These licenses are often encumbered with legal restrictions because the creators (via their agents) can get more money by subdividing the rights.

This isn't specific to music. I can speak from personal experience about novels.

A common form of encumbrance is territorial rights; for example, when I sell the rights to publish my novels to my publishers, I only sell them the right to publish in a specific language, and in specified territories.

I can't get more money from a publisher by offering them world English language rights rather than, by splitting US/Canadian and UK/rest of world rights and selling them to different local publishers. (In fact, if I sell world rights to a US publisher, they won't sell the ebooks around the world -- they'll merely re-sell UK rights to a British publisher, who will maintain the territorial split. Because there are still no truly global publishers, despite individual members of the Big Six trying to operate on a global scale.) So I split the rights and sell them separately.

As noted by, well, just about everyone, this makes little or no sense in the internet age. Unfortunately trying to get book contracts re-drafted so that e-book rights are global and non-exclusive is, shall we say, an exercise in pain (we're talking about getting publishing house lawyers involved: do I need to say any more?). So that's why it persists in ebooks, and it's pretty much the same story with other forms of content.

That's why this goes on. It'll probably continue for a few more years before truly global distributors show up and the existing system collapses under its own weight.

"Tell me (and Barassi) why this sort of thing happens. If your answer includes words like 'licensing,' 'rights' or any other explanation of the convoluted system that the labels themselves set up to prevent people from purchasing their music, your answer, while 'technically correct,' is completely wrong."

In other words, who cares?

The artists (as a general body) do not care even the slightest if I live in a foreign country.

The customers don't care what country the artist was in when they created their work.

That leaves the middlemen - who are increasingly irrelevant precisely because they are providing no value to either side.

The trouble is, they do add value, from my perspective. But they also add headaches. There is a cost/benefit trade-off here, for artists to evaluate. (Which is why I felt the need to respond to this idiotic article, my gut reaction to which was actually along the lines of "oh no, not this tired old shit again". For values of "tired old shit" that equate to Techcrunch, not BRAT, who at least knows what he's talking about, unlike the TC journalist who's using him to make a point while disingenuously refusing to engage with the real nature of the problem.)

They can also add their stamp of approval to it (I know that this means nothing to a lot of buyers, but it does mean something to some. I have heard a couple of readers of mass fiction rave about trust Del Rey books to be worth reading because they trust Del Rey), and an established publisher can more easily get it into print if/when it is worth doing.

Of course an author can do all of those themselves or hire others to handle those steps for them. But it is certainly value-added to have all of that done for you.

In some cases, such as film or broadcast, the middleman is providing the venue. Not every creator can afford their own broadcast tower and transmitter and few people own their own 35mm projector.

Of course, now times are changing, and many people do own the modern digital equivalent of all those things, and many authors do have their own distribution and marketing channels.

Middlemen still provide a pre-existing financial arrangement. As a consumer I don't really want to set up a credit card account with every fly-by-night operation on the internet that I might want to purchase from. So places like Apple and Amazon and Paypal still have a place.

And in the international marketplace, especially in media sales, local licensors often provide the value of localization. Subtitles, dubbing, translation, etc.

It's only been 10 - 15 years since significant numbers of people have been able to purchase stuff online, and there are still issues with bandwidth for some media. The world is changing and adapting to the new normal.

Congratulations, you are living through an important period of history. Expect some bumps, inconvenience and inefficiencies while humanity readjusts to a couple of thousand years of dealing with physical media.

Over at Techdirt, a site I've been reading for a half-decade and contributing to for nearly a year, IP issues compose probably 80-90% of the posts. The reason I inserted that particular paragraph was to head off discussion centered around rehashing multi-national licensing nightmares and instead get some sort of explanation as to why this isn't being fixed faster.

Obviously, there is a multitude of systems already in place and extricating ourselves from this won't be easy and won't happen quickly. But rather than working to streamline these processes, representatives of content industries are spending a great deal of their time (and lobbying power) trying to do the impossible: stamp out piracy.

Most people don't need an excuse to pirate content, but situations like this push people who otherwise would have purchased something into finding an alternate route or doing without, neither of which will make the labels (or studios or whatever) happy.

There's a lot of numbers thrown around equating each torrent to a lost sale. Actual lost sales due to speed bumps and hurdles in the distribution are rarely discussed by the industry and when they are, they result in horrendous "solutions" like Ultraviolet or the "drive your DVD to the retailer in order to rip a copy to the cloud."

