Resources on Alternative Compensation Systems (ACS)

last updated 2005-02-21 [therefore expect lots of 404s, 2022-07-09]

Central Nodes
Primary Literature
General Literature
Operating ACS-like Systems
On Statutory Licenses
On Collecting Societies
Voluntary Pre-Payments
DRM versus ACS
p2p Filesharing
Alternative Business Models
ACS in the Press
ACS on the Lists
Activism Pro ACS
Activism Contra ACS
Upcoming and Past Events

 

Central Nodes

• Berkman Center for Internet and Society of Harvard Law School: Digital Media Project, especially the Alternative Compensation System Scenario.
• Development of an Alternate Compensation System for Digital Media in a Global Environment. Meeting hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, December 5, 2003
• ACS Mailinglist at Pholist (subscribe)
• Open Society Institute’s Information Program: Alternative Compensation Systems for Digital Media
• Aaron Swartz’s webpage: Alternative Compensation Systems
• Joi Ito’s Compulsory Licensing page

Primary Literature
(in reverse chronological order)

• Derek Slater, Meg Smith, Derek Bambauer, Urs Gasser, and John Palfrey, Content and Control: Assessing the Impact of Policy Choices on Potential Online Business Models in the Music and Film Industries, Digital Media Project, Berkman Center for Internet Law & Society, Harvard Law School, January 7, 2005
• Kamiel J. Koelman, The Levitation of Copyright: An Economic View of Digital Home Copying, Levies and DRM, in: Bijdragen Symposium De Toekomst van het Auteursrecht, 15.10.2004, Amsterdam, p. 39 ff.
• EFF’s Let the Music Play Campaign: a White Paper: A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing, Making P2P Pay Artists (a lose collection of various ideas), Making P2P Legal (“Voluntary Collective Licensing” and Compulsory Licensing), and a petition to Congress demanding “the development of a legal alternative that preserves file-sharing technology while ensuring that artists are fairly compensated.” (February 2004)
• Andrew Orlowski, Why wireless will end ‘piracy’ and doom DRM and TCPA – Interview with Jim Griffin, The Register, 11/02/2004
• Robert P. Merges, Compulsory Licensing vs. the Three “Golden Oldies.” Property Rights, Contracts, and Markets, Policy Analysis, No. 508, January 15, 2004
• William W. Fisher III (Professor of Law, Harvard University, Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society), Promises to Keep. Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment, forthcoming, Stanford University Press, 2004. Drafts are available for the Introduction and for Chapter 6: An Alternative Compensation System.
• Gratz, Joseph, Reform In The Brave Kingdom: Alternative Compensation Systems for p2p File Sharing, draft, Dec 19. 2003
• Neil W. Netanel: Impose a Noncommercial Use Levy to Allow Free P2P File-Swapping and Remixing, 17 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology (forthcoming December 2003)
• Jessica D. Litman, Sharing and Stealing, Draft, November 23, 2003
• Dean Baker (co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research), The Artistic Freedom Voucher: Internet Age Alternative to Copyrights, November 5, 2003
• Eugene Volokh on the ‘NRA Second Amendment Blues’ problem, 9/9/2003
• Ernest Miller, Compulsory Licensing – What is Noncommercial Use? LawMeme, Yale Law School, September 08 [2003??]
• Stan Liebowitz, Alternative Copyright Systems: The Problems with a Compulsory License, 31 August 2003
• Stan Liebowitz, Will MP3 downloads Annihilate the Record Industry? The Evidence so Far. June. School of Management University of Texas at Dallas, 2003
• Kevin Marks, Nationalizing music, protection rackets and freedom, discussing Jim Griffin and Stephen Cherry, June 23, 2003
• Steve Gordon (entertainment attorney and consultant based in New York City), How Compulsory License For Internet Might Help Music Industry Woes, Entertainment Law & Finance, May 2003.
• Todd Larson, CommuniCast: Developing a Community-Programmed Webcasting Service, May 10, 2003
• Peter Eckersley, Virtual Markets for Virtual Goods: An Alternative Conception of Digital Copyright. Copyright Through the Looking Glass, Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia working paper 02-03, February 2003.
  • Peter Eckersley, Alternative Renumeration Systems, video recording of presentation at Open Cultures, Vienna, June 5-6, 2003
• Derek Slater – More on Fisher’s Compulsory Licensing, 4/21/2003
• Derek Slater, Outline of William Fisher’s Speech at Stanford’s CIS on January 13, 2003
• Brad Templeton (was founder and publisher of ClariNet Communications Corp), Microrefunds for a Creative Economy (without date, ca. 2003)
• Bennett Lincoff, A Full, Fair And Feasible Solution To The Dilemma of Online Music Licensing, New York, New York, November 22, 2002
  Comments on this text
• Raymond Shih Ray Ku, The Creative Destruction of Copyright: Napster and the New Economics of Digital Technology. The University of Chicago Law Review. Vol. 69, No. 263, 2002, pp. 263-324
• James Love, Artists Want to Be Paid: The Blur/Banff Proposal, Power at Play in Digital Art and Culture, April 11-13, 2002, The New School, New York, NY. (In the spring of 2003, a small group of lawyers, academics, and musicians met at the Banff Centre for the Arts to continue a conversation begun the previous fall at the “Blur Workshop on Power at Play in Digital Art and Culture” concerning possible ways of compensating artists whose works are downloaded through peer-to-peer technologies. One of the participants, Jamie Love, subsequently reported the fruits of their discussions in a document known as the “Blur/Banff Proposal.”)
• Raymond Shih Ray Ku, The Creative Destruction of Copyright: Napster and the New Economics of Digital Technology, 2 May 2001; forthcoming in University of Chicago Law Review
• Jim Griffin (Founder and CEO Cherry Lane Digital & OneHouse LLC, Los Angeles), At Impasse: Technology, Popular Demand, and Today’s Copyright Regime, White paper for the Senate Judicary Committee, April 2001
• Lawrence Lessig, Just Compensation. Congress should help artists get paid without delivering the Internet into the hands of the big labels, The Industry Standard, Apr 09 2001
  • “Compensation, in other words, without control.”
• William Fisher, Digital Music: Problems and Possibilities, last revised: October 10, 2000

