Comment Re:can internet radio play free music? (Score 5, Interesting) 123
So what we need is a largely automatic system for generating direct, explicit, licenses between artists and broadcasters (aka Internet radio stations) so that a single artist can form hundreds or thousands of unique relationships with stations without spending years drafting contracts, and vice versa. It can't be an aggregation service in the SoundExchange sense because SoundExchange bans that, so it would have to instead create the documents to generate a direct contract and then facilitate the signing and exchange of those contract documents.
Maybe it would work by allowing a broadcaster to search the site for artists that are willing to offer their music under certain terms, select those of interest, copy the broadcaster's specific information in to a form pre-filled with the terms, have the broadcaster digitally sign the contract (if I recall correctly Clinton signed a bill making a digital signature legally binding the same way as an old fashioned analog signature is binding) and then submit the contract to the artists who could log in and review the contract and sign it or not...or perhaps digitally sign all of them at once, or all of them with particular terms at once. Then once the contracts were signed a PDF would be generated and given to each party to print out and file.
There would, of course, also be a mechanism for either party to amend the terms of the boiler plate contract, although doing so would flag the contract as one needing special attention.
A clever extension of this would allow the artist to upload his/her music to the contract generation site so that as soon as the broadcaster signed the contract it could buy copies of the artists tracks and download them immediately.
Creative Commons licenses sound good at first, but no actual signed contract explicitly changes hands. The above system would solve that problem without being an aggregator itself; it merely facilitates the two parties reaching an explicit signed agreement.
Finally the good part: SoundExchange would have to keep track of all of these exceptions to the statutory licensing.
Maybe it would work by allowing a broadcaster to search the site for artists that are willing to offer their music under certain terms, select those of interest, copy the broadcaster's specific information in to a form pre-filled with the terms, have the broadcaster digitally sign the contract (if I recall correctly Clinton signed a bill making a digital signature legally binding the same way as an old fashioned analog signature is binding) and then submit the contract to the artists who could log in and review the contract and sign it or not...or perhaps digitally sign all of them at once, or all of them with particular terms at once. Then once the contracts were signed a PDF would be generated and given to each party to print out and file.
There would, of course, also be a mechanism for either party to amend the terms of the boiler plate contract, although doing so would flag the contract as one needing special attention.
A clever extension of this would allow the artist to upload his/her music to the contract generation site so that as soon as the broadcaster signed the contract it could buy copies of the artists tracks and download them immediately.
Creative Commons licenses sound good at first, but no actual signed contract explicitly changes hands. The above system would solve that problem without being an aggregator itself; it merely facilitates the two parties reaching an explicit signed agreement.
Finally the good part: SoundExchange would have to keep track of all of these exceptions to the statutory licensing.
