MTP readers will recall YouTube’s bully boy tactics against indie labels–threatening to cut off indie label access to Google’s YouTube monopoly if the labels didn’t take the hillbilly deal for a new Google music streaming service.

The indies have aligned with the Featured Artist Coalition (can the publishers be far behind?) and are launching complaints with the UK government soon to be followed by a formal complaint with the European Union Competition Commission in Brussels.  This is not a good look for Google as Google has been trying to thimblerig their way into a settlement with the EC Competition Commission for several years to avoid significant penalties in the billions of dollars.  That settlement is predicated on Google being misunderstood little kiddies who just love unicorns and Birkenstocks.

Already failing with a broad coalition of consumer groups in Europe, other EC officials and elected representatives, Google’s hoped for settlement is…

Score one for the songwriters.

After the travesty of the Pandora rate court decision, a lot of people (including MTP) have been banging the drum about the unfairness of the ASCAP and BMI rate courts.  Nowhere has the Kafka-esque absurdity of the rate courts been more prominently on display than in Pandora’s recent lawsuit against ASCAP songwriters.

But however much Pandora has galvanized the creative community in a united response against greedy, entitled Silicon Valley overreach, the first step in correcting this festering wrong is for the PROs to convince the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice to review the 70 year old consent decrees which haven’t been reviewed since 2001 in the case of ASCAP–a year before Napster entered bankruptcy–and 1994 for BMI, a year before the Congress recognized a performance right in sound recordings.

Thankfully, the DOJ is reconsidering fundamental reform of the rate court process