OK. But it is still part of the spectrum. I doubt Prince ended up profiting from this history. This kind of copyright enforcement is not the way to get anyone but large corporations paid. I'll bet his ROI on the lawsuits is not any better than the stuff Prince does not want to do. (Though Prince is probably not in the same position in this regard as a small band trying to make a living playing bars, doing any gigs they can get, and selling a CDS and DVDS where they can.. Maybe he has positive ROI from suing Youtube. I guarantee your average non-star band does not. ) However all this does not mean I bloc with freetards. I'm with KenMacLeod "Information wants to be paid". It is a non-rival classic public good. And like other classic public goods it still takes labor to create in the first place. And it takes more labor to provide a filtering. function. (Not for you, but for other following along: a filtering function is when someone suggests that Gogol Bordello is an awesome band so you don't have to look though every band on the intenet to find someone who blends Rock with Russian hoke. And if you ending hating Gogol Bordello or finding them Meh, you know not to trust that person's taste again. Note; I actually do like Gogol Bordello. But my taste in music is not exactly leading edge, so you may want to take that into consideration before following up on my rec.)
OK so how do we deal with this under capitalism. Dean Baker, who is a lefty but no socialist, has spent a lot time worrying about this very issue. He has come up with some ideas of his own, and also borrowed a lot from other people. To name two related to copyright
1) Alternative copyright where a producer of any kind of intellectual labor surrenders copyright into the public domain. In return the public funds something the like the Nielsen ratings on steroids to measure how many people read (or lists or viewed or whatever) the work surrendered. A tax on media funds paying intellectual laborers according to how much there stuff is used. I would add that if you wanted to make it more socialist, you could cap the payment so that really major best sellers did not get paid in proportion to their sales, and thus the payment per "view" was higher for everyone else. [Addition mine, and not Baker's].
2) A voucher system where everyone got a voucher to buy media with.
$200 per houehold. Only condition. Media could not accept ads,
enhanced sponsorship or anything of that sort. Vouchers could accepted
as full or partial payments. So you could charge $50 per year for a
subscription, and someone could pay $25 in voucher and $25 in cash.
Various means to fund this including a tax on advertising. Peter
Barnes suggests taxing advertising as a partial way to pay for this.
>From point of view of non-artist we get a voucher we can spend any
kind of media book, movie, journal, comic, CD, DVD, download -
electronic, paper, whatever. Only limitation (again) is to be eligible
to get accept vouchers media must not accept ads.
Also have been a more recent proposals I forget who from:
Something like VISTA for young people independent journalisst. Cash for bloggers? Maybe extend it to non-young people, make it more like WPA. My question is who decides who is eligible and who not