Musicians Want To Be Paid Multiple Times If Concert Tickets Are Resold

from the perhaps-you-shouldn't-have-sold-it-so-cheaply-in-the-first-place dept

What is it with the music industry always running to the gov't to try to grant them a new "rights" that force people to pay up for things that the musicians have already been paid for? There are so many different "rights" involved it's nearly impossible for people to keep track of them -- and now they're asking for more. Specifically, the managers of a bunch of well known musicians are asking for a "resale right" that would mean that any time a concert ticket is resold the musician gets some of the money again. This is double (or triple or quadruple or whatever) paying. The musician chose to sell the tickets at a certain price, and if there's a resale market, that's between the buyer and seller -- not the musician.

This really highlights an increasingly disturbing trend of trying to create "copyright-like" regulations on what you can do with non-information goods. In a normal, functioning economy, if you buy something, it's yours. You are then free to do what you want with it, whether that's modify it, enhance it, destroy it or resell it. In the copyright world, there is some ability to mimic this behavior with a "right of first sale," but there are still so many limitations within copyright that others have looked to take those limitations beyond copyright. We've already seen efforts, such as the law in Japan to ban the sale of some used electronics as well as a push in the UK to grant artists a resale royalty as well (so that any time a piece of their artwork is resold, the artists would get another cut).

While the aims of the music managers may be good (they claim it's to protect consumers from being ripped off by scalpers), the means are highly questionable. A market is efficient for a reason, and giving the original "owner" the right to a cut from every resale messes with that efficiency and is simply unnecessary. It simply becomes a way to get paid multiple times for the same product, distorting the real market.

Filed Under: reselling tickets, right of first sale