Digital services have accelerated the questionable use of the “address unknown” loophole in the copyright act. Check this out. Amazon has now sent notices for 24 million tracks in a period of 15 months. Between 2010 to 2015 the copyright office was only sent 4800 such notices. Is Amazon even trying to find the composers? I’m not an attorney but I don’t understand how this isn’t fraud.
We get an update this week on the total “address unknown” mass NOIs filed with the Copyright Office for the royalty-free windfall loophole. This time we have to thank our our friends at Paperchain in Sydney for doing the work of decompressing the massive numbers of unsearchable compressed files posted on the Copyright Office website. As you can see, there’s been an increase of approximately 70% since January 2017. (For background, see my article.)
As you can see, Amazon is still far and away the leader in this latest loophole designed to stiff songwriters, followed closely by Google. However, Spotify is moving on up. Spotify does get extra points for starting late in March 2017, but they are catching up fast filing over 5,000,000 as of last month.
To put this in context–the Copyright Office as recently as September 2015 posted these “address unknown” NOIs in a single…
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The Trichordist 