There are many disappointing things about all of this, but the first is that when doing a simple Google search for “Lou Reed Mp3″ the first five returns are for illegally operating and infringing sites.

This doesn’t count YouTube which may or may not be infringing, and may or may not actually be paying Lou from the advertising revenue (on this video, in the screen shots below for example). This is all the more troubling because we know that this can be easily filtered if there is the will to do so.

Perhaps most disappointing however is that major companies like American Express, AT&T Chevorlet, Chili’s, Lysol, Pottery Barn, Vons, Domino’s Pizza, Netflix and Galaxy Nexus are still supporting the this exploitation of artists with corporate advertising dollars. These companies not only supply the funding for these sites exploiting artists to exist, but perhaps even worse they add legitimacy to music piracy by lending their brand identity to it.

Clearly there is a lot of money being made in the distribution of music on the internet. Sadly not much of that money (or in this case NONE of it) is being distributed (or uhm, “shared”) with the artists themselves.

In any value chain where the artists work is being distributed and/or exploited for profit, the artist should be included in that value chain.

Not only do we see the major companies supporting these sites but there’s also the scam ads, rip offs and bogus services. And here’s where it gets even uglier…on sites like The Pirate Bay the work of Lou Reed is promoting adult (escort services?) and porn products like the one offered by Ron Jeremy below.

Let us not forget that the above examples represent a drop in the ocean of the over 200,000 infringing sites that Google alone is tracking.

See more Corporate Advertising Funded Exploitation of Artists:
Tom Waits * Neil Young * Aimee Mann * Neko Case * U2 * Ben Gibbard/Death Cab For Cutie * East Bay Ray / Dead Kennedy’s * Billy Corgan/Smashing Pumpkins

Of course there will always be people to nit pick the numbers, to argue and quibble about the Bureau Of Labor Statistics (BLS) methodology. It may be impossible to estimate the exact effect of unethical internet exploitation, but the trend is definite.

Those who debate the exact numbers are using that to delay action. Their job is similar to the commentators and ‘scientists’ funded by oil companies’ to deny global warming or say it needs “more study.”

The Bureau Of Labor Statistics is an agnostic government agency, not the RIAA.

It is also important to note that these cuts are made from the bottom up, not the top down. It is the struggling and middle class musician that gets hurt first. The difference between “making a living, making music” or not is represented in these numbers.

We should also like to point out that while musicians are making less money, those in Silicon Valley are making more money. Jaron Lanier says that “the internet destroyed the middle class” and we can see for ourselves that through the systematic process of removing the cost of labor from their offerings the elite few, are making more money, while everyone else is doing more of the work.

Reblogged from MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY:

“WHO OWNS THE FUTURE” by JARON LANIER – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/1451654960/

The Dazzling New Masterwork from the Prophet of Silicon Valley

Jaron Lanier is the bestselling author of You Are Not a Gadget, the father of virtual reality, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time. For decades, Lanier has drawn on his expertise and experience as a computer scientist, musician, and digital media pioneer to predict the revolutionary ways in which technology is transforming our culture.

Who Owns the Future? is a visionary reckoning with the effects network technologies have had on our economy. Lanier asserts that the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class. Now, as technology flattens more and more industries—from media to medicine to manufacturing—we are facing even greater challenges to employment and personal wealth.

But there is an alternative to allowing technology to own our future. In this ambitious and deeply humane book, Lanier charts the path toward a new information economy that will stabilize the middle class and allow it to grow. It is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do and share on the web.

Insightful, original, and provocative, Who Owns the Future? is necessary reading for everyone who lives a part of their lives online.

