copyright

Given that I recently went off on a bit of a rant about Cory Doctorow and his repeated failure to propose a workable solution for the problem of online piracy, I thought I would take a few minutes and suggest a possible solution that I think makes a bit of sense and wouldn't be that hard to institute. It has the benefit of also being a solution that fits with Bono's criticism of piracy that Doctorow used as his jumping off point on Twitter for his usual mindlessly didactic self-repetition.

The fact of the matter is that copyright of certain kinds of intellectual property is complicated. It is particularly complicated for music and with the rise of DVD sales and streaming video on the internet is poised to become much more complicated for visual media as well.

As being widely reported, higher fees for online music imposed by the RIAA may force Pandora.com to close down. Pandora.com is my favorite Internet radio site, and it can't be any better for other Internet Radio enterprises. This is really a classic case of the music industry shooting itself in the foot; by making their rates inordinately high they're not only going to miss out on the revenue they would get from major sites like Pandora having to close, but also from the literally millions of people getting turned on to new music and going out and buying CDs and digital downloads and so on. What a bunch of assholes.