The Gower Review was an important document for the UK. Hopefully the UKIPO will reject the proposed levy and the theory out of hand. Even Blackstone’s view of property as the sole, despotic dominion of the owner never reached this far. And, as a policy matter, the theory on which it is based, namely that every unauthorized use by consumers is the misappropriation of value properly owned by copyright owners, has no limit it applies to book reviews, news stories, quotations, parodies, the first sale doctrine, and a limitless term of protection (note the connection between the value theory and the concurrent effort at term extension for sound recordings in the UK and Europe). There is no value for policy makers in mandating such an undeserved subsidy. The proposed solution by MBG is an attempt to obtain a government-mandated subsidy by consumers of an industry that is finally being forced to give consumers what they want. ![]() It is that market reality that scares the you-know-what out of the MBG, and that forced it to turn to a consultant to come up with a theory to sell to government policy makers as an example of the sky is falling from yet another effort to blame consumers for the industry’s own shortcomings. ![]() What this means to me is not that consumers have captured value that belongs to the industry, but rather that consumers have long been deprived of the value of their money, and are finally beginning to get something close to the true value of the product being sold. William Patry, incidentally Google's copyright man, and, more pertinently, pretty much the world's leading expert on anglo-american copyright, has the shameless demand of the Music Business Group (MBG), a coalition of UK music publishers, record labels, and licensing organisations, for a second licensing fee for personal format shifting nicely skewered in this great post:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |