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Subscription plans are okay... as long as you can keep your content once the subscription lapses. If I let my Scientific American paper magazine subscription lapse, my last five years of SA aren't going to spontaneously combust on my shelf. If you lose the material with the subscription, that's not a subscription... that's a lease.
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First thing i'd like to say is that when it comes to reading, I don't understand why anyone would want to hold on to the stuff for very long. Especially SA. You read it, you've read it, you read something else.
Music, of course, is much different. Now i'm not saying subscriptions (and by definition the content has to expire) are the perfect solution. But when you compare having to pay every time you'd like to hear a song to see if you'd like it or having to pay HUGE sums just to have a large variety of music to listen to versus being tied to forever pay some sum a month but not having any hesitation, regret, or limits... then I really think subscriptions are the lesser of two evils.
The one problem with subscriptions, however, is the larger picture. If all music companies get everyone to go and buy subscriptions, why the hell would they release new music? Because of that unfortunate result, I'll reverse myself and say subscriptions are very bad. But indirectly.
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Government-funded mandatory licensing (of what? The books? The readers?) will not work internationally, will only hand commercialism over to Big Business, and will put quality control in the hands of the government. Right.
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Yes, of books (and of music). I have no idea what you mean when you say "handing commercialism over to Big Business." Of course, it's possible a corrupt government will destroy the system. But realize that we already have a system, the libraries, which work very well. (There also exist many other government institutions which fund the creation of intellectual property, like those funding art (eg PBS, NPR) or which spend hundreds of billions of dollars on scientific research (eg NIH, NSF).) Seems to me they work very, very well, and I think the government can be expected to continue making such decisions responsibly. Some people who think government can't be trusted for anything don't seem to ever try to look at the real world.
But even a simple fallback plan of compensating the author on a flat rate relative to his popularity will work very well too.