It seems likely to me that this sort of escrowed patronage will become the de facto method of paying musicians before too long. There are some coordination problems to be solved, but the end result won’t be that much different than things are now, except that compensation will be effectively shifted by one release. Since there’s no way to know whether the work you are going to pay for is any good, you’re essentially paying for the previous released work. That’s certainly already the way that release sales work. People starting out will still pretty much work for free, and those with an established reputation will be able to make plenty of money.
This has the added effect that one-hit wonders probably won’t rest on their laurels. They’ll release at least one more song/book/movie because they want to capture the income generated by the popularity of their previous work.
They get paid to create things. They don’t necessarily get paid every time someone listens to, looks at, or uses the thing they’ve created.
If you kept tabs on the various schemes put forth by various corporations to whom we grant copyrights, they plan to use those rights to charge you every time you listen to, look at, or use the thing we’ve granted them temporary rights over. Corporations cannot create anything themselves but they can commission “work for hire” where a creator is paid to create something, but they do not receive the copyright over their creation.
An interesting side effect is that occasionally a creator will continue creating, but their future creations violate the copyright on the contracted work for hire. If the corporation to whom we have granted copyright is uninterested in further work, the creator is essentially blocked from further creative progress in their original vein.
There are reasons completely unrelated to a desire to infringe copyright (via filesharing) for viewing the claims to rights by corporations as illegitimate and without authority.
Think about what you’d have to do to steal your neighbour’s stuff, and the risk involved. Compare it with the difficulty of stealing a copyrighted song, and the risk involved.
There’s a reason why a large part of the population is stealing copyrighted songs, and a way smaller part are stealing their neighbours’ stuff.
Be sure that if it anybody could download your stuff by clicking on an anonymous link, you wouldn’t have anything left in your house, whether you like it or not.
And believing, as you seem to propose, that all music-downloaders can possibly be found and punished is just a pipe dream. At some point, you just have to adapt to reality.
You are correct in a sense. If a law is unpopular enough that a large percentage of the population breaks it without consequence than that law doesn’t work. The large group breaking the law freely part is crucial. Theft and murder don’t fall into that category.
Not even close to feasible. Disregarding encrypted anonymous filesharing systems like freenet, which would make the problem of finding them even harder, there is no way you can even scratch the surface of this issue without collapsing the court system. We are talking about millions of violations annually, many happening across international boundaries with different laws. Good luck applying good old law enforcement to this problem. I think a pipe dream comes pretty close to describing it.
It’s funny how you can miss the point so thoroughly. The “gimme it for free crowd” doesn’t want to change the system. They like it the way it is, because right now you can get free stuff easily. Any copyright change would have to figure out a way to get money to the artists from the consumers in some way, shape or form to be acceptable to society. Whether through ISP or blank disc taxes or even some other exotic scheme, it means paying for it, so the free crowd likes things the way they are. The people who want to change it just see that it is broken, and wonder how we can fix it. I don’t think that heavier enforcement is the solution. Heavy enforcement of drug laws hasn’t changed drug use one bit, why do you expect this to play out differently? Like someone said upthread, it’s not the severeness of the punishment, it is how likely you are to be punished. And I don’t see any changes to that likelihood coming.
How exactly do y’all go about authenticating people who show up and say “I was $username years ago… can I have my account back?” via one of these requests?
I’d interpret that clause to be about users posting under new accounts after being suspended or operating multiple accounts simultaneously (i.e. sock-puppeteering), not an effort to tie a unique individual to their collected posting history throughout all time.
Say that you hear someone singing a song in a public park. You are fairly astute musically so that you can readily remember and sing it pretty much as you heard it. Now you yourself are in a public park much like the one you were previously. You are inspired to sing what you previously heard. Did you steal that song?