Author: thetrichordist

Copyright Office Regulates The MLC: Selected Public Comments on the Copyright Office Black Box Study: The DLC Spills the Beans, Part I

We once had a mechanical licensing system in the U.S. that worked well enough for songwriters for 100 years.  The problem with the mechanical licensing system wasn’t so much the licensing function it was the royalty rate.  The government held down songwriters for 70 years to a 1909-based royalty rate that for some reason was frozen in time (more on frozen mechanicals here).  But if users failed to license, songwriters could at least sue for statutory damages.

After the Music Modernization Act passed in 2018, they managed to even give away songwriters’ rights to sue.  The songwriter part of the three-part MMA is called “Title I” and that’s the part that gave away the one hammer that songwriters had to be heard when their rights were infringed.  They called it the “limitation on liability” and it was retroactive to January 1, 2018—before the bill was actually passed by Congress and signed into law.

It’s entirely possible that even if you knew about the MMA, you didn’t know about this new safe harbor created by the same uber-rich companies that wrote themselves the DMCA safe harbor that has created the value gap and plagued artists for years and the “Section 230” safe harbor in the “Communications Decency Act” that services use to profit from human trafficking and revenge porn stalkers.  And now there’s the MMA safe harbor.

Only a handful of insiders got to be at the table when they gave away your rights in Title I without your even knowing what they were up to.  Don’t get us wrong, there are great things in the other parts of MMA dealing with closing the pre-72 loophole, some important changes to the rules for ASCAP and BMI with rate courts, and the fix for producers getting a fair share of SoundExchange royalties.  These are all good things.

The part that sucks is Title I that created this new safe harbor give away that will bedevil songwriters for generations to come.

So you may be asking how do we know this?  Since the so-called “negotiations” for the Title I give away happened behind closed doors, how do we even know what happened?  The answer is that we didn’t have the proof because anyone who tried to offer constructive criticism to the “negotiators” for songwriters was menaced, threatened and stabbed in the back.  Nobody was talking about the safe harbor give away.

But now we do have the proof courtesy of the music services representative at the “Digital Licensee Coordinator” who opened the kimono in their recent comments to the Copyright Office about the black box.  (Read the entire DLC comment here.)  Their comments make for quite a read, not only about the so-called “negotiations” by the unrepresentatives of songwriters but also about the run-up to the MMA in the private settlements that nobody sees.

The first issue is that the Copyright Office has proposed some well-meaning regulations to increase the likelihood that the black box will actually get paid to the songwriters who earned the money.  The services seem to be all in a huff about rules applying retroactively when they’ve been using old rules to organize their data.  You know, they don’t like this retroactive thing unless it’s a retroactive expansion of their safe harbor.  Then they like it just fine.

“The DLC emphatically opposes the Office’s proposal to retroactively expand the required reporting of sound recording and musical work information beyond that which is required by the existing regulations in 37 C.F.R. § 210.20. Those regulations were issued in interim form in December 2018, and finalized in March 2019, and unambiguously required collection of reporting information under the existing monthly statement of account regulations in 37 C.F.R. § 210.16. The Office has now proposed, in paragraph (e) of the proposed rule, to change the required reporting elements for the individual tracks, nearly two years after the MMA’s enactment and months before cumulative statements of account are due to be served.”

Sorry, but we think that the richest companies in commercial history, with trillions and trillions of dollars in market capitalization and the most advanced data mining capability in the known universe, can manage to figure out how to pay songwriters in a way that will actually result in songwriters getting paid. The truth is that they are so used to screwing songwriters that they are not going to lift a finger to help beyond the absolute minimum they have to do.

They got their retroactive safe harbor to give away, so don’t come whinging about retroactivity if it makes the distributions more likely to get to the right person, something the services have uniformly failed to do from their founding.

But now it gets interesting.

“It is well-known that—prior to enactment of the MMA—a number of DMPs entered into industry-wide royalty distribution agreements under the auspices of the NMPA, structured to allow all unmatched works to be claimed by their owners and all accrued royalties to be paid out, in what became the model for the MMA. These agreements were designed to, and did, put tens of millions of dollars in statutory royalties in the hands of copyright owners—money that they had been unable to access due to the broken pre-MMA statutory royalty system.”