“FREELOADING” by CHRIS RUEN – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/Freeloading-Insatiable-Content-Starves-Creativity/dp/1935928996

“A wonderful book that catches an encouraging shift in the zeitgeist. Ruen’s epiphany regarding the effects of his own piracy and freeloading of the bands he loves was eye opening.” – David Byrne

“Fascinating.” – The Village Voice

“The original slacker’s dream of free everything may have been realized by the Internet-but along with it came the slacker’s nightmare of never getting paid for one’s creativity. Freeloading seeks-and to a large extent succeeds-to wrestle with the collapse of the commons and the possibilities for a renewed social contract.” – Douglas Rushkoff

“Brooklyn’s Chris Ruen is one of the most compelling and forward thinking critics of our current download culture.” – M3 Music Conference, Netherlands

“A book…that promises to contribute greatly to copyright debates.” – Terry Hart, Copyhype

Author Chris Ruen, himself a former dedicated freeloader, came to understand how illegal downloads can threaten an entire artistic community after spending time with successful Brooklyn bands who had yet to make a significant profit on their popular music. The product of innumerable late-night, caffeine-fueled conversations and interviews with contemporary musicians such as Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, Ira Wolf Tuton of Yeasayer, and Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio, Freeloading not only dissects this ongoing battle-casting a critical eye on the famous SOPA protests and the attendant rhetoric-but proposes concise, practical solutions that would provide protection to artists and consumers alike.

“FREE RIDE” by ROBERT LEVINE – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Ride-Parasites-Destroying-Business/dp/0307739775

“A book that should change the debate about the future of culture….With this stylishly written and well-reported manifesto, Levine has become a leading voice on one side of our most hotly contested debate involving law and technology.”
—Jeffrey Rosen, The New York Times Book Review

“Turbo-reported….Free Ride is a timely and impressive book–part guilt trip, part wake-up call, and full of the kind of reporting that could only have been done with a book advance from an Old Media company.”
—Businessweek

“[A] smart, caustic tour of the modern culture industry.”
—Fortune

“Brilliant…A crash course in the existential problems facing the [media].”
—Richard Morrison, The Times

“The most convincing defense of the current predicament of the creative industries that I have read.”
—James Crabtree, Financial Times

“With penetrating analysis and insight, Levine, a former executive editor of Billboard magazine, dissects the current economic climate of the struggling American media companies caught in the powerful fiscal grip of the digital industry…. This incisive book is a start at an informed dialogue.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Can the culture business survive the digital age? That’s the burning question Robert Levine poses in his provocative new book. And his answer is one that will get your blood boiling. Rich with revealing stories and telling tales, Free Ride makes a lucid case that information is actually expensive – and that it’s only the big technology firms profiting most from the work of others that demand information be free.”
—Gary Rivlin, author of Broke, USA

“One of the great issues of the digital age is how people who create content will be able to make a living. Robert Levine’s timely and well-researched book provides a valuable look at how copyright protection was lost on the internet and offers suggestions about how it could be restored.”
—Walter Isaacson, President/CEO of the Aspen Institute and author of Benjamin Franklin

“This book thoroughly documents a wide-spread outbreak of cyber amnesia. Despite libertarian delusions, industries often get Free Rides, especially in their early days, but they eventually give back. Taxpayers build roads, then get hired to build cars. The Internet gives back a lot in exchange for its Free Ride, but one thing it defiantly isn’t giving back is a way for enough people to make a living. No matter how amusing or addictive the Internet becomes, its foundation will crumble unless it starts returning the favors it was given and still depends on.”
—Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget

“Free Ride is a brilliantly written book that exposes the dark side of the Internet. A must read for anyone interested in the horrific undermining of our intellectual culture.”
—Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood

“Robert Levine deftly dissects the self-serving Orwellian freedom-speak being served up by Silicon Valley’s digital new lords as they amass fortunes devaluing the work of artists, journalists and other old-fashioned ‘content creators.’ Free Ride begs us to remove our blinders and take a hard look down a cultural dead-end road.”
—Fred Goodman, author of Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis

“Without being a Luddite, Levine makes the phony digital media gurus of our day seem as simple-minded as their slogans.”
—Ron Rosenbaum, author of How the End Begins and Explaining Hitler

“YOU ARE NOT A GADGET” by JARON LANIER – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307389979

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A programmer, musician, and father of virtual reality technology, Jaron Lanier was a pioneer in digital media, and among the first to predict the revolutionary changes it would bring to our commerce and culture. Now, with the Web influencing virtually every aspect of our lives, he offers this provocative critique of how digital design is shaping society, for better and for worse.

