Author: Trichordist Editor

Trichordist Editor

YouTube’s DMCA Abuse and Indie Labels: How Google is Blowing it for the Honest People

* * MUST READ * * From Music Tech Daily

Music Technology Policy

In a speech at Canadian Music Week, Beggars Group Chairman Martin Mills was not only right, he was prescient:

Google, the parent of YouTube, [is] one of the companies that have made billions on the back of [the DMCA notice and takedown,] a statutory provision intended to protect ordinary people acting innocently.

Google has now refined the DMCA to a tool to leverage its anticompetitive activities.  Here’s how it works.

1.  Google opens the YouTube platform to unauthorized “user generated content” and says to artists (literally in this case) “Does yuse wants to play whack a mole or make some dough?”  This is called the notice and shakedown.

2.  Google then jams a settlement down the throats of major labels and sticks it to everyone else.  Publishers are next.

3.  Google pays the lowest royalty online with a big advance to majors and spaghetti statements to everyone else that probably…

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by Trichordist Editor

If Google can get rid of personal data, why can’t it purge the pirates? | The Guardian UK

Critics say that if search engine knows of illegal activity, it shouldn’t help to send business its way

Google’s decision to allow users to easily de-list certain personal information from search results has infuriated a film and music industry that argues the internet giant should act as decisively to help squash digital piracy.

On Friday Google bowed to an EU privacy ruling, dubbed the “right to be forgotten”, launching a webpage where European citizens can request links to information about them be taken off search results.

The move came a day after Google had been lambasted for not doing enough to curb online piracy in a report by David Cameron’s intellectual property adviser, Mike Weatherley.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE GUARDIAN UK:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/01/google-personal-data-digital-pirates

by Trichordist Editor

End internet piracy and bring Google to heel | Sydney Morning Herald

Our Attorney-General George Brandis is attempting to reform our copyright law. Meanwhile Google, one of the multi-national companies attempting to avoid paying tax here, is lobbying in Canberra to stop this, by putting forward the following six fundamentally misconceived arguments:

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD:
by Trichordist Editor

Congress moves against ad-supported piracy | The Hill

How surprised would you be if you went to your local Honda dealer and bought a car, but when you tried to register it you were told it was stolen property?

What if you went to Target and bought a blender, but when you filled out the warranty card you were told it already belonged to someone else?

Things like this don’t happen, right? Companies like Honda and Target are respectable merchants who would never encourage the distribution of stolen property. Right? Wrong. They do. So do companies like Kraft, Lego, and the makers of Claritin. Every day.

It sounds insane, but Honda, Toyota, Target, Kraft, Lego, and Claritin are spending gobs of money every day to finance theft – whether they know it or not.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE HILL:
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/209193-congress-moves-against-ad-supported-piracy

by Trichordist Editor

“Successful” Licensing Models and the Opt Out: Music Licensing Study Comments

Music Technology Policy

The U.S. Copyright Office is conducting a “Music Licensing Study” as part of the government’s overall review of the U.S. copyright law with an eye to potentially overhauling the entire copyright system.  (See “The Next Great Copyright Act” by Maria Pallante, the head of the U.S. Copyright Office and the nominal go-to person for the U.S. Congress on copyright issues.)  The Copyright Office has received written public comments on questions posed in its Notice of Inquiry and is also holding public Roundtables in Nashville, Los Angeles and New York  (in that order).

The speakers at the Roundtables are by invitation only although the roundtables themselves are open to the public.  We understand that the Roundtable participants will be invited to submit written reply comments at some point after the conclusion of the last Roundtable.  The Nashville Roundtable is over and the Los Angeles Roundtable begins…

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by Trichordist Editor

Artists Will Receive Nothing from the $3 Billion Beats Acquisition, Sources Say…| DMN

The three major labels secured an equity share in Beats Music as part of their licensing agreements with the service. But according to multiple sources close to those negotiations and Beats’ subsequent sale, artists on those labels will receiving nothing at all from the roughly $3 billion acquisition by Apple.

The reason is that acquisition earnings aren’t tied to actual sales or streams, and therefore are not accounted at all to label artists. “They will get nothing,” one industry attorney flatly told Digital Music News, while insisting on anonymity.

READ THE FULL POST AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/06/09/artists-will-receive-nothing-3-billion-beats-acquisition-sources-say

by Trichordist Editor

Swimming Against the Stream: Musicians Fight for Their Worth in the Internet Era | SF Weekly

The cops were getting lots of calls. Drivers were worried. There was a woman walking down the road — the narrow part of Highway 1, just north of L.A. And she was pushing a baby carriage.

When the cops found her, it turned out she was not a crazy person. She wasn’t even a mother.

She was a musician on a mission.

The woman was Suzana Barbosa, a longtime Toronto singer and leader of the band Lumanova, who had lately become fed up with the state of the music industry. She’d had it with the paltry amounts paid to songwriters and performers by streaming services like Spotify. She’d had it with our culture’s preference for glamorizing starving artists instead of paying them decently.

Barbosa was so fed up with the music business that she decided to walk some 400 miles, from Los Angeles to the Google campus in Mountain View, to publicize what she sees as an existential threat to the world’s independent musicians.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE SF WEEKLY:
http://www.sfweekly.com/2014-06-04/music/beats-apple-unsound-spotify/

by Trichordist Editor

Van Dyke Parks on How Songwriters Are Getting Screwed in the Digital Age | The Daily Beast

Forty years ago, co-writing a song with Ringo Starr would have provided me a house and a pool. Now, estimating 100,000 plays on Spotify, we guessed we’d split about $80. When I got home, on closer study, I found out we were way too optimistic. Spotify (on par with other streamers) pays only .00065 cents per play.

There’s less support for all the arts today, and the blade gets duller with every cut in arts funding. It degrades dance, opera, even academia and, significantly, the art of journalism. As a result, in the U.S., public opinion suffers from what we call “infotainment.” That’s a genre of media news that is not informing, entertaining, or remedial. And it’s a direct result of a vacuum of patronage (and by patronage, I don’t mean just Medici-style sponsorship but the willingness of all arts consumers to pay for what they listen to, read, and watch, and for the industry to fairly recompense creators).

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE DAILY BEAST:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/04/van-dyke-parks-on-how-songwriters-are-getting-screwed-in-the-digital-age.html

by Trichordist Editor

T Bone Burnett’s plea: The piper must be paid| LA Times

Fans can still hear the work of America’s musical pioneers, thanks to online and mobile services. Through downloads and streams and services such as Pandora and Sirius XM Radio, these giants’ recordings continue to captivate and influence young musicians, singers, songwriters and producers.

Yet some of these same companies have made the decision to devalue the music of these artists for their own profit by not paying for it. In doing this, they devalue the substance of their own medium. For the last 20 years we’ve witnessed an assault on the arts by the technology community — especially when it comes to music.

This devaluation is troubling because music is not only the creation of people who make this art for us; it is how they earn a living. Music is how they feed their kids and provide for their futures.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE LA TIMES:
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-80409552/

by Trichordist Editor

No, Silly, Piracy is Theft | DevTopics

A classic, with illustrations.

A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie.  You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others.  But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket.

So when you pirate music, video or software, you are stealing income from the seller.  You are receiving something of value without paying for it.

READ THE FULL POST AT DEVTOPICS:
http://www.devtopics.com/no-silly-piracy-is-theft/

by Trichordist Editor