Compulsory Licensing Makes Me Cringe

The EFF Fred von Lohmann suggests in a Daily Princetonian editorial that a compulsory license is a good solution to the peer-to-peer piracy problem. Sorry Fred, you know I love you EFF kids (and the super-DMCA analysis is superb), but you missed the boat on this one.

There are a bunch of problems with compulsory licensing, which is generally conceived as a flat fee on Internet access that gets passed on to artists via some mechanism. Of course, making sure the right people get compensated in proportion means doing what the RIAA does now: policing file-sharing services. And, as is rarely discussed when people bring this issue up, how are independent musicians who have no RIAA representation remunerated? What if the artists want people to be sharing their music for free? And, more important than all of the music world concerns, what about those Internet users who don’t ever touch file-sharing? I see no reason why my father, who uses the Net solely for email and browsing, should be penalized for people like me who make the occasional illegitimate download (along with a bunch of legitimate ones).

And don’t give me any lines about this being a sort of tax for “netizens”: for most of the world, the Internet is a service, a means to various ends, not a community or society. It seems a task too technically and politically complex to regard as a good solution. Let’s keep thinking, folks.