General Literature

• Nicholas Bentley, Proposal for a Distributed Intellectual Property Rights (DIPR) system, 1999-2004
• Jacqueline Lipton, Mixed Metaphors in Cyberspace: Property in Information and Information Systems, Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Vol. 35, pp. 235-274, 2004
• The proposal how to avoid double payment and create a ‘competition’ between DRM and levy schemes
  Till Kreutzer, Herausforderungen an das System der Pauschalvergütungen nach den §§ 54, 54a UrhG durch die Umsetzung der Richtlinie 2001/29/EG, September 2003
  s.a. Till Kreutzer, Dr. Till Jaeger und Carsten Schulz, Stellungnahme des ifrOSS zum Fragebogen des Bundesministeriums der Justiz zur weiteren Reform des Urheberrechts in der Informationsgesellschaft („2. Korb“), S. 3 ff., Hamburg – München, 30. Oktober 2003
  s.a. with a nearly identical line of reasoning: Alexander Peukert, in ZUM, 12/2003, Sonderheft zur Auftaktveranstaltung Zweiter Korb
• Bell, Tom W., Authors’ Welfare: Copyright as a Statutory Mechanism for Redistributing Rights, Brooklyn Law Review, Vol. 69, p. 229, 25 September 2003
• Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, IER Lawrence Klein Lecture: The Case Against Intellectual Monopoly, March 28, 2003
  • Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly, drafts of the first four chapters of upcoming book
  • Douglas Clement, Creation Myths. Does innovation require intellectual property rights?, reason-online, March 2003
    (on the Boldrin/Levine model and its reception in economics)
• Janko Röttgers, Mix, Burn & R.I.P. Das Ende der Musikindustrie, dpunkt Verlag 2003 Weblog dazu, bes. Links zu Alternativen
• Future of Music Coalition, Radio Deregulation: Has It Served Citizens and Musicians?, 2002. This report is an historical, structural, statistical, and public survey analysis of the effects of the 1996 Telecommunications Act on musicians and citizens.
• Till Kreutzer, Napster, Gnutella & Co.: Rechtsfragen zu Filesharing-Netzen aus der Sicht des deutschen Urheberrechts de lege lata und de lege ferenda – Teil 1 (GRUR 2001, Seite 193 ff.) und Teil 2 (GRUR 2001, Seite 307 ff.)
• Till Kreutzer, Tauschbörsen wie Napster oder Gnutella verletzen nicht das Urheberrecht, Telepolis 07.02.2001
• Yochai Benkler, Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, October 2001
• Peter DiCola, The Economics of Recorded Music: From Free Market to Just Plain Free, Future of Music Coalition, 07.16.2000
  “Recorded music, though a unique phenomenon, will soon have the two main characteristics of a public good, non-depletability and non-excludability. The free market mechanism does an extraordinarily poor job in handling public goods.”

