Going means trouble and staying makes it double: the value of licensing recorded music online

This paper discusses whether a copyright compensation system (CCS) for recorded music—endowing private Internet subscribers with the right to download and use works in return for a fee—would be welfare increasing. It reports on the results of a discrete choice experiment conducted with a representative sample of the Dutch population consisting of 4986 participants. Under some conservative assumptions, we find that applied only to recorded music, a mandatory CCS could increase the welfare of rights holders and users in the Netherlands by over €600 million per year (over €35 per capita). This far exceeds current rights holder revenues from the market of recorded music of ca. €144 million per year. A monthly CCS fee of ca. €1.74 as a surcharge on Dutch Internet subscriptions would raise the same amount of revenues to rights holders as the current market for recorded music. With a voluntary CCS, the estimated welfare gains to users and rights holders are even greater for CCS fees below €20 on the user side. A voluntary CCS would also perform better in the long run, as it could retain a greater extent of market coordination. The results of our choice experiment indicate that a well-designed CCS for recorded music would simultaneously make users and rights holders better off. This result holds even if we correct for frequently observed rates of overestimation in contingent valuation studies

Standardization as emerging content in technology education at all levels of education

Integration of standardization into different levels of technology education has surfaced as a critical issue for educational practitioners and policy makers at national and regional (APEC, EU) level. In this paper, we describe and analyze empirical data collected from 118 educational experiences and practices about technology standards and standardization in 21 countries of a regional variety. Specifically, this research examines standardization education programs these countries have implemented, and explores suggestive indications for the design and development of an educational policy for standardization. Online surveys, offline interviews, face-to-face meetings and case studies have been used to determine the way these standardization education programs are segmented and implemented in different contexts. The findings are consolidated into a framework for standardization education. The framework presents an applicable combination of target groups (who), appropriate learning objectives (why), probable program operators (where), prospective contents modules (what), and preferred teaching methods (how). This framework may contribute to planning and implementing more inclusive standardization education programs

Counter-piracy, communities of practice and new security alignments

Contemporary global and regional security relations are no longer predominantly characterized by formal organizational structures, but increasingly made up of informal and often diffused problem centered alignments. Following the hypothesis that new security problems produce new forms of security alignment, I scrutinize in this paper how one problem, maritime piracy, is addressed by different forms of alignments. I outline a perspective of how to study the range of new forms of security alignments which have risen to counter piracy. Investigating the United Nations contact group, the military mechanism SHADE and two regional agreements I argue, firstly, that these new forms of security alignments are glued together by notions (or better boundary objects) of best practices, information sharing and training. Rather than formal institutions, the alignments are best understood as organized around practical activities which revolve around projects of creating a common repertoire of knowledge, a joint epistemic infrastructure and shared practices. Secondly, the cases indicate that new alignments produce new (cognitive) regions which can be observed through the spatial practices underlying them