We live in a crazy world

Posted Nov 27, 2024 14:11 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: We live in a crazy world by anselm
Parent article: Arch Linux finally starts licensing PKGBUILDs

> The collection agency doesn't care in the least what exactly is played at a concert – the royalties they collect are typically based on the size of the venue, the number of attendees, and the price of the tickets, not the material performed.

Translation from English to English: said agencies are not caring about copyright protection of artistic works one jot (because how can you protect someone's interest if you don't even know if he is involved in what you are doing or not?) but are purely an extortion, racket business that exist solely to fill some people pockets.

They sign an agreements with people who don't need their services (because anyone who if famous enough to squeeze significant royalties from they guys don't need these money) and then pressure people who may benefit to giva up their rights.

That's very well-known phenomenon that existed as an ugly side-show to the recording industry and which was tolerated before broadband made distribution of music essentially free.

Why it should even exist today is entirely non-clear, but nonetheless, it persists.

> People have been wondering, off and on, whether a system of copyright collection agencies for software along the lines of those established for music or written works would make sense.

Of course it would! Sure, it would hurt the society and would make lives of everyone except these collectors worse, but it could bring enough money to pay to the legislators and then it would become a reality.

> how one ensures adequate compensation for people who write highly complicated and specialised (thus, expensive to make) software that only a few people actually use

Which is approximately 99% or 99.9% of all the software that exists. Sure, puny excel spreadsheet with a few knobs is not as glamorous as Excel itself, but if you count number of such spreadsheets, then, together they dwarf all the software that we have ever heard about by huge margin.

But that's still not a reason to create something like that – and I'm not gonna try to do anything about that, especially if that would happen in a country that I don't plat to ever visit.

Worse: since “protectors of my rights” don't deign it important to even notify me that they are “protecting my rights” I couldn't promise to someone that s/he wouldn't sued by said “protectors” without my knowledge.

We live in a crazy world

Posted Nov 27, 2024 14:54 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Why it should even exist today is entirely non-clear, but nonetheless, it persists.

Copyright collection agencies do solve an important problem: Without them, users of copyrighted content would have to talk licensing with creators of that content on a one-to-one basis, and that obviously doesn't scale well. Imagine running a radio station, or for that matter playing background music in a bar, if you had to obtain an individual license from every single composer, lyricist, arranger, and musician involved with every single song you play. Compared to that, having to deal with just one collection agency looks fairly reasonable and enticing, certainly from a practical POV.

There are very many things to criticise concerning the way copyright collection agencies are established in law, and how they go about their business. In fairness, a lot of their practices are probably not even deliberate attempts at extortion but simply holdovers from a previous time where they did sorta-kinda make sense (again from a practical POV). Some reform would certainly be nice. However, unless we abolish the basic premise of copyright (the “right” of a creator to control when, how, and by whom their works are “copied”) altogether, collection agencies as a practical solution to an obvious problem won't be going away anytime soon.

We live in a crazy world

Posted Nov 27, 2024 14:56 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

As interesting as global policies on the collection of music royalties might be, it seems we have once again strayed far from the original topic. Let's end this thread, and any similar ones, here please.