[SLUG] Compulsory Licensing

From: Russell Hires (rhires@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri May 24 2002 - 09:35:15 EDT

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Hello All,

I heard an interesting story on National Public Radio the other day. It
talked about compulsory licensing. I had never heard of this before, but now
I know a little bit more. If you have the RealAudio Player you can hear the
story at
http://search1.npr.org/opt/collections/torched/atc/data_atc/seg_143658.htm

If you haven't heard of it, it is basically how an artist/record company gets
paid for songs that are played for free over the radio waves (that is, it's
free to the listener, but not the radio station). This was an issue in the
1930's when radio was new, and record sales were threatened by this new
technology.

Fast forward to the Internet Age. Something similar might just occur for us
internet users in relation to music, but I can also see it happening for
other "content", such as proprietary software that is regularly pirated...of
course, us GNU/Linux people have no need to pirate, but this might be
something to worry about anyway (or not?) since it could conceivably cause
internet connection fees to increase or ... well, I don't know.