Online Community to Support
College Blanket License/Collection Society Project

Around the world, the Internet is responsible for introducing new sets of disruptive technologies, which are changing “popular culture” in radical new ways. Information, images, knowledge, film, music and all other forms of digital content flow through these horizontal networks and create new societal and cultural challenges, opportunities and struggles. Despite the popularity of digital audio, incumbent rights holders led by the recording industry four corporate multi-national conglomerates have successfully policed and bullied all attempts to reform the present system of Intellectual Property rights (IPR). Their weapon of choice, which protects contemporary licensing price points and provides enclosures around digital distribution networks, is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This law creates significant obstacles for those who want to promote the unlimited, non-commercial sharing of music by fans of their favorite musician’s work.

This spring, I was the catalyst for a series of preliminary white-paper meetings through the Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) previous to its disbanding as a inter-disciplinary think-tank. This group came out of conversations between Cory Doctorow and Aram Sinnreich in the fall. Our group consisted of the following members: Cory Doctorow, a visiting Fullbright professor, co-editor of BoingBoing and advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jennifer Urban, Director, USC Intellectual Property Clinic and Clinical Associate Professor, USC Gould School of Law, Jonathan Taplin, a senior Annenberg Professor, Joanna Demers, Assistant Professor of Music, John Gillian, an undergraduate launching a digital music label, Aram Sinnreich, a specialist in digital music issues, New York University associate professor, and Annenberg graduate and myself. In our proposal for workshop funds, we wrote:
licensing costs and barriers to permissions are presently insurmountable barriers that keep most follow-on musicians from creating new music and innovating new musical forms. The traditional label response to digital media has been to develop complicated and onerous digital rights management and licensing systems that undermine traditional user rights in copyrighted music. The traditional response has not, however, benefited anyone. It has not benefited the labels: the public is wary of DRM-locked music and prefers peer-to-peer systems, and CD sales continue to fall. It has not benefited sound recording artists, who miss out on the lucrative residuals claimed by music composers. It has not benefited individual music lovers, who are left with the choice of either risking lawsuits and computer spyware by using peer-to-peer systems or buying broken music that locks them into a proprietary system and that must be “re-bought” over and over.

A collecting society system—similar to that used for musical composition performance rights in the US,[1] and performers’ rights in Europe—coupled with a generous license, would, we think, fix these problems. Customers would buy blanket licenses to all participating artists’ music from the collecting society. Statistical sampling technology would estimate the rate of use of any particular piece of music; the collecting society would pay out to artists accordingly. Artists would get paid, where now they often do not. Follow-on creators could add to the rich cultural pool of music, where now they are chilled by fears of expensive copyright lawsuits and caselaw that is anti-sampling. And consumers could buy music that they can own, including transferring to different formats, remixing and reusing it.

We would like to develop this idea and follow a two-pronged approach: 1) target independent and sympathetic artists (who would clearly benefit from such a model) as early adopters; and 2) work to develop broader industry buy-in of the collecting society model. Target early-adopter customers for the license are universities, who presently feel threatened by music lawsuits: under the collecting society scheme, they could buy blanket licenses for a small per-student fee, and no longer worry about what students are doing with the music. Because of the traditional wariness of all relevant industry players—labels; telecom companies (who could buy and resell blanket licenses at the ISP level); device manufacturers and the tech sector (who will help create the statistical sampling algorithms) —we believe that a candid conversation with these entities is important to appropriately developing the system and getting buy-in (2007).

Also in the spring for my professor, Jon Taplin, who is on the California State Broadband Recommendation panel commissioned by Governor Schwarzenegger, I headed up the team that wrote a white paper, Toward a Broadband Future: California, the United States and the Global Network. There were five sections and I wrote “Blanket Licenses for Unlimited Digital Sharing of Music” (2007). In the White Paper, I argue that these new blankets licenses and collection society have the potential to impact societies on a global level as revenue of approximately $600 million/month would be created and shared among creators world-wide as compared to the monopolistic owners. Professor Taplin has approached the new Dean at Annenberg about hosting such an ambitious conference to promote the creation of a world-wide “ISP tax,” which would require these new blanket licenses and collection society.