So, if I'm ignoring the "why" behind the situation (which I don't believe I am), it's because the point of the article was "Don't cry about piracy if you can't give me an option to buy."

We know the system is a tangled mess. We know there are many more middlemen than there needs to be. We (and every time I use "we," I'm speaking broadly from my experience as a writer/reader of Techdirt) don't believe ALL middlemen are useless. Many of them DO add value, but when you've got several middlemen guarding turf in several different locales, all hoping to carve a slice of a digital good, it leads to this. And knowing every detail of "how" and "why" a particular band can't sell a particular album via the internet to you simply because of where you live doesn't change the fact that it's frustrating for fans who want to support artists and, I would imagine, greatly frustrating for the artists themselves, who need all the paying fans they can get.

So, we can engage the real nature of the problem, but unless someone towards the top starts slicing away at the undergrowth surrounding worldwide distribution, not much will change.

There are some great comments here. I found yours to be very informative as well as the contributions from commieneko and Gfischer. Both raise very good points about this situation. In short, the systems in place can't adjust as quickly as the market does. (Or in some cases, won't.) But back to the point of my post: you (this would be the royal version, not you personally, Charles) really shouldn't be hollering about piracy when you're unable (and in some cases, unwilling) to let would-be paying customers give you their money.

(P.S. I don't really consider myself a journalist. I'm sure many, many people would agree with me.)

Obviously, there is a multitude of systems already in place and extricating ourselves from this won't be easy and won't happen quickly. But rather than working to streamline these processes, representatives of content industries are spending a great deal of their time (and lobbying power) trying to do the impossible: stamp out piracy.

Agreed the piracy issue is a red herring; it's an emergent side-effect of the unavailability of cheap, convenient legal purchase options. But it's also one that is popular with the folks who fill boardroom seats at the top, who tend to be old and anxious about hot new technologies that they don't understand.

And that in turn is an emergent side-effect of the wave of media conglomeration that happened in the 1980s, as large publishers went on acquisition and merger sprees and ended up as part of huge groups within a handful of large cross-media multinationals.

What they urgently need is some sort of cross-licensing agreement, but I'm unsure where it's going to come from ...

(Reply cut short due to urgent business IRL. May be more to say later.)

Yeah, that's the issue. Here's my pipe dream. Someone at one big studio/label/publishing house stands up and says "This is ridiculous" and begins a Sherman's March to Sea on the existing system and streamlines it using common sense and ass-kicking.

That's my dream. I wish they would, while they still have the money and power to make it happen. Of course, that still doesn't address the problem that the industry heads and the artists have very different ideas about what's equitable. So, that's another issue. The industry doesn't have a great track record on treating its artists fairly so in all likelihood any slash-and-burn revamp would likely heavily skew in favor of those at the top of the heap, much as it does today.

A very slim possibility exists that this revamp, though heavily skewed, would still end up being a net gain for most, if not all of the artists working within that system.

What gets me is that they have still have massive amounts of power and money and they're using it all to play a largely defensive battle. Being the last to market, so to speak, isn't going to help them take control of the future. I understand that you can't suddenly yank an ocean liner into a tight 90-degree turn, but you also can't avoid icebergs (to continue this awful metaphor) by waiting until it's tearing chunks out of the hull before making your move.

Keep in mind there's no obligation on their part to sell it to _anybody_. Taking matters into your own hands and choosing to download something you want-but-can't-buy happens to be different to physical goods, in that you're not depriving the original owner of the use of the file, but assuming you've got the "right" to have a copy is a particularly advanced sense of entitlement.

It's probably easier to have come to this realisation from Australia, quite a lot of "the internet" doesn't believe you exist if you don't have a US credit card billing address, so it's not just music and ebook downloads that I've had to make the choice of "Pirate? Use VPN & fraudulently-obtained-pre-paid-credit-card*? Bother a friend who does have US internet-commerce-existance? Or do without thing I was about to buy?".

Maybe I should pot a graph of my major label music purchases by year, and do a blog post explaining the recent steep decline?

Setting it up so that only certain people can purchase your goods does nothing for the two parties most interested in each other: the customer and the artist.

