I assumed that the 76m did not include the 9.1m they know was distributed (the article suggest that anyway, and as Dementia comments).
To get a ratio of how efficient they are I was looking at what proportion of the amount CAL themselves spent was given to creators. In other words
Amount distributed to creators / Total distributed + amount spent doing so
Ignoring the 76m gives a ratio of 9.1 / (9.1+9.4) = 49%
If we include the 76m, we need to know how much of this was distributed to artists, and how much was spent by the publishers in doing so: (9.1 + some of the 76) / (9.1+9.4+76) = ??
Unfortunately we don't have that information. Also, if we include the unexplained amount of 19.5m (114-9.1-9.4-76) which is presumably held in CAL's bank account, we would need to know how it was ultimately spent.
To give an example of why I'm not including the 76m, lets assume we do your calc which assumes that none of the 76m was spent on admin and it all went to creators. How about if, after receiving the 76m, the publishers gave 50m back to CAL .. who promptly returned it to the publishers. Now, CAL has still only spent 9.4m on admin, but it has given a total of 126m to the publishers and 9.1m to creators. Pass the 50m back and forth several more times and your formula makes their efficiency boost up to 100%, all without another penny being paid to creators.
My point is there are either two cases:
- the publishers are more efficient than CAL. In this case, more than 49% of the 76m is distributed to creators and including the 76m in the above calculation will improve the overall efficiency. However, in this case what has CAL added to the picture? The efficiency could be improved even more by passing all of the funds direct to the publisher
- the publishers are less efficient than CAL. In this case, less than 49% of the 76m is distributed and including them would lower the 49% overall. In this case, I'd wonder why the publishers are finding it harder and more expensive to distribute to their own creators than CAL - so arguably CAL should be distributing (some of) the 76m. Plus even though CAL is doing better than the publishers here they're still not doing well compared to other fundraising organisations.
Either way CAL on its own needs to improve efficiency, either by shutting down or upping their game. There shouldn't be a place in the modern world for extra layers of management that can be made more efficient.
(Also I'm with Killer_Tofu in that I'm suspicious that the publishers' efficiency is going to be worse than 49% ... would be nice to see some stats to verify this if anyone has them?)
I think it's that there's more interference now, as Mike C was pointing out.
I was an early adopter with wifi in my area so even though I was in a block of flats my network was the only visible one.
These days, even though I'm now in more spaced housing there are half a dozen wireless networks plus I have a sonos sound system which uses the wifi space and 4 cordless phones (also the number of things attached to my wifi has gone from 1 PC to 2 PCs, a laptop, an iphone, an ipod, an xbox 360 and my wii).
On the flip side the wifi router is better than my old one, but even so connections drop occasionally.
Perhaps one way of thinking of the collections agencies is as a charity. After all they claim to be a way of channelling money from the public to the needy (artists).
Using the figures above, they incurred expenses of 9.4m and distributed 9.1m to creators. Their distribution rate is therefore 49%. If a charity approached you for a donation, and told you that they would actually keep just over half of your donation, I don't think you'd be too impressed!
I've had a quick scout around the internet to see what charity comparison sites have to say about efficiency ratings:
Charity Navigator
- 90% of charities spend more than 65% on their purpose, compared to CAL's 49%
- Fundraising organisations, which seem to be close to CAL, spend an average of 6.6% on admin, much less than CAL's 51%
- Even museums, who have property to maintain, get away with only 15.5% on admin
Charities Aid Foundation
- Average admin spend over the last 25 years has been pretty stable at around 13-14% (although it does acknowledge that there is noticeable individual variation)
Intelligent Giving
- Shows average admin spends are higher than the 13-14% on CAF above, however the highest is around 25.7% which is still around half that of CAL
Note: I've ignored the 76m that was passed on to another collection agency (albeit an internal department of publishers) as in order to distribute that there will be more expenses, so by ignoring both I shouldn't be distorting things. If you argue that the publisher's expenses will be lower than CAL's (and can they really be higher?) then you'll have to explain why CAL doesn't step out of the picture and let the publishers deal with the whole thing. And try to keep a straight face!
