cgray4

Remix? Sequel? Live performance?

The New York Times doesn't do a great job of following that standard if indeed they try to. Searching for CDs gives me many more examples of "CDs" than "CD's" -- the only one I saw was a blog post, which is probably copy-edited less strictly than an article in the paper. Similarly, searching for ATMs gives "ATMs" and "A.T.M.'s", but not "ATM's". Others I found: both "GTOs" and "GTO's", "LCDs", "TVs", both "B&Bs" and "B&B's". The phrase "A's and B's", referring to grades, was always written with apostrophes, as was the phrase "P's and Q's".

One of the fun thing of doing these searches is that really old articles are mixed in with the results. Searching for LPs shows that it has been written "LPs" since at least 1955 and also yields this intriguing headline: "DIGITAL COMPACT DISKS - REPLACEMENT FOR LPs?" from 1983.

If a doctor is funded by a drug company and publishes articles saying that the company's drugs are good, is her connection relevant?

Even the best scientists can be biased, and being aware of the biases can help one decide how much attention to give arguments. If Prashant Deva is biased by his experience and funding against the technology that he is critiquing, then that is relevant information to me and many other people who read his critique. To suppress that information, as you seem to be trying to do, would be a blow against transparency. In my opinion, that would be a bad thing.

I would call it a digital media consumer's union, where a person pays in a certain amount per month and then the total is allocated to the copyright holders proportionally to the amount that their media are consumed by the members of the union. Consumption statistics for music are already tracked by things like last.fm (and libre.fm), and it would not be hard to build a tracker for things like movies, books, and possibly websites and computer programs.

The monthly bundle of money would obviously be the carrot, and if one of the companies getting the money decided to sue a member for copyright infringement, then the money would be coverted into a stick in the form of a legal defense fund.

What about free riders? There would obviously be some, but I think a lot of people really do think that digital distribution is terrible and would pay if given the chance.

What about trust? Whoever was doing the collecting would have to have a great reputation and be completely transparent. It should probably be a non-profit and regularly audited.

Would it be be sued into oblivion? IANAL, but it seems like giving people money should not be actionable. The big guys would probably try to get the list of members, so being paranoid about privacy seems like it would be a good idea.

What would it do to the incentives? This is my favorite part. Instead of the publishers attempting to lock everything up, the incentive would be for them to make content that is as consumed as possible. That is, the publishers would want their stuff to get out there so that people see it and give some of their share to the publisher. Things like digital locks would become counterproductive.

Things like flattr provide some precedent for this idea, though they obviously don't go track down people that aren't part of the system.

I'd love to hear critiques of this idea, because if it can't work, then I can stop thinking about it.