John Palfrey

“I think Terry’s proposal is terrific,” says Prof. Nesson.  “But the question is how can you get from here to there.  There are a lot of dead of bodies between here and there, and they aren’t dead yet.”

Terry Fisher replies: “Something more dramatic, something of a lurch, is needed to get us to a better world.”  And, he concedes that Prof. Nesson is indeed persuasive on one point: ”The political impediments to replacing the copyright system, even in one country, the United States, are quite high.  And the political impediments to replacing the copyright system internationally are huge.” 

So, instead, says Terry, we need an intermediate step: an entertainment co-op, voluntary from the perspective of the artists and the individual consumers, a cousin of of creative commons.  It would cost $3.50 a month for consumers for unlimited downloads and streams.  The main impediment to the voluntary scheme?  Critical mass.  You need substantial involvement of the artists and of consumers. 

Jonathan Zittrain has a constituency: those who are able to take advantage of the 35-year “Rod Stewart Protection Act.”  There’s a lot of demand for bands’ songs that are 35 years old, who can now strike a new deal with their distributors.  They could move to Terry’s world: “Lifebeginsat40.com”.

A nice riff by iLaw attendee and venture capitalist David Hornik on yesterday’s conversation on whether the web makes democracy possible, with some good comments attached (see Gary Santoro’s, e.g.).

Prof. Terry Fisher’s alternative compensation scheme – focused initially on the music industry and extensible to film, books and other forms of content – has four parts: Register, Tax, Count, Pay. 

How much money would you have to raise to make this system work?   About $2.4 billion, he calculates. 

Merits of such a system: large cost savings; elimination of deadweight loss; convenience for consumers; no price discrimination; gains from semiotic democracy.

Demerits: Who gets hurt? Manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and possibly record companies and studios.  But the last community might not get hurt at all, if they’re as good as they say at selecting winners among artists. Distortions and cross-subsidies.  Danger of giving discretionary power to a government agency.

Advantages over the current arrangement seem sufficient to try it out.

For more details and continued iteration of the model: see Chapter 6 of Promises to Keep (forthcoming) at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/PTKChapter6.pdf.

“Here’s the point of the whole course: extraordinary things happen based on tiny changes.”  Like the fact that every act on the internet makes a copy.  “The net is a copying technology.  Bingo.  The world’s transformed.”  So says Prof. Lessig.  People were hanging on every word here.