Easy, lawyers do leaflet drops on nearby forests saying "Did you fall over? Was nobody around? We can help get you the listeners you deserve! Just call 1-800-ambulancechasingscum now!"
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: My 5 oint plan or copyright and patents.
Agree that they should be able to licence it to others, just don't see why they shouldn't be able to transfer it. After all, if you allow licencing what's to stop people writing licencing agreements that run for the length of the copyright with no/very penal early termination clauses? Would have the same effect as transferring.
If the holder wants to:
- sell completely (ie sell the freeholding on a building)
- licence for a long period (ie sell a leaseholding)
- licence for a short period with termination clauses (ie monthly/yearly rental)
there shouldn't be anything to stop them, as any barriers will only be circumvented and we'll spend our time with increasingly arcane laws aroud what is and isn't allowed in agreements.
I'm wondering how PPL will pay the £20m. After all, it's not like they have many assets since they'll have been distributing it all to artists over the years.
I disagree here. Why should the ownership of copyright not be treated like any other asset - such as a building, or equity? In each case it's an asset that can be used to generate an income. If the artist wants to capitalise their future royalty income stream they should be free to sell their copyright (also if you prevent reassigning copyright someone will come up with a clever financial product that does the same thing, so why stand in the way?)
As a separate point, they shouldn't be allowed to reclaim them back - unless there was an explicit clause in the original sale agreement stating that. After all, if I sell you a house you'd be a bit annoyed if I turned up a few years later and demanded it back again.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Aristocratic Lords protect liberty
A lot of countries have a bicameral government, I don't think that means we should give up on democracy.
To my mind (one of) the advantage of the Lords is that it is filled using a different process to the Commons. If the Lords were all directly elected, we'd end up with two houses of Commons so we might as well combine into one.
Agree that it's unfortunate that the government can stack the house of Lords for political purposes - also putting people in there so that they can take on cabinet posts etc when they aren't elected (Mandelson, Sugar spring to mind).
Comes down to how do we fill the second house:
Voting - I don't like as wouldn't be different to the Commons
Hereditary - Somewhat of out of favour these days
Appointed - but who does the appointing, and how to prevent it becoming too party political
Lottery - Run it like a jury system, or conscription, with people required to do 2 years service, although getting higher earners (above average intelligence?) to do this could be hard
I would have said ESPECIALLY those with deep pockets (or perhaps those with deep enough pockets to make it worthwhile suing but not so deep that they can afford a better legal team than yours)
Whoever made the phone listings in the first place is incompetent in extracting maximal value out of them, and society is best served when someone else comes along and does a better job
Except if they are extracting value by selling the collated results to people who are good at collecting advertisers, and printing/distributing heavy books. No one company has to do an entire process from cutting down trees to delivering a book. Division of labour FTW
Completely agree there. I'd rather the second house wasn't elected by popular vote, as they then don't need to pander to either business bribes, or populist agendas. Instead they can get on with the business of running the country.
Of course you need some form of system for choosing who is going to be in the House of Lords. I just don't think it should be by public vote.
I would say Government for the people is a European ideal (in no way suggesting that it is not also an ideal in other parts of the world). Just to my knowledge no country anywhere has ever managed to effect it (massively sweeping statement I know). Seems that everywhere ends up being run by an elitist group of individuals who believe they know best and if you disagree you're dumb. Recently the UK had Tony "God" Blair, America currently has Obama's healthcare bill.
Brings to mind Churchill's quote that "democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried"
Have to say though that the EU parliament is a particularly good case study of goverment NOT for the people. Bunch of incompetent corrupt moneywasting buffoons in my not-so-humble opinion :P
Hehe, now I'm thinking of doing my printing on my neighbour's printer to save on ink. Of course I doubt they'll be happy when I knock on their door to collect my printouts.
