The Copyright Royalty Board kept royalties on digital music downloads at 9¢ — a smart move. But what is mind-boggling is that they set royalties on ringtones at 24¢. So they basically are saying that the value of a 10% portion of a song (a 30-second clip of a 5 minute song) is nearly 3× the value of the whole song. Talk about out of touch with reality.Going either further, I don't understand why anyone would buy a ringtone, rather than simply buying the full song, and exercising their fair use rights to create a ringtone from it. It's simple to do if you have an iPhone and the latest version of GarageBand. And there are several ways to create ringtones using just iTunes.
All of this begs the question why one even needs the have the song to create a ringtone. All of the digital music stores offer 30-second previews of every song they sell. It seems like it'd be pretty straightforward to automate the process of grabbing this 30-second clip and turning it into a ringtone. Anyone know of such a untlity?
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