived from your work then it 
would be reasonable to expect me to pay an upfront payment based on how 
many copies I intend to sell or at a fixed price. In much the same way 
that I could purchase a hammer at a hardware store and use it to make as 
many wooden houses I could build or a license to distribute x amount of 
units for a pre determined sum.

However making it illegal and criminal for me to copy your work and 
share it with anyone I choose is effectively pissing against the wind 
unless we are going to live in a society that actively monitors and 
polices for such events and applies the monitoring evenly across the 
board. That is a society I want no part of. A police state, with active 
monitoring and enforcement by a select few that are propping up a 
fundamentally flawed economy and power structure while consuming as many 
resources as required to keep the system alive even at the detriment of 
the majority of the worlds population.

A system that requires complicite acceptance of the wholesale 
consumption of resources and encourages the theft of the intellectual 
property it detemines as controllable via legal loopholes that are 
created by the same organisations that want to maintain control of the 
intellectual property in the first place. A completely hypocritical 
system where we end up with companies and organisations promoting 
openess to destabilise their competition and in the same breath exposing 
the virtues of proprietry control in order to maintian their power 
structure and unfairly distributed share of the resource pool.

Because I am forced to participate in that system if I want to pay my 
rent, support my family and put food on my plate does not mean that I 
willingly support the erosion of fundamental rights of expression by 
sycophantic organisations like ASCAP.


-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd



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