I have been thinking a lot as of late about protection for musicians, writers and inventors.

The core question is this: does it make sense in this age for society to protect their property to the extent currently afforded them? For inventors it’s 17 years, for writers and musicians it’s their lifetime plus 100 years.

These government enforced boundaries were originally implemented to encourage creators to invest their energies by ensuring all future rewards would be protected so they could profit from their efforts. Even our founding fathers felt these protections were necessary to build a strong society and wrote them into our constitution.

While this may have made sense in the 1700′s does it still make sense in an age where sharing is becoming the norm and the spread of shared ideas and media is instant and worldwide?

Don’t you think just about everyone has owned a copy of a Beatles song or Stairway to heaven even though they probably didn’t purchase them? I consider these public domain – despite the fact they are protected to make sure every last penny goes to the owner’s of the material.

The problem with the current system is it restricts growth and limits technological change. It’s an old model that no longer works.

Tomorrow a few more thoughts.

A 5 year old girl is reprimanded by her teacher for not sharing with her classmates.

“Don’t you like to share?” Asked the teacher.

“Yes I like to share, I just don’t like other people touching my stuff.” And so you have it.

We live in a world where sharing will increasingly become the norm – not because we’re getting more used to people touching our stuff – but because in our newly networked society sharing becomes collaborating – 1+1=3 – and the results will be in all our best interest.

In our older society sharing meant having less. In today’s society sharing means having more.

Yesterday we wrote about arcane protectionism laws that require our governments to protect us from sharing music, books and inventions. Let me suggest something different.

What if we as a society took a baby step towards our future by limiting our protectionism to 5 years after it’s introduced for sale or use – instead of hundreds for books and music and 17 for inventions?

Something like this must happen because any society that wants to drive the future must embrace the benefits of open sharing without reprimand – and our current laws do not support this model.

I know it’s wild. Think about it.

This issue about copyrights and protection has so many layers and hooks into society’s fabric that it’s hard to pick on just one but I will certainly try.

It is legal for me to stream music in the form of a radio station. In fact, we do this already through eTracks. Here I can stream pretty much anything I want and pay a yearly license fee. Problem is, it’s 192kbps limited and MP3. It sounds good, but it’s not great and the quality of the sound certainly doesn’t pay homage to the musicians who made the music. What I’d love to do is stream full CD and high-res quality but there’s simply not enough bandwidth to do that.

So I came up with an idea – if the source of the radio station was local then you wouldn’t have bandwidth restrictions. So we place the entire library onto a small hard drive in its uncompressed format, encrypt the data so it cannot be copied, and package the HD in a radio product we sell to folks. Access to it is still the same – as a radio station – but now you get full bandwidth without compression – we could even do multiple stations from the same library – and what a cool product that would be. Maybe 20 stations that cover everything we’d like to listen to – all in uncompressed wonderfulness.

Can’t do it. Copyright laws prohibit this. Same music, same fees paid, same protection from copying and selling.

And that’s the problem of legislating against change and the natural order of things. For now it’s just an inconvenience but one that hurts the musicians as well as the high-end customer who wants to enjoy music without suffering the degradation of MP3.

Change is tough but building fences to protect a dying industry doesn’t work and slows down what will work.

We’ve discussed plenty of controversy about how musicians and artists will get funded in this day and age of the internet. I haven’t any magic to offer but when I do see a small ray of light I will bring it forth to hopefully spark ideas.

One such ray of light is a website called Kickstarter. These guys have a really brilliantly executed operation that kick starts companies, artists, musicians and inventors, by getting funding for them through the online community.

I first heard of this group because they funded an interesting loudspeaker project. The goal was to raise $125K and they succesfully raised almost $1,000,000 instead. You can see the video on this here: Bluetooth streaming radio

How would this work for artists and creatives? Check this out: Andrew York album funding

Andrew York is a musician and is looking to fund his next album. He’s already met his goal and by the time you read this he’ll be getting even more.

Is this the ultimate solution? Probably not, but it certainly is a ray of light – and a bright one at that.

Good news is the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter and I am convinced it isn’t a train.

I have written a lot as of late about the issue of musicians and how they get rewarded for their work. It has ruffled a few feathers and I think that’s good.

