Comment Re:Flat fee (Score 1) 477
At risk of repeating myself, the presence of an almost-free channel for rapid distribution does not give anyone the authority to act illegally, however outmoded the actions of the *AA may appear. Even if the artist does poorly from his contract, there are only two options:
1) Buy music from the distributior, marginally benefitting the artist
2) Take music for free from P2P networks, benefitting yourself
It is a guilt-assuaging fiction that option 2 will somehow encourage artists to transition to P2P distribution of their works, thereby helping themselves financially. Assuming their current contracts would allow this, and they certainly don't, the current methods of paid internet distribution rely on a client-server model. Enabling P2P distribution of paid content would require impeneterable DRM the likes of which has never been seen. The costs of distributing one's work in the client-server model would without doubt be cheaper than setting up one's own network of paid P2P distribution. The alternative would be licensing rights to your work to to a centralised paid P2P network: welcome to the new Record Companies.
1) Buy music from the distributior, marginally benefitting the artist
2) Take music for free from P2P networks, benefitting yourself
It is a guilt-assuaging fiction that option 2 will somehow encourage artists to transition to P2P distribution of their works, thereby helping themselves financially. Assuming their current contracts would allow this, and they certainly don't, the current methods of paid internet distribution rely on a client-server model. Enabling P2P distribution of paid content would require impeneterable DRM the likes of which has never been seen. The costs of distributing one's work in the client-server model would without doubt be cheaper than setting up one's own network of paid P2P distribution. The alternative would be licensing rights to your work to to a centralised paid P2P network: welcome to the new Record Companies.
