DRM is simply not effective and probably never will be - unless the government figures out a way to make all old analog devices illegal, it will (for the foreseeable future, certainly more than long enough to drive the record companies out of business) be possible to make an analog copy of pretty much anything and then re-encode it back to a digital copy without DRM. Sure, the quality may be a bit less, but considering that people are more than willing to download crappy-quality video-camera recording of movies, I don't think the quality issue is a deal-breaker. Lawsuits clearly haven't worked either - they're of questionable legality and in any case you can't sue everyone, and yet at this point that's practically what it would take. Still, at the same time copyright does serve a purpose and artists do deserve to get some recompense for their efforts.
I think that the best solution might be a voluntary "Internet license" that people could pay $10 or $20 a month extra on top of their ISP bill in return for a promise by the rights holders not to sue for copyright infringement. This would be combined with ISP level monitoring software that could sniff traffic to roughly determine what songs/movies/etc were being downloaded and at what rates, so that the monthly payments could be distributed appropriately to the artists, the industry agencies, etc. The monthly rate could be legislated to be set by the copyright office (much like they currently set radio royalty rates). The system would be opt-in, so if people didn't intend on sharing copyrighted music or downloading it from non-authorized sites, they wouldn't have to pay the fee - but if they didn't pay the fee and then did such things, they would be very clearly open to lawsuits.
While I realize that a fee like $10 or $20 a month might sound low, I think it would be enough because the industry would still be able to sell music online just as it is now. The monthly fee wouldn't guarantee delivery of music or anything like that - it would just be a license to listen to the music or watch the movies if you could find them. It also wouldn't legalize websites directly showing streaming video of copyrighted works - the only things that would really be in the clear would be truly non-profit p2p networks like Gnutella or Bittorrent, which could be analogized to the idea of friends trading media among friends.
YouTube link needs embedding.
I wonder, is this a serious belief of Kid Rock's, or is he just aiming for attention?
- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson
No, I'm not stealing anything. My Police Chief brother would probably agree with me. I do own a website address, and I'm still learning how to set it up. VMS guru, DOS guru, that would be me, but setting up a website is something new to me, so that's my summer project. That, gardening and cooking, a little bit of everything. I guess I'm a bit eclectic, what can I say?
there's only one way to find out...
and we slobber all over it.
The incessant coverage of celebutards in mainstream media and elsewhere bores the living shit right out of me.
Carry on.