First of all—“money that they had been unable to access due to the broken pre-MMA statutory royalty system” is utter crap.  The reason that services didn’t pay out is because they didn’t clear the songs but exploited them anyway.  For example, that’s also why Spotify got sued so many times and is still getting sued.  It’s not that the system was broken, it’s that the services didn’t care and handled licensing in an incompetent manner. In case you missed it, that’s what they want to keep doing by extending into the future the same sloppy practices they got sued for in the past.  The only thing new and improved about it is their absurd and undeserved safe harbor.

We don’t know what these “industry-wide royalty distribution agreements” were all about, but one thing we know for sure is that they weren’t “industry-wide” and the NMPA wouldn’t have had the authority to make those deals “industry-wide” in the first place.  “Industry-wide” seems to mean “with the major publishers” or with NMPA members or just plain insiders.  The implication is that “industry-wide” means everyone, which it clearly does not and cannot if you think about it for 30 seconds.

And if the copyright owners were owed a payment with their own money, the only reason that they couldn’t “access” the funds is that the services wouldn’t let them.  When you owe somebody money, you should pay them because you owe them, not act like you’re doing them a favor.

But here it comes:

Congress in the MMA’s limitation on liability provision enacted a compromise among stakeholders’ interests: elimination of the uncertainty of litigation facing DMPs in exchange for the transfer of accrued royalties to the MLC.

In other words, the services sat on the money and refused to pay until they got the MMA safe harbor.  That was the “trade”—do something the services were already required to do in return for something the songwriters were never obligated to do.  The songwriters paid for the safe harbor with their own money.

“As set forth in the relevant statutory provision, in exchange for payment of accrued royalties from “unmatched” usage prior to license availability date (and related reporting), DMPs are protected from the full brunt of copyright damages in any infringement lawsuits based on alleged failures to comply with the requirements of the prior mechanical licensing regime. The provision provides a clean slate for any past failures under the prior licensing regime for those DMPs who pay those back royalties and provide associated reporting. It provides requirements for DMPs that seek to take advantage of the limitation on liability, ensuring that DMPs that pay accrued royalties to the MLC can do so without having to second-guess whether the payment was worth it—that is, whether they qualify for the limitation.

This was the heart of the deal struck by the stakeholders in crafting the MMA: to provide legal certainty for DMPs, through a limitation on liability, in exchange for the transfer of accrued royalties.

Which “stakeholders” were these?  Did they include any of the plaintiffs who were then suing the services?  No.  Did they include anyone who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid?  No.

So let’s be clear—the reason that the services deigned to actually pay money they owed for failing to license properly is because they didn’t want to be sued for screwing up.  They wanted a vig of a new safe harbor, and as the DLC tells us very, very clearly this issue was at the core of the deal you didn’t make for Title I.

More in Part II

 

 

 

 

by thetrichordist

Must Read by @superwuster: A TikTok Ban Is Overdue

[Professor Tim Wu has a must read post in the New York Times that nails the problems with TikTok (and WeChat).  The subtitle are words that will live forever:  “Critics say we shouldn’t abandon the ideal of an open internet. But there is such a thing as being a sucker.”  Wowsa.]

Were almost any country other than China involved, Mr. Trump’s demands would be indefensible. But the threatened bans on TikTok and WeChat, whatever their motivations, can also be seen as an overdue response, a tit for tat, in a long battle for the soul of the internet.

In China, the foreign equivalents of TikTok and WeChat — video and messaging apps such as YouTube and WhatsApp — have been banned for years. The country’s extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad.

The asymmetry is unfair and ought no longer be tolerated.

Read the post on the New York Times.

by thetrichordist

What’s Good for Google is Not What’s Good for the USA: Supreme Court Brief of @davidclowery, @helienne, @theblakemorgan and @sgawrites in Google v. Oracle, Part 6

Google’s appeal of its major loss to Oracle on fair use is shaping up to be the most important copyright case of the year, if not the decade.  It could set fair use standards for years to come.  We’re going to be posting installments from the friend of the court brief that David, Helienne, Blake and The Songwriters Guild filed in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Oracle in the Google v. Oracle fair use case.  This is the last installment.  We decided to omit the footnotes for this posting, but you can read the whole brief here.