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Re: Re: Re: Life, the universe and everything
On the post: Winning Essay In High School Ethics Writing Competition Argues That File Sharing Isn't Wrong
Re: Re: Re:
I'd like to see Rosa Parks writing to her congressman ...
On the post: Australian Copyright Agency Paid Itself More Than It Distributed To Content Creators
Re: Re: charitable comparison?
To get a ratio of how efficient they are I was looking at what proportion of the amount CAL themselves spent was given to creators. In other words
Amount distributed to creators / Total distributed + amount spent doing so
Ignoring the 76m gives a ratio of 9.1 / (9.1+9.4) = 49%
If we include the 76m, we need to know how much of this was distributed to artists, and how much was spent by the publishers in doing so: (9.1 + some of the 76) / (9.1+9.4+76) = ??
Unfortunately we don't have that information. Also, if we include the unexplained amount of 19.5m (114-9.1-9.4-76) which is presumably held in CAL's bank account, we would need to know how it was ultimately spent.
To give an example of why I'm not including the 76m, lets assume we do your calc which assumes that none of the 76m was spent on admin and it all went to creators. How about if, after receiving the 76m, the publishers gave 50m back to CAL .. who promptly returned it to the publishers. Now, CAL has still only spent 9.4m on admin, but it has given a total of 126m to the publishers and 9.1m to creators. Pass the 50m back and forth several more times and your formula makes their efficiency boost up to 100%, all without another penny being paid to creators.
My point is there are either two cases:
- the publishers are more efficient than CAL. In this case, more than 49% of the 76m is distributed to creators and including the 76m in the above calculation will improve the overall efficiency. However, in this case what has CAL added to the picture? The efficiency could be improved even more by passing all of the funds direct to the publisher
- the publishers are less efficient than CAL. In this case, less than 49% of the 76m is distributed and including them would lower the 49% overall. In this case, I'd wonder why the publishers are finding it harder and more expensive to distribute to their own creators than CAL - so arguably CAL should be distributing (some of) the 76m. Plus even though CAL is doing better than the publishers here they're still not doing well compared to other fundraising organisations.
Either way CAL on its own needs to improve efficiency, either by shutting down or upping their game. There shouldn't be a place in the modern world for extra layers of management that can be made more efficient.
(Also I'm with Killer_Tofu in that I'm suspicious that the publishers' efficiency is going to be worse than 49% ... would be nice to see some stats to verify this if anyone has them?)
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Re: Re: Re:
I was an early adopter with wifi in my area so even though I was in a block of flats my network was the only visible one.
These days, even though I'm now in more spaced housing there are half a dozen wireless networks plus I have a sonos sound system which uses the wifi space and 4 cordless phones (also the number of things attached to my wifi has gone from 1 PC to 2 PCs, a laptop, an iphone, an ipod, an xbox 360 and my wii).
On the flip side the wifi router is better than my old one, but even so connections drop occasionally.
On the post: Australian Copyright Agency Paid Itself More Than It Distributed To Content Creators
charitable comparison?
Perhaps one way of thinking of the collections agencies is as a charity. After all they claim to be a way of channelling money from the public to the needy (artists).
Using the figures above, they incurred expenses of 9.4m and distributed 9.1m to creators. Their distribution rate is therefore 49%. If a charity approached you for a donation, and told you that they would actually keep just over half of your donation, I don't think you'd be too impressed!
I've had a quick scout around the internet to see what charity comparison sites have to say about efficiency ratings:
Charity Navigator
- 90% of charities spend more than 65% on their purpose, compared to CAL's 49%
- Fundraising organisations, which seem to be close to CAL, spend an average of 6.6% on admin, much less than CAL's 51%
- Even museums, who have property to maintain, get away with only 15.5% on admin
Charities Aid Foundation
- Average admin spend over the last 25 years has been pretty stable at around 13-14% (although it does acknowledge that there is noticeable individual variation)
Intelligent Giving
- Shows average admin spends are higher than the 13-14% on CAF above, however the highest is around 25.7% which is still around half that of CAL
Note: I've ignored the 76m that was passed on to another collection agency (albeit an internal department of publishers) as in order to distribute that there will be more expenses, so by ignoring both I shouldn't be distorting things. If you argue that the publisher's expenses will be lower than CAL's (and can they really be higher?) then you'll have to explain why CAL doesn't step out of the picture and let the publishers deal with the whole thing. And try to keep a straight face!
