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Re:Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibran... by pjc50 on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @06:37PM (#17913466)
People do deserve to be paid for their work, but at what "deadweight" cost to the rest of us?

Rights collection these days works by media suppression: almost all the effort is put into preventing people from getting it, destroying copies etc. Given free reign they would put a lock on every technological system to ensure prices stay high and media inconvenient.

Netflix and Spotify (and I think iTunes etc) only exist because piracy drove the media companies to negotiate.

Re:Wikimedia warns EU copyright reform threatens the ‘vibran... by doh on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @06:49PM (#17913535)
I do agree with your assessment (although it's more complicated than that).

Historically, rights holders (RH) used to have the upper hand, then the Internet came and took their reign down while giving upper hand to DSPs. Now RHs are trying to tip the scale back where it was.

Neither is a good situation. I definitely do not know what the right solution is, but nor the status quo nor the proposal is any good.

My radical view on this is to try to come up with some kind of compulsory license similar to the one that exists in music in US [0] for all content. The rates could be set up by panel of judges (similarly to US) or put in place arbitrary at lets say 50%.

This way, if creator produces content and decides to distribute it, she can't prevent a platform (DSP) from distributing it, however DSP can't avoid a payment.

Obviously this is a gross simplification, but I'm not seeing many ways out of this mess.

[0] https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-a-compulsory-licen...