Cover Page

Moreover, Amici believe that Google’s fair use expansion campaigns are designed to serve as a honeypot for Google’s data scraping business model that feeds its outsized profits from ads. Google likewise seems to promote expansion of the fair use doctrine as way to easily keep more videos on YouTube, while providing material support to its partners that allows them to outlast any songwriter or artist in the game of whack-a-mole under its copyright strike policies. No one is giving creators a shadowy milliondollar fund to defend against the misapplication of fair use.

Amicus Mr. Lowery summed it up in his 2014 testimony to the House Judiciary Committee:

I am not concerned with parody, commentary, criticism, documentary filmmakers, or research. These are legitimate fair use categories. I am concerned with the illegal copy that masquerades as fair use, but is really just a copy. This masquerade trivializes legitimate fair use categories and creates conflict where there need be none.

Scope of Fair Use at 22.

Unfortunately, Google manipulates fair use to extract value by monetizing verbatim  copies to the great disadvantage of creators who can little afford to fight back against the multi-national, trillion dollar corporation, and usually do not. Thus, independents
are caught without leverage in cases that rarely get to court.

The end result is that even where its use is “free,” Google’s interests are steadfastly commercial. Accordingly, the Federal Circuit was correct in finding that the nature and purpose of Google’s use was entirely commercial in nature.

III. GOOGLE’S PRIVATE INTERESTS ARE
NOT THE PUBLIC INTEREST.

The ultimate question in a fair use analysis is “whether, and how powerfully, a finding of fair use would serve or disserve the objectives of the copyright.” Leval at 1110–1111; see also Harper & Row, 471 U.S. at 546 (noting purpose of copyright is to give creators
“a fair return for their labors”).

Google’s only response to whether its use furthers the public interest—i.e., in promoting an effective system of copyright—is that allowing it to copy verbatim Oracle’s declaring code and structure would be “promoting software innovation.” Such verbatim copying is a “facile use of the scissors.” Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F. Cas. 342, 345 (C.C.D. Mass 1841) (Story, J.).

Yet what is good for Google is not synonymous with what is good for the public—no more than “[w]hat’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA.” Johnny Mercer and Gene De Paul, Li’l Abner (1956).  In fact, a ruling for Google would be “promoting” software innovation only in that the purported “innovation” would be furthering Google’s private
interest—i.e., using works without permission or a license fee.

This case again appears to be the latest in Google’s long-term strategy to use its market dominance and overwhelming commercial power to continually distort copyright exceptions, thereby artificially depressing the market price of copyrighted works.  Google’s proposed outcome would be yet another distortion. Were Google to prevail here, Amici expect Google (and its proxies) to throw its full weight behind such a ruling, far beyond the confines of its text. This case would become another totemic faux license or safe harbor that Google could use as a cudgel against creators and copyright owners.

Left unchecked, eventually the copyright distortions they seek—including in the case at bar—could nullify copyright, particularly for those who cannot afford to fight back or fear retaliation for doing so. Under the Google anti-copyright regime, exceptions would devour the rules of protection in whole, digesting art and culture along with them.

CONCLUSION

Amici respectfully suggest that the Court should consider whether a decision in favor of Google would merely “unleash” yet another weapon for Google’s private benefit, and whether Google’s infringement of Oracle’s declaring code and structure constitutes
“simple piracy” for which the company should most certainly be held accountable.

This Court should affirm the decision of the Federal Circuit below.
Respectfully submitted,
CHARLES J. SANDERS
Counsel of Record
29 KINGS GRANT WAY
BRIARCLIFF, NEW YORK 10510
(914) 366-6642
cjs@csanderslaw.com

CHRISTIAN CASTLE
CHRISTIAN L. CASTLE, ATTORNEYS
9600 GREAT HILLS TRAIL
SUITE 150W
AUSTIN, TEXAS 78759
(512) 420-2200
asst1@christiancastle.com
Counsel for Amici Curiae

 

by thetrichordist

How Google Treats Copyright as an Inconvenience: Supreme Court Brief of @davidclowery, @helienne, @theblakemorgan and @sgawrites in Google v. Oracle, Part 5

Google’s appeal of its major loss to Oracle on fair use is shaping up to be the most important copyright case of the year, if not the decade.  It could set fair use standards for years to come.  We’re going to be posting installments from the friend of the court brief that David, Helienne, Blake and The Songwriters Guild filed in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Oracle in the Google v. Oracle fair use case.  This is part 5.  We decided to omit the footnotes for this posting, but you can read the whole brief here.

