Magnifisyncopathological

Ars Technica via Slashdot: Pandora now pushing radio to pay for music, too

The campaign to get radio stations to pay up for the music they play marches on. With revenues from recorded music sales declining, rightsholders have turned their eyes in recent years to commercial US radio, which currently pays songwriters (but not performers or record labels) for the tunes that power their business.

The record labels now have Pandora on their side. The influential webcaster just wrapped up its own music licensing negotiations with rightsholders last week as both sides at last agreed to a deal that each could live with. With its own future secure for the next few years, Pandora is now turning its attention to the public performance debate here in the US, saying that the issue is a simple matter of fairness: why should webcasters have to pay more for music than traditional radio does?

Ars Technica © 2009 Condé Nast Digital. All rights reserved.

Pandora is now supporting the Performance Rights Act in order to force AM/FM radio into the same royalty scheme as satellite, Web radio, and other broadcasters. Currently, AM/FM broadcasters only pay royalties to songwriters whereas the others must pay royalties to the writers and the performers. Pandora and the RIAA say this is fundamentally unfair. The National Association of Broadcasters disagree.

I reacted to the Ars Technica article by retweeting it from XaqFixx:

#fr33 The correct response to government attacks on you isn't to wish similar attacks on others. Bad Pandora ( http://bit.ly/161l44 )

Why do I think Pandora's in the wrong here? Normally I can be expected to be a fan of fairness and I'm not against broadcasters paying content producers (or vice versa) for the service of spreading that content.

My problem is rather basic. Equal protection under the law is a decent concept in the abstract, but it falls apart when that law is rotten. For example, imagine a law requiring everyone to give a cash tip to law enforcement officers after they cite you for a traffic violation. I think such a law is bogus on a number of levels and would cheer any exemptions written into it for the simple reason that at least some people would be able to avoid paying the tips. Even if the exemptions were written explicitly for the well-connected elites who wrote the law, their outrageous hypocrisy would not erase the fact that they would not be forced to give an illegitimate tip to a cop.

As Murray Rothbard says within the context of discussing taxation:

Yet this [“equality before the law”] canon is by no means obvious, for it seems clear that the justice of equality of treatment depends first of all on the justice of the treatment itself. Suppose, for example, that Jones, with his retinue, proposes to enslave a group of people. Are we to maintain that “justice” requires that each be enslaved equally? And suppose that someone has the good fortune to escape. Are we to condemn him for evading the equality of justice meted out to his fellows? It is obvious that equality of treatment is no canon of justice whatever. If a measure is unjust, then it is just that it have as little general effect as possible. Equality of unjust treatment can never be upheld as an ideal of justice.

So, from the outset, my concern is very much with justice. Before arriving at the ethical weight of a specific distribution of an action, we must first arrive at the ethical weight of the action itself. In this case, we're talking about the forced inclusion of an industry into a cartelized, heavily-regulated royalty system that has little to do with the voluntary actions of buyers and sellers in a free market.

For me, there's little reason to argue this issue further. I will not condone subjecting more people to state coercion, particularly if expanding that coercion is justified on "let's do it to everyone so it's fair" grounds. Pandora is a service I like and enjoy, but the answer to the unequal application of bad law is the repeal of the bad law, not its extension to more people.