This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.

This was originally posted on the Shapeways website as part of a series on legal concepts important for 3D designers and 3D printing.

photo courtesy petful

(This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog)

David Byrne’s op-ed in the Times on Sunday got me thinking about the importance of information sharing in online music services.  In that spirit, I decide to throw up this unpublished whitepaper from 2011-12 on ways forward for online music licensing.  Central to the idea is complete transparency on who is consuming what.  It provided a way for unlicensed services to become licensed and to minimize the economic value of unauthorized music distribution.  It certainly has its flaws (it fails to appreciate the importance that labels put on pricing different songs differently, which may or may not be a legitimate thing to consider in this context) but I’ve always kind of been partial to it.  Remember that at the time this was written Spotify had pretty much just launched in the US and its licensing situation was from from clear.  Anyway, for posterity’s sake here is the text of the whitepaper.  It never had a title.