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My keynote to the Pirate Party General Assembly in Prague

I was in Prague last Saturday, giving an address to the General Assembly of Pirate Parties International. The video is on YouTube.

4 Responses to “My keynote to the Pirate Party General Assembly in Prague”

1. digi_owl says:

   April 16, 2012 at 12:49 pm

   Blanket licensing, i have been advocating that in one form or other for years now.
2. next_ghost says:

   April 17, 2012 at 2:23 am

   So far, blanket licensing doesn't seem to work in practice. On one hand, if you try to be fair and try to base the payment to artists on actual statistics, you end up with artists trying to artificially inflate their share: http://falkvinge.net/2012/02/23/cultural-flatrate-wont-work-heres-why-it-wont-work/

   On the other hand, even voluntary blanket licence payment doesn't ensure the price tag won't be way too high as illustrated by German royalty collector GEMA which recently got power over Internet music streaming. The result? YouTube had to block all music videos in Germany, including those they have licensed directly from labels. The labels are not happy about it: http://torrentfreak.com/sony-music-boss-censored-youtube-videos-cost-us-millions-120224/
3. Shawn H Corey says:

   April 17, 2012 at 6:10 am

   Sorry, Cory, but the artists do not get paid if their music is played. Only the record labels get paid. This is why they shut down Napster. If the artists could figure out how much they should be paid, they would raise holy sh*t when they get nothing from the labels.

   If anyone wants to have a website that sells music, they have to do it in such a way that the artists cannot determine how much money they should be making, like Apple does. They would have to hire accountants with no experience in bookkeeping to design the "creative" accounting system to delude the artists.

   Until then, no useful music-download sites.
4. digi_owl says:

   April 19, 2012 at 8:16 am

   @next_ghost As a certain recent, and ongoing, crisis should demonstrate, anything that can be gamed will be gamed. But if the social benefits outweigh the potential issues, and i would say that avoiding turning every person above infant age a criminal until proven otherwise is a very big benefit, i will say it is something worth trying.

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