You should plot a graph of your purchases and their subsequent decline. Every decline these days is written off to piracy while situations like yours and BRAT's (and thousands of others) are ignored or dismissed as outliers.

cstross argued the opposite, and explained why.

Based on his answer, if he could deal with a truly global middleman that could distribute throughout the world and paid him fairly for that privilege (rather than only caring about their own current region), he would probably cease to care.

It is emphatically not the customer's job to solve the problem.

If you want money, make it easy for people to give you money, otherwise, you're just a crazy guy rambling about the vast world-wide conspiracy to screw you.

I assume that here on HN, we're interested in finding the roots causes of things. Not throwing up our hands and saying "I know it's broken, but I'm not interested in talking about how to fix it."

And then it's immoral when they try to enforce this.

Nobody is going to know how to "disrupt" a problem they don't understand.

If you had to choose an audience in front of which to explain the problem of the existing publishing industry and their outdated approach to selling digital versions of their product to people begging to be able to pay for them, can you think of anywhere else that's more likely to have enough people capable of going "I cold fix that!"?

The statement that I responded to was directly contradicted by a published author (cstross). That's what I was pointing out, that if we want to get further towards understanding the situation, perhaps we should listen to a person with experience in it.

(As an aside, the smoothest publishing tool is pubit owned by Barnes & Noble. Go figure.)

E.g. the kindle store is mostly US only, but you can use any international credit card to buy them. I think this kind of attitude is good enough for now, until a true global shift.

Distribution rights for your country are worth investing in because you know you can make money if the movie is popular. A percentage of net profits is not worth investing in, because you have no control over what they are netted of.

Global distributors alone won't solve this -- the funding mechanisms need to change too.

If it is an option, then the foreign distributors can wait to see how the film does domestically before deciding whether to go all-in, which also works against doing a simultaneous global release.

A small example: approximately 10 years ago, when I lived in mainland france I purchased all my DVDs by dvdexpress.com because it just removed all these problems. Then they went express.com and added restrictions, and thus lost my business.

I am the customer. I want an item. I will pay for it. If you don't let me buy it, I will find a mean to get it anyway. You will just lose the opportunity to make good money on the transaction, and infuriate me for the time lost in doing your work - finding a way to get me the stuff I want.

Some people believe artificial restrictions from the last centuries still matter.

In this day and age, they don't. They are just problems to be solved or worked around by innovatives companies.

Any company that does this get the money. Itunes did a lot of things wrong, and has many of these issues left, but at the moment it provides the most gracious experience for the customer.

The company that will manage to find a way to circumvent all these blocks to satisfy the customer on other IP items (Ex: music, books, newspaper) will get the best advantage there can in the market: customer satisfaction.

At the moment my money is on google music's cheap mp3, but even more the kindle ebooks- because you can change the country settings in just a mouse click.

The company has the right scale to try and sign some worldwide agreement, or try to strongarm companies or governments that may stand in the way. I wish them the best of luck to satisfy us - the customers.

Things have moved forward since then, but very slowly.

" Spotify is currently not available in New Zealand. Enter your email address to be first in line when we launch! "

Which isn't exactly solving the problem...

But not for everyone. The question is that you are prohibited from doing so due to B.S. licensing issues described in TFA.

Tim Cushing is right; I don't want to hear your ramblings about licensing or rights. The fact is, Aziz and Louis CK can do it; why can't the music labels?

I often find myself seething with anger that although I have paid what I consider unfairly high prices,

(e.g. $77/month for satellite and some specialty channels Idon't watch but cannot escape, in order to watch Game of Thrones and the occasional filler program, and finding myself pirating the show anyway for ease of watching, and extra costs for producing amateur plays whose professional authors are long dead and whose rights are owned by an entity with no discernible purpose other than making more money)

and and with the knowledge the money isn't supporting who I want it to support (i.e. the artist/creator), and having access restricted to free ad supported content because of where I live, which is as this article points out; insane.

I feel as though we are still in the birth or staging period of the ideas that were conceived with Napster and the like. There is profit for all to be made in digital media and the phrase 'digital media' represents a far broader swathe of culture than people outside this type of community seem to realize.

The profit lies in the value the product adds to the culture and intellect or distraction of the consumers and nowhere else. If someone is valued by society for their contributions then, like the artists of old, they will find themselves supported by the population in one way or another.