Informed by Lanier’s experience and expertise as a computer scientist, You Are Not a Gadget discusses the technical and cultural problems that have unwittingly risen from programming choices—such as the nature of user identity—that were “locked-in” at the birth of digital media and considers what a future based on current design philosophies will bring. With the proliferation of social networks, cloud-based data storage systems, and Web 2.0 designs that elevate the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and wisdom of individuals, his message has never been more urgent.

Reblogged from MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY:

In case you were wondering, as Tim Westergren's crew prepares to reintroduce legislation to require the Congress to reduce artist royalties paid by SoundExchange, old "million a month" Tim continues to make bank on Pandora stock sales.  Pandora's only product?  Music.

Read more… 6 more words

This is part of a broader attempt by Pandora to win the hearts-and-minds of working musicians, and bolster support in Congress.  Here’s an email shared with Digital Music News; we blotted out the name of the artist (and some other identifying details) but everything else is intact…

READ THE ENTIRE LETTER AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com

ALSO AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
Pandora Tries to Convince a Musician That He Isn’t Getting Screwed…

From: Blake Morgan
To: Tim Westergren @ Pandora

Without us, you don’t have a business.

The idea of “allowing” us to “participate” in a business that is built solely on distributing and circulating our copyrighted work is like a grocery store saying it has an idea to “allow” the manufacturers of the goods it carries to get paid. The store isn’t “allowing” Del Monte to get paid for their cans of green beans, right? Of course not.

Here is the operative sentence from the paragraph above with one word added…

Google, with a market cap of $215 billion, is about five times larger than GM yet has just one fourth as many [PAID] workers.

It occurs to us in the new exploitation economy of loser generated content that many people are “working” for Google and other tech companies supplying endless hours of consumer created content from Facebook posts to Instagram photos. That’s just the stuff that people are willing to give away by consent (although we don’t know how much privacy they are actually consenting to give up in the process).

But the larger truth is even more scary. Google and other internet businesses profit greatly by avoiding paying for the cost of the goods they are monetizing (primarily by advertising). YouTube is a company built on infringement and theft as a business model.

In other words, it’s a lot easier to make money when you don’t have to pay for the labor or fixed costs of developing and producing a product. You know products like music, film, books, software, etc.

Obviously if all of these creators and producers were paid fairly in the value chain to which their work is creating revenue, than there would be less profit for the distributor. What we have now is a distribution mechanism that profits without paying the creative producers. Which is exactly how a company like Google can earn such extraordinary wealth, essentially through stolen labor.

Read the whole story here at The Daily Beast:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/14/america-s-new-oligarchs-fwd-us-and-silicon-valley-s-shady-1-percenters.html

The Constitutional and Historical Foundations of Copyright Protection
By Paul Clement, Viet Dinh & Jeffrey Harris [1]

Article I, section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress authority “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”  There was little debate over this provision during the Convention, but James Madison (as Publius) emphasized in Federalist 43 that “[t]he utility of this power will scarcely be questioned,” and “[t]he copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law.”  With respect to both copyrights and patents, Madison asserted that “[t]he public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals.”

*     *      *

This history flatly refutes any notion that copyright law is a matter of legislative grace intended solely to serve utilitarian ends. The Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution was inspired by a long intellectual tradition—extending back to the very origins of printing and publishing—in which legislators, jurists, scholars, and commentators recognized authors’ inherent property rights in the fruits of their own labor.

Just as the scope of the pre-existing right informs both the contemporary public understanding of, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of, the right enshrined by the Second Amendment, see Heller, 554 U.S. at 592, 603, this pre-constitutional history is useful both in interpreting the scope of Congress’ copyright power and in informing policy debates about how that power should be exercised. The Supreme Court itself has harkened back to the Statute of Anne in interpreting the copyright laws. See Feltner, 523 U.S. at 349-50. A view of the copyright laws that ignores this history is sorely incomplete.

READ THE FULL REPORT AT:
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/42-constitution-and-legal/1679-the-constitutional-and-historical-foundations-of-copyright-protection

Reblogged from MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY:

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) (French) (Spanish) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected.

Article 27.

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.