On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 7:56 PM, Michael Snow <wikipe...@verizon.net> wrote: > about the > relationship between the fundraising campaign and actual lawmaking. > That's not entirely your fault, since the writer threw in some filler > about the activity of an administrative agency, apparently because this > tangent gave him an opportunity to link to his previous reporting. [snip]
+100 The event David was writing about was that the ASCAP sent out this letter: (in two parts) http://twitpic.com/1zai6e http://twitpic.com/1zai66 There is no connection obvious there with any particular lawmaking. Nor am I otherwise aware of any of organizations in question explicitly lobbying for the abolition of copyright though they may have failed, at times, to denounce the claims by others that they were for such an abolition. What I've mostly seen is the advocacy that authors choose less restrictive licensing, opposition to policy which would reduce the current or future public domain, discouraging a legal policy which creates larger punishment for copyright infringement than other more social impacting crimes, and other such activity which should be generally beneficial or at worst neutral to the economic welfare of artists. It would seems that the ASCAP has conflated the aims of these organizations with those of movie pirates, arguably because doing so is in the ASCAP's interest as the bulk rights collecting societies are on the long end of a dying line of businesses and nothing short of an dramatic expansion of copyright powers is likely to keep them alive. Online distribution doesn't favor having a lot of middle men, certainly not a lot of _profitable_ middlemen... but this detail has little to do with the interests of _artists_ and music consumers that the ASCAP claims to be concerned with here, and certainly doesn't have much of anything to do with any existing law. On the general subject of business-protection-laws hiding as copyright-laws I would recommend listening to [[Eben Moglen]]'s commentary on the DMCA from a panel at the 2001 Future of Music policy summit at 15:15 in http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org:8080/~gmaxwell/eben.ogg he continued these views on the positions of the 'music industry' at 31:36, "You are listening to a conversation among dead business about how, under certain imaginary conditions, if it only takes long enough for us to recognize that they are dead they might come back to life". If there were a transcript, I'd link to that instead. But there isn't, and Eben's points are really enjoyable, as usual. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l