[ EEPI-Discuss ] Re: Don't bring political partisanship into this discussion. What's right for the Dems is right for the GOP.

[Dan Krimm <djkrimbo@earthlink.net>]

>Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 21:31:58 -0600
>From: David Wade <djw@marystruck.com>
>Subject: [ EEPI-Discuss ] Don't bring political partisanship into this
>	discussion. What's right for the Dems is right for the GOP.
>To: eepi-discuss@eepi.org
...
>Mr. Krimm spent entirely too many words on "beating my dog", and not enough
>on explaining why "now" we have to support performance artists when in the
>past, the portrait artists lost their livelihood to the Photographer.  He
>has not spent one word on proving that we don't have that same problem
>today.  We do not subsidize the Degas among us, or even the Renoir.  But he
>does tell us that he feels that the government is being threatened today,
>and we must assume that he thought that the last 40 years of Democratic
>reign were better.  None of that has anything to do with whether we must
>subsidize the dying art of musicians getting together in a studio with a
>"Notorious Lead Vocalist" and making a record.
>
>Within a few years we will be able to record live performances
>holographically, and play them back as though the artists were in the
>center of the room.  Why should we keep that technology from being born
>because we must tax the living s&*( out of the consumer with every song he
>hears?  All of the artists I've ever met perform because they like doing
>that.  They get no feedback from my listening to their record.  But the
>Internet has been giving them feedback from all over the world...  From
>people who they could never have performed before.  Perhaps the
>Internetizens can charge the artists for that?


Woah, Nelly!

Excuse me, I did not mention either party in any of my posts -- I am
talking about economic and market issues, not partisan issues.  The closest
I got to partisanship was identifying myself as a "progressive".  I agree
that a comprehensive solution will have to incorporate a constituency
spanning all political stripes.  I thought that was what Lauren wanted this
list to be about.

The comparison with painters versus photographers is a red herring as far
as I can tell.

Recording music is hardly limited to the narrow paradigm of 'musicians
getting together in a studio with a "Notorious Lead Vocalist" and making a
record' -- all of my arguments are intended to support the idea of breaking
down the barriers to entry in the music marketplace and allowing DIY
(do-it-yourself) artists to compete in a viable market on the merits of
what they create, rather than allowing the huge oligopoly to continue to
exclusively dominate the music business based on a star-based fad dynamic
(which would endure in the absence of property rights to the works
themselves -- by obliterating property rights you would lock-in the
celebrity dynamic as the dominant market structure).

I'm afraid I'm not up on holographic recording technology, however even if
it were realistically within reach (which I highly doubt), it would
presumably be subsumed under whatever applies to video today.

I'm very impatient with the suggestion that, just because artists create
art because they *want* to (they certainly do, I can attest to that
firsthand since I am a musician -- exclusively avocational these days),
they shouldn't get compensated for the societal value of that work.  It's
not ultimately about the selfish interests of artists, though I do have
those in mind as well.  It's about the value to society.

Works left uncreated by one artist or group will never be created by
another artist/group to substitute.  In fact, as an artist ages, the older
artist will not create the works that would have been created by the
younger artist.  When artists fail to make works that they might have made
if they had enough resources, those works are forever lost to society, and
whatever value they may have provided is lost.

Artists (including me and all the musical artists I've ever known and
worked with) do want to get fairly compensated for the value they create,
because if it's good enough taken as a full collection of works there is an
expectation that they could collect a full-time living from the use of that
content and thus concentrate all their creative energies on the art instead
of having to cannibalize that energy to pay the rent with other means.
That is, it is to society's benefit that talented artists be enabled to
make art full time (not necessarily to become famous or filthy rich), and
that a market exist to express the value of their work for that purpose.
If they do it well, then they should be rewarded.  If they suck, then the
market should fail to compensate them.

In short, just because big record labels have abused the copyright paradigm
doesn't mean that some sort of property rights shouldn't apply to creative
works.

If I read the comments here correctly (it's a little enigmatic) the main
objection implied here is to the scare-word "tax" -- but this objection is
being conflated with an objection to property rights at all.  These are two
separate issues, though somewhat interrelated.

There is nothing to apologize for in suggesting taxation as a method of
governance.  Taxation is one valid response to the structural impossibility
of markets to address the production of public goods (and avoid negative
externalities) of value to society in general.  Even hard-line libertarians
tend to agree that things like military justify government and taxation.
It's not a matter of *if* taxation is justified *at all*, but *what*
qualifies as justified for taxation.  Taxation is already on the table,
unless you're such a radical that you prefer absolute anarchy.  I don't
think anarchy works, except in constrained circumstances that rely on
explicit collective governance to provide a societal foundation.  If you're
going to have an explicit government, then taxation of some sort is
unavoidable.

To create a market, one must first create property rights.  I have to say I
don't take seriously the suggestion that we obliterate all property rights
to music compositions and/or recordings.  It just doesn't seem at all
politically feasible.

But in a digital-computing/network context the enforcement of
content-control rights is systematically problematic (hackers, the analog
hole, etc.).  Nevertheless, if as a society we deem it is of value to
create a market incentive to create creative works, then we have to assign
some sort of rights and ensure they can somehow lead to payment in
proportion to the aggregate social value of the works.  So instead of
control rights we fall back to remuneration rights, enforced at point of
access rather than enforced via a per-unit market transaction.

But, taxing the distributed Internet is not the only way a viable service
model could be designed to replace content-control-based markets.

We could enable bulk licensing for bulk catalogs, for example.  It could be
in the form of a voluntary collective license applied to dedicated music
services like Yahoo/LAUNCHcast, where you make your decision as a customer
on an all-or-nothing basis.  However, I wouldn't mind seeing law that
forces music services to allow any artist into their catalog on equitable
terms with any other artist (in return for the service being able to
include any work in its catalog at its own discretion).  In this model the
"compulsion" would not be on the user but rather on the service and the
artist in complementary ways.

I actually feel that if such services were truly open to a full catalog (as
far as that is practical -- let's call it "open access, discretionary use"
in the form described above), such a service could feasibly "compete with
free" and we could reasonably allow free file sharing outside of such
systems into the domain of fair use, because it would not significantly
undermine the market.

Not all "compulsory licensing" looks the same, and it shouldn't be painted
with the same brush.  Not all forms of blanket licensing involve "taxing
the Internet".

I hope if and when the EEPI conference comes around we can avoid the
knee-jerk reactions and address the structural issues on their merits.  I'm
under no illusions as to the difficulty of doing this, however that seemed
to be the point of this EEPI list in the first place.  I thought we were
all here to *try* to do that...

Dan
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