To be clear, I am interested in looking at alternate ways to get our artists and musicians paid – and paid well enough to have their work flourish. I believe some of my readers have misunderstood my intent – instead thinking I am advocating free music for everyone – while nothing further from the truth could be said. We need to find a way to get musicians paid for their work so they can continue to make more of it. Plain and simple.

Here’s something to think about however. The classic model of the label financing all the work and paying the artists a percentage of the returns is at the heart of the original problem, in my opinion.

The old model is the label takes a chance on an artist and funds the recording, the publicity, the manufacture of the media and the distribution and sale of that media. In exchange for all this upfront work and risk, the label typically keeps 90% of the revenue while the artist gets 10%. If the artist is a big name this percentage might shift to perhaps an 80/20 split.

This means that the vast majority of every dollar we spend on our music goes to the people who create no content and the smallest amount goes to the people who create all the content. The same is true for authors of books as well.

Does this seem right? Not to me it doesn’t. It’s exactly backwards in my opinion. Those that create something of value should always be compensated higher than those that simply facilitate their exposure.

You can have music without distributors but you can’t have distribution without music.

You probably read that Steve Jobs of Apple listened mostly to vinyl instead of his fabled iPod creation. He was a real music lover and preferred the sound of vinyl to that of digital.

What you may not know, however, is what he accomplished when he launched iTunes. He set the stage for musicians getting paid a larger percentage than they did in the past.

In yesterday’s post I mentioned how the old and dying model of the label getting the lion’s share of the revenue – the musician getting only a fraction of the money – was always doomed to failure and rightfully so. Why? Because when the merchant gets far more than the creator there’s a natural imbalance that somehow must be corrected to survive.

The new era has started and we have Jobs to thank for part of it. With iTunes, when you buy music, the typical split is 30 to 35% for Apple (the merchant) and 65 to 70% for the artist (the creator). This is a much better split IF you’re an independent artist without a label and a much worse split IF you are an artist with a label.

I can see the fireworks starting now – but please just take a deep breath and ask yourself if this isn’t a step in the right direction.

I would ask myself why I need a label if I have iTunes to distributer it for me?

Could be the start of something good.

Yesterday’s post Perfectly Legal had a few of you scratching your heads about being law breakers. If you rip a CD and then sell it or give it away, technically you should delete the stored copy as you no longer own the rights to listen to the music you bought.

I still cringe every time I rip off a warning label on a new pillow or mattress that adamantly says not to do that under penalty of law because I am technically breaking the law. Logically the mattress police probably aren’t going to come after me nor are the copyright folks likely to audit my CD collection and compare it to what I have ripped – but in both cases they have the right to do it.

Society has an obligation to protect people’s rights but it also has a duty to make sure its legal system isn’t absurd.

If you own a CD it is perfectly legal to sell that CD. It’s your property.

It is also perfectly legal for you to make a copy of that CD for your own use on your iPod, a server or computer. You do not have the legal right to copy the CD and sell or give away that copy.

So if it is perfectly legal to copy our physical media libraries and retire the CD’s, why do we keep them?

The simple answer is that the record companies didn’t actually sell you a copy of the work, they sold you a license that allows you to play and fairly use the work in your own environment. The moment you sell your “license” you don’t have the right to even play the copy you made anymore. Which is rather silly to imagine if you sold your collection of CD’s because they’re collecting dust, you would also delete the tracks from your iPod and music server. But you’re supposed to to be perfectly legal.

I kind of understand where they’re going with this – it wouldn’t be fair to the musicians to purchase a CD, rip it to your library and then resell it for a couple of bucks less for someone else to repeat the process. Yet, the reality is that’s not what happens with most of us.

The reality is most of us buy our CD’s, rip them to our portable music players, computers and more recently music servers to enjoy the music we purchased anywhere we are or want to play it. The physical media then going into storage to collect dust.

It’s all a rather odd system that still isn’t working to anyone’s favor. Had I the right to sell my CD’s I’ve collected over the years, I would take that money and buy more! The purchaser of my library would be able to learn about new artists, new music and be inclined to do the same.

Even if it were legal, and apparently it’s not, there isn’t a good high-end oriented marketplace to buy, sell and trade CD’s.

That’s a shame.