Ronaldo sez, "I am writing because something relevant happened in Brazil two days ago regarding the local copyright collecting societies (analagous to Ascap and BMI in the US). After more than 6 months of investigation by a Senate special inquiry commission, 15 directors have been indicted for various types of fraud and crimes. Also, the Senate is proposing a new law to completely revamp the copyright collection system, based on principles of transparency, efficiency and tech improvement (I helped the Senate draft the law). I believe this might be interesting for people outside Brazil for various reasons. Both because it paves the way to a more transparent and accountable copyright collection system, and also because it is a huge contrast with cases like Megaupload: in Brazil it is the copyright societies that are been indicted for fraud."

The part that I'm excited about is "principles of transparency, efficiency and tech improvement." Collecting societies are based on the idea of statistically sampling music usage and remitting funds based on the analysis. Given that we live in the age of analytics, it's unforgivable that the basic algorithm for collection distribution is "all the money goes to the big four labels, except for some scraps that we give to a few indies, and the rather titanic rake we keep for ourselves." I think the 21st century is waiting for a collecting society run with the institutional transparency of GNU/Linux and the analytic efficiency of Google.

CPI do Ecad propõe novas leis e órgãos para gerir direitos autorais

(Thanks, Ronaldo!)