This is made more difficult by an attitude that our intellectual property is not as valuable as “legitimate” arts like movies, books and etc.

We give away free music but not as a business decision but as an atristic one. We all make tremendous sacrifices for our art but the current climate is worse than ever for small labels despite the common knowledge belief to the contrary.

The truth of the music business is that there is not much money in it anymore. Especially when our rights to our product is being discounted in value.

It seems to me that we are already losing the extant copyright bargain–where in order to bring the public more published works, the government grants a temporary monopoly on a published work in exchange for giving the public the freedom to do what they want with that work in perpetuity (the public domain). Reasonable proposals to underscore this exchange, like the Eldred Act, never become law.

For instance, Prof. Fisher suggests the ACS would offer a �a sensible mechanism� for dealing with samples in rap music. Many producers sample out-of-print orphaned works, for instance an obscure funk 45 from the early 1970s, so the ACS would not clarify copyright ownership.

The web site funk45s.com is building an archive of such rare recordings. For fear of copyright infringement, the owner of the site says, �The purpose of this site is to increase awareness of rare funk music, not to encourage music piracy or online trading of mp3s etc. To this end the audio is deliberately very low quality one minute samples which cannot be used for anything other than education.� Many of these recording were originally pressed in small qualities and, if available, are quite expensive in the collector marketplace. In practical terms, the music is inaccessible to the public unless a song could be found on one of the p2p networks. Although a few independent labels have legally reissued a few of these recordings, tracking down the original copyright owners is a daunting, time-consuming task, so most will never be legally re-issued any time soon. I am less concerned that the music industry has lost some of their current and future profits due to p2p downloading and more concerned about public access to recordings such as these � access for education, research, re-mixing, sampling, and other derivative works. (Ch. 6 of Promising to Keep concludes with a brief mention of the beginnings of a digital library of Brazilian music.)

For actually changing the direction of cultural ownership and access, sooner rather later, will challenges to copyright law, such as Kahle v. Ashcroft, be more effective then sorting through all intricacies and constituents of the ACS?

Lovely.

ACS is nothing more than a new version of the NEA, whereby the goverment decides (through a legally defined system) what art to support. To tweak the system to favor one group over others, all it takes is a law proposed by bought-and-paid-for legislators, passed by indifferent legislators, and signed by a beholden president.

Sounds great, where do I sign up?

There is no system, other than direct payment of the artists/producers by the consumers, that will work well in the long term. The fact that we can’t do that efficiently _now_ doesn’t change the fact that any other system we put into place will be a bad hack at best. And once codified into law, getting rid of that bad hack will be another 60 year nightmare.

As with most every other security system you have to decide where the level of tolerance is. Everything can be hacked by people willing to pay enough money, nothing is 100%. I think ways can be devised to minimize this threat through server side processes. I think the parallel you draw is absolutely correct and quite possible if complete anonymity is allowed, however partial anonymity could yield a solution where consumers are still protected and the evaluation process is shielded.

Take for example the TIVO evaluation system. I have not heard of wide spread hacking to alter the results of their process (though that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened). I think this might be because in order to contribute you have to be a paying TIVO member and each account has only 1 vote in a manner of speaking. This provides a server side solution to the problem and can succeed where DRM fails because both keys don�t have to reside on the hostile machine. Plus it also puts the consumer in a position that they want to protect their information because dissemination to others could result in a loss of personal information (like their credit card number); this means the machine is less hostile than the DRM scenario. This type of symbiotic relationship would have to be achieved by the ACS, and I am not sure it can be done with complete and total anonymity.

The TIVO system is a potential model for how the ACS evaluation system could work. Create an environment where consumers wish to protect their IDs/certificates and only issue 1 ID/certificate per name/address/phone/DL# (or some similar combination of private identifying information). If you offer an incentive to the consumer and ensure not only top-notch protection of their information but complete anonymity of the actual usage tracking (use their ID/certificate only for authentication not vote tracking). Another feature that might need to be implemented is a 1 vote per item, account and for a specific period (though this does have the cost of some loss of anonymity). These ideas have the potential to severely limit the gaming effect especially in regards to automated gaming (which would be my biggest fear).

Thoughts or comments?

Cory comments “It doesn�t seem that this system addresses variation of value to the consumer. The Economist, for example, can charge a significantly higher yearly subscription fee than Entertainment Weekly, because its relative value to its (I suspect) smaller subscriber base is much higher. How does this system support niche items of high value to their niche?”

Great question Cory, I hope Professor Fisher has time to respond to it for many media companies it could be a show stopper. The only idea to offset this issue is implementing some type of weighting system, but it would most likely be an administrative train wreck. I fear unbalanced distribution is problematic in this type of an ACS, but I am sure there is an angle I am missing.

ErikT