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https://fossforce.com/2019/04/whats-wrong-with-the-music-modernization-act/
Pretty much everyone in the music industry agreed that the rate setting process for both mechanical and streaming royalties was antiquated. Having a central location for storing publishing and master ownership information for all recordings — as well as for obtaining digital mechanical licenses — would be ideal. There also needed to be payments to heritage artists whose music is broadcast on satellite services, and a clear system for paying producers and engineers for their share of the master recording income derived from performance.
The MMA promised all that and more. The changes it brought about, however, came with a price.
The Music Modernization Act: What Is It & Why Does It Matter?
The Music Modernization act, or "MMA" creates a formalized body, run by publishers, that administers the "mechanical licensing" of compositions streamed on services like Spotify and Apple Music (we call them DSPs). It changes the procedure by which millions of songs are made available for streaming on these services and limits the liability a service can incur if it adheres to the new process. It funds the creation of a comprehensive database with buy in from all the major publishers and digital service providers. This would be the first of its kind that has active participation from the major publishers, representing a vast majority of musical works. It also creates a new evidentiary standard by which the performance rights organizations ASCAP and BMI can argue better rates for the performance of musical works on DSPs.
[...] There will be meaningful criticism of this bill. But at the end of the day, this is a good thing for our business. A consensus amongst the music community and agreement with the DSPs. Two notions that, before this bill, lived in the realm of fantasy. And a real nuts and bolts solution to, what a year ago, seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle.
So how about it fellow Soylentils? What do you think about this proposal?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @09:26PM (1 child)
The database might be a content addressed system, ipfs, torrent. The claim of authorship ideally from crypto sig, possibility of protecting a pair of hashes of the work instead of the data itself, for what you don't want/can't publish yet. As for the duration of copyright, make the AUTHOR (or his heirs for max 20 years) and not the publisher the only one to be able to claim damages from piracy. If the author gains nothing because he had a bad deal, the publisher can't sue.
From this dumpster of data, indexes could be made to ID songs. Indexes would substitute streaming services. If i find a song through an index I am more than happy to pay for their service if that is a service. Access to a lowfi preview should be free. The original file should be itself unencumbered, but the PLAYER would make the playback lawful by micropaying in advance, differently depending on context - your position, personal play discounted, theater play dependent on how many people, whatever), micropayment indexes would yield public data for charts and stuff.
This will never happen as it cuts out basically any intermediary. And we are in a byzantine post-capitalist (fake-capitalist because capitalism never actually happened) world.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday April 25 2019, @04:52PM
In the case of a work to which hundreds of people contributed, who is the author?