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.The publisher couldn't say no, and no one had to hire a lawyer at $200 an hour to argue about whether the payment should be two cents or a nickel.This compulsory license is still in place today: when Joe Cocker sings "With a Little Help from My Friends," he pays a fixed fee to the Beatles' publisher and away he goes — even if Ringo hates the idea.If you ever wondered how Sid Vicious talked Anka into letting him get a crack at "My Way," well, now you know.That compulsory license created a world where a thousand times more money was made by a thousand times more creators who made a thousand times more music that reached a thousand times more people.This story repeats itself throughout the technological century, every ten or fifteen years.Radio was enabled by a voluntary blanket license — the music companies got together and asked for a consent decree so that they could offer all their music for a flat fee.Cable TV took a compulsory: the only way cable operators could get their hands on broadcasts was to pirate them and shove them down the wire, and Congress saw fit to legalize this practice rather than screw around with their constituents' TVs.Sometimes, the courts and Congress decided to simply take away a copyright — that's what happened with the VCR.When Sony brought out the VCR in 1976, the studios had already decided what the experience of watching a movie in your living room would look like: they'd licensed out their programming for use on a machine called a Discovision, which played big LP-sized discs that were read-only.Proto-DRM.The copyright scholars of the day didn't give the VCR very good odds.Sony argued that their box allowed for a fair use, which is defined as a use that a court rules is a defense against infringement based on four factors: whether the use transforms the work into something new, like a collage; whether it uses all or some of the work; whether the work is artistic or mainly factual; and whether the use undercuts the creator's business-model.The Betamax failed on all four fronts: when you time-shifted or duplicated a Hollywood movie off the air, you made a non-transformative use of 100 percent of a creative work in a way that directly undercut the Discovision licensing stream.Jack Valenti, the mouthpiece for the motion-picture industry, told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was to the American film industry "as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone."But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it determined that any device capable of a substantial non-infringing use was legal.In other words, "We don't buy this Boston Strangler business: if your business model can't survive the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get another business-model or go broke."Hollywood found another business model, as the broadcasters had, as the Vaudeville artists had, as the music publishers had, and they made more art that paid more artists and reached a wider audience.There's one thing that every new art business-model had in common: it embraced the medium it lived in.This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful new medium: it is true to itself.The Luther Bible didn't succeed on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable: they were ugly, they weren't in Church Latin, they weren't read aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience, they didn't represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by someone who had given his life over to God.The thing that made the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for a new medium pale beside its profligacy.The most successful organisms on earth are those that reproduce the most: bugs and bacteria, nematodes and virii.Reproduction is the best of all survival strategies.Piano rolls didn't sound as good as the music of a skilled pianist: but they scaled better.Radio lacked the social elements of live performance, but more people could build a crystal set and get it aimed correctly than could pack into even the largest Vaudeville house.MP3s don't come with liner notes, they aren't sold to you by a hipper-than-thou record store clerk who can help you make your choice, bad rips and truncated files abound: I once downloaded a twelve-second copy of "Hey Jude" from the original Napster.Yet MP3 is outcompeting the CD.I don't know what to do with CDs anymore: I get them, and they're like the especially nice garment bag they give you at the fancy suit shop: it's nice and you feel like a goof for throwing it out, but Christ, how many of these things can you usefully own? I can put ten thousand songs on my laptop, but a comparable pile of discs, with liner notes and so forth — that's a liability: it's a piece of my monthly storage-locker costs
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