My hypothesis is that the desire for IPR reform is strong and a website promoting the creation of such licenses and collection society would be strongly received by the blogasphere. My units of analysis would be a comprehensive reviews of examples testifying to consumer demand for change as seen in Digg/AACS confrontation and proliferation of numerous online communities expressly committed to challenging DRM and promoting IPR change. The most prominent example came in the “uprising” reported on front-page media outlets as users of the website, Digg, rose up against the company’s executive leadership for bowing to DMCA “Take-Downs” and Hollywood-led consortium, AACS. From The New Times:

In a blog post Tuesday afternoon [May 1, 2007], Digg CEO Jay Adelson wrote that the company was pulling down a number of news stories pertaining to a cracked HD DVD encryption key that could circumvent the digital rights management restrictions on the media discs.

The reason for the move, he said, was a cease-and-desist letter on behalf of the Advanced Access Content System [AACS], the consortium with ownership rights to the key that had been cracked. By including stories that linked to the key, the letter argued, Digg was breaking the law. However, Digg's user base, notoriously opinionated and accustomed to a community-run atmosphere restricted by relatively few editorial controls, revolted. Rebelling against what they saw as unnecessary censorship, Digg users so thoroughly flooded the site with submissions and comments containing the cracked key that every one of Digg's top-ranked technology stories pertained to the issue (Musil 2007).

This community uproar exploded on Facebook groups and across the blogasphere. Other prominent activist sites are the Free Software Foundation’s anti-DRM Defective by Design Campaign (link) and the student-led organization, Dowhill Battle, which promote digital reform in the music industry (link). I am also active in the International Student Free Culture Movement at USC (link).

My research will explore what the best form and framework would be in creating a new Online Community expressly committed to the creation of both new blanket licenses and a new collection society so that students can share music non-commercially without restrictions. My unit of analyses will focus on interval testing. My coding scheme will analyze user definitions of “stealing,” “sharing,” “copyright,” “design,” “hip,” “disruptive" and “DRM.” My measures will examine contemporary attitudes among college students and their level of commitment to political change, “I think the present system of copyright as it relates to digital music requires change. I [early adopters/indie musicians] am willing to join a new, untested collection society in return for my fan’s ability to download and share music. I [college student] am willing to pressure my university to adopt such licenses?”

One concern I have is how to structure the data questions so it doesn’t appeal to college students’ natural inclination to embrace disruptive or “alternative” policies. That is, I want to capture what seems to be the real inability to engage this generation unless something is branded “hip” or “disruptive.” Research methods will include national survey regarding digital music, case-study analysis of specific pro-digital content, IPR reform sites, focus groups, in-depth interviews and content analysis. Some of the most important questions will be what features would best promote the viral growth of such an online community. I hope to create a range of advisors with deep technological and strategic marketing experiences to address this fundamental question. I will also need to reference established scales used by political organization in conceiving and incentavizing their bases to participate in new campaigns. Finally, I will need to explore what the best way is to virally launch horizontal activists online communities.

Bibliography
Haidt, L. (2007). “Blanket Licenses for Unlimited Digital Sharing of Music” from
Toward a Broadband Future: California, the United States and the Global Network. Retrieved June 3, 2007 from http://settopcop.wetpaint.com/page/CA+State+Broadband+Connectivity+%26+Blanket+Licenses.

Heller, G. (2007). Looks Like Jobs is a Jester. Retrieved May 2, 2007
from http://defectivebydesign.org/blog/jester_hat.

Urban, J and Haidt, L, Doctorow, C; Taplin J.; Demers, J., Gillian, J; and Sinnreich, A.
(2007). “ACC Request for Workshop Meeting re: Proposed Artist Collecting Society for Digital Music.” Retrieved May, 2007 from http://settopcop.wetpaint.com/page/ACC+Request+for+Workshop+Meeting+re%3A+Proposed+Artist+Collecting+Society+for+Digital+Music.