Arcane Copyright

NY Times: Music-Sharing Service at M.I.T. Is Shut Down. To Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, that incident shows that the world of copyright has grown so arcane that even the major players do not even understand it. [Tomalak's Realm]

I disagree. It's not the "arcane world of copyright" here, it's the "arcane world of music licensing". It is not copyright law in dispute here, it is what contracts have allowed whom to do what. The only copyright "fix" here is to somehow mandate simpler contracts and as neat as that may sound on first blush, it could only backfire. There's really no way to avoid this when you have contractual relations amongst that many entities.