Proposal
“we replace major portions of the copyright and
encryption-reinforcement models with … a
governmentally administered reward system.”
Chapter 6: An Alternative Compensation System,
William W. Fisher III, Promises to Keep:
Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment
(Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2009)
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Outline
• Creator registers work with the Copyright Office
• Registration provides unique file name to track
transmissions of digital copies of the work
• Taxes raise money to compensate registrants for making
their works available to the public
• Government agency estimates frequency with which
song/film heard or watched by consumers.
• Registrant periodically paid by agency a share of the tax
revenues proportional to relative popularity of work
• Modify copyright law to eliminate most prohibitions on
unauthorized reproduction, distribution, adaptation, and
performance of audio and video recordings
• Music and films readily available, legally, for free.
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Advantages
• “Consumers…pay less for more entertainment.”
• “Artists … fairly compensated.”
• “The set of artists who made their creations available … --and
consequently the range of entertainment products available … --would
increase.”
• “Musicians …less dependent on record companies, …filmmakers … less
dependent on studios, for the distribution of their creations.”
• “Both consumers and artists …enjoy greater freedom to modify and
redistribute audio and video recordings.”
• “prices of consumer electronic equipment and broadband access would
increase somewhat, demand for them would rise, thus benefiting the
suppliers of those goods and services.
• “society at large would benefit from a sharp reduction in litigation and
other transaction costs. “
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Short Term
• “make creators, as a group, whole”
• “compensate creators and their assignees for the losses
they have suffered--and will likely suffer in the
immediate future--as a result of being deprived of their
ability to enforce their copyrights in the new
technological environment.”
• “begin by holding more-or-less constant the aggregate
amount by which creators are currently compensated-and only to make adjustments, up or down, to their
collective incomes when we have better information
about the likely effects of such changes.”
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Longer Term
• “emergent goal would be the public interest.”
• “determine the amount of money that, when distributed to creators,
would sustain a flourishing entertainment culture…through frequent,
modest adjustments of the tax rates, followed by studies of the impact of
each change.”
• “aspiration….not …to increase the flow of money to musicians and
filmmakers until it produced what economists …describe as the socially
optimal output of entertainment products. … fidelity to that criterion
would be prohibitively expensive and would draw an excessively large
number of workers into the entertainment industry.”
• “select a level of aggregate reward sufficient to provide consumers a rich
array of entertainment products …
– “estimate the rewards, other than income attributable to the distribution of
recordings, available to musicians and filmmakers--including nonmonetary
benefits (the various sources of gratification available to participants in the
entertainment industry) and the revenues that they could earn from live
performances.
– “the larger those supplementary rewards, the smaller must be the pot of
money collected through taxes.
– “ more important … the office’s judgments concerning the quantity and
quality of the recordings currently being produced and the observed impact of
its most recent adjustments on the production of new products.”
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Plusses
• “For consumers--large cost savings, more convenient access to
more diverse programming uncontaminated by advertisements,
freedom from price discrimination, and greater opportunities to
participate in the creative process”
• “For artists--a reliable source of income, greater freedom in
selecting the intermediaries to distribute their work, and expanded
opportunities to draw upon existing recordings when making new
ones”
• “For the manufacturers of electronic equipment--increased demand
for their products and the elimination of constraints upon the
design of their devices”
• “For society at large--a sharp reduction in the costs associated with
enforcing copyright law plus elimination of the culturally unhealthy
practice of widespread lawbreaking”
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Minuses
• “Cross-subsidies and associated distortions of
consumers’ behavior”
• “Erosion of artists’ ability to control the public
presentations of their works (unless the system
contains a second track for artists hostile to the
reconfiguration of their creations)”
• “The hazards of administrative discretion and
‘rent-seeking’”
• “Leakage across national boundaries”
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