"Monetizing Anarchy": Jim Griffin on the economics of digital entertainment

Mobile industry news site The Feature just published a great essay by Pho list co-founder and Cherry Lane Digital CEO Jim Griffin that explores whether or not it's possible to "pay for art without controlling art." Disclosure: bb's own Mark Frauenfelder is a contributor there, too. Excerpt:

If there’s a copyright war between technology and entertainment, between delivery and creativity, between left brain and right brain, between people who use stuff and people who make stuff, here’s a prediction for how it ends: A pool of money, and a fair way to divvy it up, all of which will be supervised by government.

This is a safe prediction: Effective control is impractically elusive, inefficient and counterproductive, and we know it. The history of the intersection of electricity and art is actuarial, not actual control. Pleas for copy protection are elaborate misdirection akin to sending the husband to boil water while the wife is having a baby.

The real battle is where the money is: Control of the pools. Simply for music in the United State alone you can count ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, RIAA-SoundExchange, Royalty Logic, NMPA, Harry Fox, AFM, AFTRA – well, the full list of acronyms and their translations would require pages; still worse, multiply it by well over a hundred countries worldwide.

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