[M4IF Discuss] (no subject)
William J. Fulco
wjf NetworkXXIII.com
Wed May 8 12:37:01 EDT 2002
Rob,
> > I'm just offering other possibilities.
>
> Thanks for the contributions Bill, It is good to be able to flesh out all
> the licensing issues in public. These discussions help.
I hope so... just trying to clarify the issues - I often see buyers that
think they've got some right to what's being sold at a price that they're
happy with - and sellers that think buyers have no choice. It's all just a
negotiation....
Some thoughts from earlier...
Basically what we (the buyers) are saying is we want a low-cost to build the
market and the sellers are saying they're afraid of missing-out on a
potential "boom" so they want a high-price - usually this kind of thing is
handled with a "percentage of the take" kind of deal (they don't make money
until we make money) - but the accounting and privacy issues in that kind of
deal are always problematic (as we've seen here). One way to handle the
account issues is not to try to take a percentage of the user's income - but
to charge a unit-cost for the producer's goods - this is where the 2cents/hr
comes in. This is better than auditing the user's books to see how much
money they made - but it's still an accounting/privacy problem and at 2c the
price is still potentially a killer.
They could do it as a sliding scale - 0.1 cents for the first x hours, up to
2cents for whatever... (this could handle the price issue for small users -
but potentially not the accounting) Another possible way to handle the
baggage-free issue - especially the accounting-problems - would be to not do
it as pure 2cents/hr - but perhaps as tiers - $150/year for up to 10,000
hours (1 stream * 2 cents/hr * 365 * 24) or maybe 50,000 - small-fry get it
cheap - of content streamed and maybe $500/year for up to 100,000 hours and
such... based on "last years' numbers" - that way no penalty for "guessing
wrong" and very little accounting (again, I'm taking out the
easy-to-account-for potential MPEG-4 DVD market)... with a grace-period.
Maybe there is a cap at 100,000 hours/content year? or 1,000,000 hours or
5,000,000 or some such
Again it's the uncertainty that causes the problem - the small producers -
internet radio-stations etc are afraid that they're business model can't
support a "success problem" and/or that the accounting is too intrusive -
fine - they buy a bulk-license - pay your $150 or $500 and you're good to go
for the year. The big producers like cable-TV MSOs are afraid that if they
convert over that 2c/hr * all their channels on all their systems * all the
hours in the day mean HUGE expenses - then they need a cap - 5,000,000
hours/year means that they pay $100,000 and they're good to go no matter how
big their system - again - with little accounting nightmare...
If the price is sufficiently low - like the $0.25/encoder and $0.25/decoder
with a cap - then big consumers (like Apple) can just write the check for
the max and call it a day. Same could be done with usage-fees - if there is
very inexpensive entry number - then small users can write a (small) check
and be done with it. If there is a cap on the total amount per "entity"
perhaps - the big companies can write a (rather large) check and be done
with it.
++Bill
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