Re: Consortium to discuss electronic storage

 Mary Brandt Jensen said (in part):

> materials. And as Congress found was the case with jukeboxes and cable
> TV, tracking down all the copyright holders for all the material in a large
> electronic library to ask permission is impractical. For these reasons,
> Congress adopted compulsory licenses for juke boxes and cable TV. However,
> when the U.S. joined the Berne convention it became highly unlikely that
> any additional compulsory licenses would be enacted.

Actually the difficulty of tracking down licensees had little to do with enacting compulsory licenses. As ASCAP and BMI have shown, when parties stand to make (or lose) money, they figure out a way to arrange for licensing despite what appear to be overwhelming transaction costs (as those organizations do for music, which is performed in a zillion places all over the country). It had more to do with the fact that the cable industry had been "subsidized" by earlier Supreme Court decisions, had grown into a powerful lobbying force, and was able to force copyright owners to come to a compromise between no liability for cable TV and full liability for cable TV: specifically, the compulsory license arrangement.

In fact, there are far fewer (FAR fewer) cable tv stations than there are places where live and recorded music is played; hence an organization like ASCAP for television would have been eminently practical had Congress not depended on the interest groups to reach their own compromise.

        --Trotter Hardy

  +-------------------------------+------------------------------------+
  |  thardy[_at_]mail.wm.edu           |     Prof. I. Trotter Hardy         |
  |  Voice: (804) 221-3826        |     Marshall-Wythe School of Law   |
  |  Fax:   (804) 221-3261        |     College of William & Mary      |
  |  BBS:   (804) 221-1137        |     Williamsburg, VA 23187         |
  +-------------------------------+------------------------------------+