Cool Tech

Compulsory licensing

AaronSw has written about compulsory licensing, the idea that a small tax is levied on CD-ROM burners, ISP fees and other toll booth type taxes to levy on the file trading community. Aaron stated the problem succinctly without offering a solution.

Now Aaron has a written up his proposed solution in his blog entry Fixing Compulsory Licensing. LawMeme ran a response, calling his idea ProtoWhuffie. Gojomo also has a response.

Aaron's solution suggests that everytime someone pays the license tax they would get a voucher that they could send to their favorite artists, and the artist could redeem the voucher for money. LawMeme suggested that the solution was ahead of its time and that a lot of fake artists would crop up to cheat the system, which has been my main objection to such systems for a long time. Artist authentication is hard unless you are the recording industry and you have all the recording contracts in hand to determine who the real Buttney Spears is.

But, my main objection to Aaron's idea is that he suggests that the government oversee this process and make sure that everyone is playing fair. I'm not sure which government he is thinking of, but the US government would be unable to create an entity that would be fair, fast and flexible enough to handle such a difficult problem. Take ICANN and VeriSign as an example -- these two lovely organizations are screwing the general public. Especially VeriSign and the DNS redirect crap they are pulling. I can't see a single governmental agency or government sanctioned private enterprise to even get close to doing this right.

I think I have to agree with LawMeme -- I like the idea but its ahead of its time.

Posted by Mayhem at September 17, 2003 10:38 AM