rjwill246 said:
It is amazing that you don't seem to see that the very thing you describe, the nightmare of, yes, quagmires and, you bet! inefficiencies, has NOTHING to do with Apple. I read and re-read what you have said and written and I can only stand in stunned amazement at your explanations. It's organizations like yours that are the heart and root of the problem. Why keep passing the buck back to Apple? They only offer to the public what is allowed them. It is the organization(s) that YOU represent that needs to turn over every stone and do everything at the highest speed to assist Apple to get the job done.
Either I'm not making myself clear or you're being deliberately obtuse.
1. Like it or not, the music industry is divided into two principal groups of rights-holders: song owners (music publishers) and recording owners (record companies).
2. We have made an immense number of songs available through a single agreement that comes as close to one-stop shopping as possible. Without this agreement, an online music vendor would be compelled to chase down thousands of individual music publishers. We have entered into this agreement with four online companies to date and look forward to dong the same with Apple.
3. The record companies have no central licensing body. An online service must enter into deals with each label individually. It would certainly be easier for an online service to deal with a central licensing body, but the record companies haven't seen fit to create one.
4. CMRRA has no control whatsoever over the behaviour of the record companies.
5. The range and complexity of licensing issues faced by an online service pales beside those faced by other entities, such as television networks and film producers. The range of rights issues that can be encountered in those industries makes music look like child's play. I speak from experience as an entertainment lawyer who has worked in both those areas.
So what's your real point, rjwill? That you think the complexity of music licensing is a bad thing? What's your alternative - that we should agree to allow our songs to be used for free? That we should accept a lump sum with no accounting as to which songs get downloaded?
It may not have occurred to you that a service like IMS has half a million songs, each of which has different ownership and different authorship.
Someone has to figure out how to distribute the royalties commensurate with usage. Under our agreement, the online service doesn't have to take on that job - they just give us usage data and we take care of the distribution. It's straightforward and, compared to what it would be in the absence of our involvement, relatively simple.
Or would a random distribution of randomly chosen sums of money be alright with you?
Every aspect of rights administration is more complex than P2P systems in which everything is given away and nobody gets paid for his or her work. That's simply a fact of life. But I'm inviting you to review this message, and my previous ones, and point out which aspect of our operations represent an impediment to the launch of IMS or any other online music service in Canada. Be precise, please.
Finally, has it not occurred to you that Apple may have its own reasons for not having opened up in Canada yet? Reasons that have nothing to do with the availability of the right to reproduce songs? Granted, Apple's strict no-comment policy makes it difficult to answer this question, but if you think about it, you'll begin to see that the issue of choosing which territory to expand to first just may involve issues other than those associated with securing rights.
At least you've stopped calling me a "dingbat", which is progress.
David A. Basskin
President
CMRRA Ltd.
Toronto, Canada
