Do Your Rights To Listen To Legally Licensed Music Stop At The Border?

from the rights-holders-fuck-up-everything dept

Two rather successful venture capitalists, Brad Feld and Fred Wilson, have been at the forefront of bucking the ridiculous claim that VCs only invest in companies that have patents, as both have spoken out about how patents tend to stifle innovation, and how their portfolio companies are often held back by patents, rather than helped by them. It looks like both of them are also quite aware of how copyright gets in the way of basic innovation as well. Brad Feld has a post up about how he created a Pandora station based on Fred's blog post detailing his top albums of the decade. Pretty cool, right?

Well, the problem is that Brad sent Fred an invite to this "station," and Fred is traveling for the holidays in Argentina with his family. So, because of ridiculous demands from copyright holders that make it so Pandora is only available in the US, Brad gets informed that Fred cannot access the station that Brad created for Fred solely due to ridiculous copyright holder demands. Yes, even though Fred almost always accesses Pandora from the US, but just happens to be in Argentina this week, Pandora says he can't listen to the station that Brad created for him. Brad makes a good point, that any human can understand why this situation is silly, but computers still can't quite figure it out, noting: "The level of interaction of human and machine is high, although the level of sophistication is pretty low." As for Fred's summation of the situation? "Rights holders fuck everything up." Indeed.

Filed Under: brad feld, fred wilson, licenses, music, rights holders