Every other way to squeeze profit out of what is essentially non-human entertainment (i.e. once digitized the content can be recreated without another human adding any value to the work) is just a way ensuring that the less talented will continue to make less meaningful art at the expense of the whole society.

What Napster, and by extension the whole internet, did was generate a source and medium through which the mass individual could self determine quality and be exposed to more genres and therefore the ideas of musicians than what was ever before possible. It's major flaw, legality notwithstanding, was that it limited itself to music. The same approach clearly applies to all form of media that can be reproduced.

Clearly the repercussions of this way of thinking would destroy industries and create a new paradigm that the would will take some getting used to, if what I described were practically applied. Ultimately, I believe it will be resolved in a massive anti-trust case against the ever larger music labels/studios/cable giants/ISP's worldwide that will limit their monopolies and finally reflect the global nature of their industries.

We are seeing the dawn of a global culture. One that will survive and change so long as the human race does. To place a monetary value on access to that culture is not sustainable and will not last. IMHO lol

That is inane and witless. It throws away any kind of intelligent informed view and reduces it all to a cheap emotive sloganeering.

Rightsholders are not entitled to control what people do with information -- they are granted special commercial rights, and not for their own benefit but because such an arrangement is intented to encourage production for people to use/enjoy overall. The purpose is not to deny people or restrict people -- exactly the opposite. The aim is to have no more restriction than needed.

This is just the standard rational understanding. It is not difficult to find.

And it follows that if people do feel inordinately restricted or inconvenienced, the system is not functioning well and needs adjustment or fixing.

It has nothing to do with entitlement. Copyright is not a god-given right. It is a social contract; the consumer respects the copyright so that the artist gets more money, in return the consumer gets more art.

Currently, this social contract is out of balance. I think the right approach would be for some smaller countries, such as Slovenia, which get routinely neglected by copyright moguls, to pass laws saying that copyright is only valid if the work in question is offered domestically under equal terms as elsewhere worldwide. That would solve the problem real quick, one way or the other.

Currently the 'industry' operates much like a cartel. I would posit that granting monopolies rarely benefits the most people, despite the good intentions.

Note: the public CAN withdraw the monopoly at any time.

What exactly is this "legal work"? The Berne convention makes copyright worldwide, and your typical software company doesn't need to check to see if their customer is in the US before selling them their product. Your typical independent band doesn't perform a region-check on customers buying their MP3s. What's different here?

From what I can tell, most of the "legal work" is complexity created by the labels themselves.

The article is completely satisfactory with regard to all other legal "hurdles":

"The only people who would find this sort of thing acceptable are the legal teams, administrators and royalty-collecting intermediaries who need this sort of relentlessly stupid convolution to maintain their positions."

Copyright protection is easy to secure, and is not a barrier to entry into foreign markets. http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+secure+international+c...

Just do nothing. Simply don't program in any restrictions - very easy, no work involved.

An equally valid criticism to apply to any attempt at perfect copyright enforcement. Or to keep copyright in the same bullshit state it is in. Or to not innovate to keep up with the technology. Or to exert claims over a business model's viability. And on and on.

However, I will argue that current IP practices are hurting us. It does bring the quality of life down for the citizens of the country, and sometimes it's not just a song which is not available, it's a needed piece of software you just can't purchase legally - as an example, the Business Software Alliance branded as "illegal" a copy of a certain software package in a company I worked for because it was purchased in the U.S. and used in Uruguay, even though it was paid for. So now said company has to use a clearly inferior software package.

It also adds a drop to the bucket to our ability to recruit abroad (people aren't as happy when they learn that their money buys much less and far more expensive, and with lots of availability issues - want the latest and greatest? Either pay through the nose if possible, or smuggle it.

I wish there were good IP treaties that allowed us to buy abroad. Barring that, I'll have to keep hoping for a non-pipe dream Mercosur (EU equivalent) or being absorbed by Brazil or (god forbid) Argentina.

Yet, the copyright holders biggest arguments for strict copyright enforcement also seem to go out the window if they make it impossible to legitimately purchase the content in a certain market. They cannot claim they have lost a sale if they have made it impossible for that sale to go through any reasonable, legitimate channel.

You can also see it as the publishers are not entitled to the protection of copyright if they aren't going to sell the books.

Those endless "rights holders" who complain about piracy in countries where they don't even want your money. If they can't figure it out it should equate to public ___domain, I think. Maybe that'd provide an incentive.