Operating ACS-like Systems

• PlayLouder MSP (UK)
• MIT’s Library Access to Music (LAMP) (US)
• AllofMP3.com (RU). Authorized by the Russion collecting society, still, legal status is being questioned. 1 MByte = 1 US Cent. Best catalog of all.No DRM
• Weblisten.com (ES). In cooperation with the Spanish music collecting society. No DRM.

On Statutory Licenses

• CPTech page on Health Care and Intellectual Property: Compulsory Licensing
• Hearing on the Copyright Compulsory License Improvement Act before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, February 25, 1999

On Collecting Societies

• European Parliament Report on a Community framework for collecting societies for authors’ rights (2002/2274(INI)), A5-0478/2003, Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, Rapporteur: Raina A. Mercedes Echerer, 11 December 2003 (deutsche Fassung)
• Bernt Hugenholtz, Lucie Guibault & Sjoerd van Geffen, The Future of Levies in a Digital Environment, Final Report, Institute of Information Law, University of Amsterdam, March 2003
• Thomas Dreier, Die Auswirkungen des § 63a UrhG auf die Verteilungspraxis der Verwertungsgesellschaften, März 2003
• Martin Kretschmer, Digital Copyright: The End of an Era, European Intellectual Property Review (2003): pp. 333-341
• Martin Kretschmer, The Failure of Property Rules in Collective Administration: Rethinking copyright societies as regulatory instruments, European Intellectual Property Review (EIPR) Issue 24(3) 2002: 126-137
• Peter Mühlbauer, Urheberrechtsausgleich oder Subventionssteuer?
  Teil 1: Wie die Verwertungsgesellschaften ihre Einnahmen verteilen, Telepolis 9.05.2001
  Teil 2: Die Stichprobe, Telepolis 11.05.2001
• European Court of Justice, joined cases 110/88, 241/88 and 242/88 against SACEM (13.07.1989)
• CPTech’s Page on Collective Management of Copyrights
• European Copyright Collection, initiated by Freibank

Voluntary Pre-Payments & Cyber Tipping

• Andreas Neus, Blender and the Street Performer Protocol: Freak success or first of a trend? A Case Study of Open Source Economics, October 2002
• Chris Rasch, The Wall Street Performer Protocol: Using Software Completion To Fund Open Source Software Development, First Monday, Volume 6, Number 6 — June 4th 2001
• Peter DiCola, The Online Tip Jar Experiment: Why the Results Could be Underwhelming – Or Even Harmful – For Artists, Future of Music Coalition, 10.15.2000
• Jeff Coleman, Busking as a Form of Online Compensation, Future of Music Coalition, 07.31.2000
• John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier, The Street Performer Protocol and Digital Copyrights, First Monday, Volume 4 Number 6 — June 7th 1999
• John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier, Street Performer Protocol, The Third USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce Proceedings, USENIX Press, November 1998

