This is, however, not a step of authors taking publishing in their own hands, and the Author's guild is not entirely happy with this solution. Wiley is replacing one middle man (the publishers) by another, the agent. It is self-publishing in the hands of the wrong selfs.

No matter where we stand on this — this is certainly only the beginning of a number of changes in the author-agent-publisher-dealer-reader chain. It will be interesting to see what the parties do next.

Larry Lessig of Creative Commons replies politely in a letter in the Hunffington Post, clearly stating that 'Creative Commons is a nonprofit that provides copyright licenses pro bono to artists and creators so that they can offer their creative work with the freedom they intend it to carry.' And that Creative Commons builds upon copyright, etc.

Lessig calls upon ASCAP's president Paul Williams to address the different views 'with honesty and good faith' and 'the way decent souls do. In a debate.'

Lessig also mentions that artists using these licenses actually make money. Which is actually not such a surprise, because the two things that musicians make, is music and money. Having said that, and having noticed that ASCAP runs their fundraising campaign only under their .com domain, I am stopping short of concluding that the actual business that's under threat might actually not be making music, but collecting fees.

Most of the teenagers I have met who are into theatre would do the free song before they would do the one for $3.99 unless they had a really good reason. It could theoretically take place the same way. The question is would it? And the answer is probably not. I never said that it was an amazing thing happening and I never said that it doesn't start with what I'm sure seems to you as a bad thing. I "assume that because a good thing comes from an illegal act, it's therefore mitigated"? Well, I have just explained that it is not illegal, so we will leave that alone. Yes. I assume that because something that good comes from something so insignificantly negative, it's therefore mitigated.

So Jason needs to make a living. And he pretends to make that living from selling sheet music at 3.99. Most of the money will end up somewhere between the buyer of sheet music and the composer. He'll probably not get more than 10 %, which is 0.399. Composers earn 34,570 per year (according to Wiki Answers) or anything between 34,667 and 147,628 (salaryexpert.com). Which equals 369,995 copies of sheet music sold per year. While I don't have any statistics at hand what "normal" sheet music revenues are, we now from the famous "My sweet Lord"/"He's so fine" plagiarism case (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976)) that "My sweet Lord" made 67,675 in sheet music sales in 5 years. This seriously leave's me wondering what musical genius this Jason Robert Brown is that 4000 teenagers are so keen to trade his sheet music (while he's busy selling it) and still has time to go into lengthy conversations with them — well, not all of them, but according to his own account, he did check if they responded to his request not to trade.
And why does Jason remind me of Giuseppe Verdi? Verdi had — as one of the only Italian opera composers — the luck to live the introduction of copyright protection for opera in Italy during the early 1840s. And Mike Scherer (The Emergence of Musical Copyright in Europe From 1709 to 1850, HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP08-052) found, that '[a]s his wealth accumulated, Verdi reduced his compositional effort — from 14 operas in the 1840s to seven in the 1850s, two in the 1860s, and one each in the succeeding three decades. The reduction in effort cannot be attributed to declining ability; some of Verdi's great operas are among the handful of late compositions. Rather, his correspondence makes clear, the higher "price" elicited for each opera made it possible to reduce effort along a classic backward-bending supply curve.'

Since the advent of file sharing, the production of music, books, and movies has increased sharply.

Moreover, they find that as files haring grows, the demand for complements to protected works raises, for instance, the demand for concerts. Equally, concert prices go up. So in the end, the income of artists has increased, not decreased.

And again, they dismantle the myth of file sharing having a massive impact on record sales: "Empirical work suggests that in music, no more than 20% of the recent decline in sales is due to sharing."

• "Authorship (…) will remain what it always has been." — collaborative will remain the exception
• Publishers are not innovative and have never been — anecdotic evidence on how in 1951 Epstein "invented" the paper back edition of regular hardback books
• The toner based book market, represents about 6% of the books market in the U.S., is twice as big as the e-book market and is estimated to grow to 15% in the next three to five years
• books going digital get countless opportunities for viral publicity on YouTube and its successors (!)
• digitization makes the backlist accessible at virtually no more than printing cost — a revenue opportunity
• Publishing conglomerates are inefficient; Google &co. are a threat by the control they (could) exercise — there is need for decentralized content provision

And the one I liked most: "Stephen King and John Grisham (…) is a separate activity from mainline bookselling. All John Grisham needs is a printing company and a truck. That's all the publishing work that has to be done, because those books are presold. You just ship them to Costco and other distributors and there you have it. That's a different arrangement than what it takes to publish a real book of substance."

Read the whole article…

CCIA commissioned the study conducted using publicly available government data and World Intellectual Property Organization methodology. It found companies benefiting from limitations on copyright-holders’ exclusive rights, such as “fair use” – generated revenue of $4.7 trillion in 2007 – a 36 percent increase over 2002 revenue of $3.4 trillion. The most significant growth over this period was in Internet publishing and broadcasting, web search portals, electronic shopping, electronic auctions and other financial investment activity.

As for jobs, employment in fair use industries grew from 16.9 million in 2002 to 17.5 million in 2007. One out of eight U.S. workers is employed by a company that benefits from protections provided by fair use and industries relying on fair use and other copyright exceptions make up one-sixth of the U.S. economy, according to the report. The report updates a comprehensive 2007 study that shows the importance of fair use.

In other words: copyright would impede growth and kill jobs if there weren't exceptions. Read the full study here or intelligent comments here.

One: "Three Widely Cited Estimates Sourced to U.S. Agencies Cannot Be Substantiated" — the FBI estimate of a $200-$250 billion loss to counterfeiting per annum to U.S. businesses; the CBP estimate of $200 billion/750,000 jobs loss per year; the $3 billion annual loss in sales allegedly calculated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Second: Just over half of seized counterfeit goods (58 %, in terms of domestic value) are not pharmaceuticals or media, but handbags, clothes and footwear. Pharmaceuticals are 5 % and media a mere 3 % in the 5 year period of 2004-2009 (DHS figures).

So essentially the claims, mainly of the recording industry, about the amount of losses due to piracy are exaggerations or simply lies. And who wanted to know that, could read it in arstechnica already over 2 years ago.