Tax on innovation

You won't see this in the daily news anywhere, but ASCAP has won a settlement in court against Google for royalty fees for the music in YouTube videos.

"Basically, ASCAP gets to go in and demand cash from anyone who benefits from music anywhere, and a judge sorta randomly makes up reasons to give them cash. For more than a century now, Congress and the courts seem to look at every innovation and simply slap another license fee on it, and leave it to the courts to sort out any mess. All of these license fees add up to a massive tax on innovation that divert money from good business models and into the hands of collections societies, who siphon off a piece and often don't do a very good job distributing that cash. It's a massively inefficient model that's simply not needed."