July 6, 2005
“‘Collective Licensing or Media Levy’ Is a Euphemism For Turning Creativity Into A Socialist Gulag”
So says Jim DeLong.
Someone better tell the artists represented by collective rights
organizations ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. Do they have any idea how they’re being oppressed?
Artists must rise up and stop Marybeth Peters, whose proposed reform “effectively substitutes
a collective licensing structure for the existing Section 115 compulsory
license.”
Perhaps Delong was only referring to compulsory licenses or
“Alternative Compensation Systems.” I guess I missed the part in
Professor Fisher’s book where people are worked to death in prison camps.
Come on, guys – do we really want to throw around terms like gulag? Haven’t we just been over this?
In a related situation, Glenn Otis Brown pointedly framed what’s distasteful about casually using such loaded terms:
throwing them around recklessly, especially given what those words
meant in the not-so-distant past,” Brown wrote. “My father was a CIA
Cold Warrior for 35 years of his life; he wasn’t fighting against GPL’d
software. Stalinist purges, the Berlin Wall, tanks in Budapest —
that’s communism.”
Filed by Derek Slater at 1:46 pm under Big Ideas
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