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Re: What can be done?
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Re: Re: Masters of our domain...
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Re:
On the post: Public Knowledge Pushes Five Point Plan For Copyright Reform
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: My 5 oint plan or copyright and patents.
If the holder wants to:
- sell completely (ie sell the freeholding on a building)
- licence for a long period (ie sell a leaseholding)
- licence for a short period with termination clauses (ie monthly/yearly rental)
there shouldn't be anything to stop them, as any barriers will only be circumvented and we'll spend our time with increasingly arcane laws aroud what is and isn't allowed in agreements.
On the post: UK Court Shoots Down Fee Hike For Pubs, Restaurants & Hotels
how will PPL pay?
Right?
On the post: Public Knowledge Pushes Five Point Plan For Copyright Reform
Re: Re: My 5 oint plan or copyright and patents.
As a separate point, they shouldn't be allowed to reclaim them back - unless there was an explicit clause in the original sale agreement stating that. After all, if I sell you a house you'd be a bit annoyed if I turned up a few years later and demanded it back again.
On the post: EU Has A 'Public/Private' IP Observatory To Watch For Copyright Infringement Online
Re: Re: Don't be ridiculous.
In human civilisation, government is by the elites for the good of the elites.
Fixed.
On the post: House Of Lords Has Serious Concerns About Digital Economy Bill
Re: Re: Re: Re: Aristocratic Lords protect liberty
A lot of countries have a bicameral government, I don't think that means we should give up on democracy.
To my mind (one of) the advantage of the Lords is that it is filled using a different process to the Commons. If the Lords were all directly elected, we'd end up with two houses of Commons so we might as well combine into one.
Agree that it's unfortunate that the government can stack the house of Lords for political purposes - also putting people in there so that they can take on cabinet posts etc when they aren't elected (Mandelson, Sugar spring to mind).
Comes down to how do we fill the second house:
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Re:
On the post: Beyonce's Bikini Infringing On Copyrights?
Re: Not anymore
On the post: Australian Court Says You Can't Copyright Facts; Phone Books Not Protected
Re: Re:
Whoever made the phone listings in the first place is incompetent in extracting maximal value out of them, and society is best served when someone else comes along and does a better job
Except if they are extracting value by selling the collated results to people who are good at collecting advertisers, and printing/distributing heavy books. No one company has to do an entire process from cutting down trees to delivering a book. Division of labour FTW
On the post: House Of Lords Has Serious Concerns About Digital Economy Bill
Re: Re: Aristocratic Lords protect liberty
Of course you need some form of system for choosing who is going to be in the House of Lords. I just don't think it should be by public vote.
On the post: EU Has A 'Public/Private' IP Observatory To Watch For Copyright Infringement Online
Re: Don't be ridiculous.
I would say Government for the people is a European ideal (in no way suggesting that it is not also an ideal in other parts of the world). Just to my knowledge no country anywhere has ever managed to effect it (massively sweeping statement I know). Seems that everywhere ends up being run by an elitist group of individuals who believe they know best and if you disagree you're dumb. Recently the UK had Tony "God" Blair, America currently has Obama's healthcare bill.
Brings to mind Churchill's quote that "democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried"
Have to say though that the EU parliament is a particularly good case study of goverment NOT for the people. Bunch of incompetent corrupt moneywasting buffoons in my not-so-humble opinion :P
On the post: Would A Moron In A Hurry Be Confused By The Difference Between A High School And A Pickup Truck?
Never mind trademark infringement, I'd be concerned with copyright infringement as well.
On the post: Leaving Your WiFi Open Decreases Your Fourth Amendment Rights To Privacy?
Re: Re: Re: Re: I dunno
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