DRM versus ACS

• Jörg Reinbothe (Head of the Unit “Copyright and Neighbouring Rights” of DG Internal Market of the European Commission), “Private Copying, Levies and DRMs against the Background of the EU Copyright Framework”, held at the Conference on “The Compatibility of DRM and Levies” (Brussels, 8 September 2003, organised by Rightscom Ltd., London
• Tsvi Gal (Chief Information Officer, AOL Time Warner Music Group), Howard M. Singer (VP Technology, AOL Time Warner Music Group), Laird Popkin (Chief Technology Officer, TIG Ventures Group), The IP war: apocalypse or revolution? invited talk at 2003 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management, October 27, 2003, Washington DC, USA (Proceedings)
• Rachna Dhamija and Fredrik Wallenberg, A Framework for Evaluating Digital Rights Management Proposals, in the proceedings of the First International Mobile IPR Workshop: Rights Management of Information Products on the Mobile Internet, August 2003, Helsinki, Finland
• Lionel S. Sobel, DRM as an Enabler of Business Models: ISPs as Digital Retailers, without date
  Comments on this text

p2p Filesharing

• Michael A. Einhorn and Bill Rosenblatt, Peer-to-Peer Networking and Digital Rights Management: How Market Tools Can Solve Copyright Problems, Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 534, February 17, 2005
• Lior Strahilevitz, Charismatic Code, Social Norms, and the Emergence of Cooperation on the File-Swapping Networks,Virginia Law Review, Vol. 89, 2003
• Nicklas Lundblad (Anna Research Institute C/o Stockholm Chamber of Commerce), Noise Wars: Is the Answer to the Machine in the Noise?, presented at BILETA 2003, London, 14-15.4 2003. (on legal aspects of noise dillution strategies in p2p networks)
• stud. iur. Sascha Theißen and stud. iur. Alexander Huber, Rechtliche Bewertung von Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Film- und Musiktauschbörsen nach dem Urheberrechtsgesetz und dem neuen Teledienstegesetz unter Berücksichtigung zentraler und dezentraler Netze wie Gnutella, Napster, eDonkey2000 und Filetopa sowie den kommenden Änderungen im Urheberrecht aufgrund der EG-Urheberrechtsrichtlinie Seminararbeit im Rahmen des Blockseminars an der Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen zum gewerblichen Rechtsschutz und Urheberrecht, im Sommersemester 2002

Alternative Business Models

• Tim Weber, Gabriel to launch musicians’ union, BBC News, 23 January, 2004
• Jeff Goodell, Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview. He changed the computer industry. Now he’s after the music business, Rolling Stone, December 03, 2003

ACS in the Press

• Kembrew McLeod, Share the Music, New York Times, June 25, 2004
• Janko Röttgers, Musikerverbände wollen Tauschbörsen legalisieren, MP3-world.net, 22. Juni 2004
• Alfred Krüger, Flatrate für Filesharing? Telepolis, 22.06.2004
• Dawn C. Chmielewski, License to allow music downloading proposed, Mercury News Feb. 26, 2004
• Andrew Orlowski, Free legal downloads for $6 a month. DRM free. The artists get paid. We explain how… , The Register 01/02/2004
• Paul Boutin, An Offer You Can Refuse. The RIAA’s amnesty deal may not keep you from being sued, Slate, Sept. 8, 2003
  “The most obvious method would be the creation of a “blanket compulsory license” for digital media akin to those already used by radio and TV broadcasters.”
• Xeni Jardin, Creative License. Some analysts are proposing compulsory licenses as the answer to digital piracy, GRAMMY Magazine – July 25, 2003
  Comments on this text
• William Fisher, A royalties plan for file sharing, CNET, July 11, 2003
• Steven M. Cherry, Getting Copyright Right. Mandatory copyright licensing legitimized the early radio and cable TV industries. Can it do the same for the Internet? IEEE Spectrum Online, February 2002
  Three Steps to Breaking the Licensing Logjam, Interview with Whitney Broussard, IEEE Spectrum Online, February 2002
• Jefferson Graham, Kazaa, Verizon propose to pay artists directly, USA Today, 14.5.2002

