Ross's TCPA paper

bear bear at sonic.net
Tue Jun 25 13:22:46 EDT 2002



On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, Ross Anderson wrote:

>I agree. I play music because I want to, not because I have to. (As a
>student I played professionally as I could earn more that way than by
>working on a building site.)
>
>I, and many other amateur musicians, are however frustrated by the
>fact that if we were to post some sets on our web pages, we'd be
>limited to out-of-copyright stuff, and to stuff we composed entirely
>ourselves.
>
>Even playing `happy birthday' can get you into trouble from the
>performing rights society.

Yep.  It was a very similar frustration that moved Stallman to
start working on GNU.  At that time, no matter what programs
you wrote, you wound up relying on a proprietary operating system,
and nobody could run your programs without paying the reichsgelt.
Since Stallman wanted to share stuff even with poor people, he
launched what was then considered a lunatic's crusade, duplicating
the functionality of every damn proprietary thing, starting from
zero, under a free license.  None of which mattered much until
Torvalds wrote the linux kernel and it finally became possible
to actually run Stallman's free stuff without paying the reichsgelt.

An open-art movement faces a very similar problem, but from a
cultural rather than a technical perspective.  'happy birthday'
is copyrighted, so somebody needs to write a song capable of
being a cultural replacement and develop a free-play license
making it possible for other artists to do covers and adaptations
as they like provided they license their performance likewise.
With freeplay songs, bands could still make money from
performances and club dates.

Ever notice restaurants where the waitstaff sings happy birthday
to customers never use the copyrighted version?  I bet you could
get them to use the freeplay version.  I bet bars would go for
a jukebox full of songs they didn't have to pay ASCAP for.  And
musicians would really like a bundle of stuff they could do
covers of without worrying about that crap.  Picture distributions
of a dozen DVDs covered with a hundred thousand MP3's (and
MIDI files so people can do their own remixes) by a thousand
artists.

ObCrypto: Could we use the DRM/trusted platform stuff they plan
to put into the computers to "enforce" the freeplay license?  ie,
make sure all derivative works also bear the freeplay license?

				Bear





---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com



More information about the cryptography mailing list