Linked by Paul Cesarini on Mon 8th Sep 2003 03:02 UTC
Thanks to a provision in the 1976 Copyright Act, U.S. law allows the first purchaser of copyrighted material (a book, CD, etc) to subsequently re-sell that item without the copyright owner's consent. In this age of online distribution and the budding, halting attempts at legitimizing it, is the the right to re-sell going to be upheld?
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What we need is micropayments. I would prefer to pay 0.25$ per song directly to the artist for a digital format than buying a 12.00$ CD in store. For one, it costs me less and to top it off, the artist most likely makes more money.
Now that said, I don't see any reason why the digitally purchased music would have to be subject to any other kind of regulation than the CD I would have bought in store. I can make a copy of the CD if it's for archive/backup purposes; I can make a copy of my digital song for backup/archive purposes. I can sell the CD to a friend if I don't want it anymore, I should have the same right for a digital song.
But quite frankly, if it's 0.25$ per song that I anyone can get with a single click, I don't see why my friend wouldn't buy it directly from the artist.
The music industry need the following in place for "trialware", it's making an official 30s sample/demo of their song available for free and fully shareable/copyable. You get the sample for free, you can copy/share it as you wish.
I don't get all this fuss about DRM and this and that. The problem the RIAA has right now is it's losing control of how much money flows into their pocket. They should instead invest their time in building a system of micropayments for artists, build up a database of demo/samples and use their high bandwidth lines for distributing the music rather than finding P2P users.