ACS on the Lists

• [nettime] From: rasmus fleischer Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 “Content Flatrate” and the Social Democracy of the Digital Commons

Activism Pro ACS

• Downhill Battle Music Activism – is a non-profit organization working to support participatory culture and build a fairer music industry. “Our plan is to explain how the majors really work, develop software to make filesharing stronger, rally public support for a legal p2p compensation system, and connect independent music scenes with the free culture movement.”
• c’t-Umfrage: Kaufmusik mit DRM — Geißel oder Chance? (18.-27.2.2005)
• Le Nouvel Observateur: “Libérez l@ musique!” L’appel pour protester contre la répression qui touche les adeptes de peer to peer (P2P). Dessous, la liste des premières personnalités (artistes, politiques, intellectuels…) qui ont signé le texte. (36,000 people to date). (Telepolis Artikel darüber)
• FairSharing: Die Kulturflatrate, German campaign, including a signature collection demanding a public debate on ACS.
• Chaosradio/98, Thema: Vergütung im Netz, 1. Dezember 2004 von 22 bis 1 Uhr auf Radio Fritz
• Berlin Declaration on Collectively Managed Online Rights: Compensation without Control, to Mr. Jörg Reinbothe Head of Unit Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Internal Market DG European Commission, in response to the call for comments on the Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament and the European Economic and Social Committee on the Management of Copyright and Related Rights in the Internal Market (COM(2004) 261), signed by international copyright scholars, practitioners and activists at the WOS3, Berlin, 21 June 2004
• Kompensation ohne Kontrolle. Stellungnahme zum Zweiten Korb der Novellierung des Urheberrechtsgesetzes, von privatkopie.net, Forum Informatikerinnen für Frieden und gesellschaftliche Verantwortung e.V.(FIfF), Netzwerk Neue Medien Chaos Computer Club, FoeBuD e.V., Attac, AG Wissensallmende und freier Informationsfluss und ODEM — Online-Demonstrations-Plattform für Menschen- und Bürgerrechte im digitalen Zeitalter. an Bundesjustizministerin Brigitte Zypries, Berlin, den 21. Juni 2004
• EFF’s Let the Music Play Campaign: a White Paper: A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing, and a petition to Congress demanding “the development of a legal alternative that preserves file-sharing technology while ensuring that artists are fairly compensated.” (February 2004)

Activism Contra ACS

• music united for strong internet copyright
• Bitkom-Presseerklärung: Das Internet braucht keine Pauschalabgaben, 14.11.2002
• Bitkom bekräftigt Forderung nach individuellen Vergütungsverfahren für digitale Medien, 15.3.2002
• European Information, Communications and Consumer Electronics Technology Industry Association (EICTA): Anti-Levy Campaign
  (Article on the launch: IT companies campaign against copyright levies, Online Publishing News, 17 November 2001)

Upcoming and Past Events

• ACS-Panel at Free Bitflows, 3-4 June 2004, Vienna
• ACS-Panel at Wizards of OS 3, 10-12 June 2004, Berlin
• Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialog (TACD), Global Access to Essential Learning Tools Report, April 5th 2004, New York
  There was also broader discussion on, for example, the question of how society should pay for knowledge when it is a public good and available at zero marginal cost. Should we buy it as a public good and then distribute it regardless of ability to pay? How do we compensate people who are producing goods?
  Final Report