Can it be for real? A company called Qtrax is going to let us download all the music we want, legally and free of charge? That Times Online story is here. Maybe not. Today it sounds like major labels aren’t actually willing to let music licensing be paid for with advertising revenue. So says this article from thisislondon.co.uk.
It’s all complicated, isn’t it? I guess the objectives are simple enough. Eventually, we consumers want all media content avaialable at arm’s length at all times for free. Artists would like compensation for their work in proportion to it’s “use”.
It’s hard to know how we’re going to get there. At one time content was in large part controlled by the fact that ordinary people couldn’t reproduce it for less cost than the official distributor. Now a single person with a computer could launch world-wide distribution with just their computer. And people aren’t policing themselves, either. Think about it. You see the ads about downloading movies from peer-to-peer sites being illegal, but in your head you say, “Well, hey I didn’t post it there. I’m just looking at what someone else stole.” And think about how silly it seems to you that the ubiquitous song “Happy Birthday” can’t be sung by the wait staff of your favorite restaurant because it’s copyright owners would expect a royalty. That’s like saying you must include the “TM” symbol whereever you print the word “Christmas”. Heck in our consumer culture, content is king. If it was taken by force or unethical means that just ratchets up the importance that we know about it.
Well, I don’t have a solution. I do know that if all artistic contributions are subject to unauthorized and uncontrolled reproduction and therefor necessarily become gifts to all humankind, artists may have to think about other professions. And frankly, I prefer to suffer some intrusion of advertising and/or loss of quality to preview material if paying means I have full use of a digital copy. But what of file sharing people, those who don’t want to pay because they’ve got a free, ad-free source? I guess you can only do so much to reign in human behavior. Somebody, comment please!