Cover Page
Cover Page of Friend of the Court Brief

ARGUMENT

B. Google Benefits Commercially from Weaker Copyright Protection.

Amici, as creators in the digital age, are largely beholden to the whims of distributors. As romantic the notion is of solitary artists laboring over their works, the fact remains that they will ultimately need to distribute their creative expression. That means going
through Google far more often than not.

Artists like Amici have a tense relationship with Google and its subsidiaries. On the one hand, Google controls access to the market directly or indirectly. On the other hand, Google has consistently abused or outright ignored copyright when it comes to
interactions with creators and their intellectual property.

For example, when YouTube rolled out its subscription service, it reportedly warned independent artists and labels that if they refused YouTube’s licensing terms, their music would be blocked on YouTube’s free service, and YouTube would keep any advertising revenue. Ben Sisario, Independent Music Labels Are in a Battle with YouTube, N.Y. Times
(May 24, 2014) https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/business/media/independent-music-labels-are-in-abattle-with-youtube.html.

In Amici’s experience, Google has a long history of leveraging copyright exceptions for its enormous profit at creators’ expense. Through YouTube, Google profits directly from verbatim copies of Amici’s own works. These copies are often unauthorized, unlicensed, and severely undermonetized. See Jonathan Taplin, Do You Love Music? Silicon Valley Doesn’t, L.A. Times (May 20, 2016).

Google is able to artificially lower the floor for the market for music and other copyrighted works by strategically leveraging a variety of copyright exceptions and loopholes across all of its platforms, particularly YouTube and search.

As discussed above, in order to maximize user engagement with its ads, Google needs a constant influx of creative content. Copyright is treated as an imposition, and Google avoids liability through an abuse of exceptions such as the safe harbor provisions
in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. See 17 U.S.C. § 512(a)–(d). Google frequently argues that these provisions immunize Google from liability for infringing content, while also making it very easy for Google to restore content with the check of a box.

Google has cobbled together a system of copyright “strikes” based on DMCA notices received from copyright owners against infringing YouTube channels. With sufficient strikes, YouTube blocks public access to the channel. The channel operator, however, can easily restore content by filing a counternotification with YouTube often attesting without firm legal grounds to a good faith belief that their unauthorized use of the material is non-infringing.

Such an assertion frequently mimics Google’s general assertions that the fair use doctrine is malleable enough to accommodate any use no matter how damaging, non-transformative, commercially based or unnecessarily broad. See 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3)(C).
Assuming the copyright owner does not seek relief in court—and very few do because of the prohibitive costs and time required—then YouTube restores the content, and Google has another video to monetize.

Thus, assertions of fair use (real or imagined) play a critical role in this scheme, and therefore ultimately Google’s advertising inventory. YouTube’s counternotification
webform, in fact, arguably encourages a channel operator to claim a good-faith belief that its infringing video was fair use under the broadest of circumstances. See Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 801 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2015).

These channel operators are rarely represented by counsel, meaning their claims of fair use are more folk wisdom and internet legend than law. Five-time Grammy Award winner and independent composer and band leader Maria Schneider gave an example of this culture in comments to the Copyright Office:

“As just one small example, just put in the YouTube “search” bar the phrases “fair use” and “full CD.” There are literally countless whole albums digitally uploaded by users who state that it is “fair use” (which it obviously isn’t).

YouTube knows there is infringement of epic proportions broadly across its platform, and . . .certainly makes it possible, and easier, for infringement to occur.”

Coupled with its porous repeat infringer policy, YouTube has leveraged counternotifications into a broad-based fair use business strategy—truly an attempt to fashion its non-existent “fair use industries” entirely out of whole cloth.

Google overamplifies fair use in other ways. For example, since 2015, YouTube has  sponsored an initiative to subsidize legal fees for certain fair use cases that it decides are “some of the best examples of fair use on YouTube by agreeing to defend them in
court if necessary.”34 YouTube announced that it intended to “indemnify creators whose fair use videos have been subject to takedown notices for up to $1 million of legal costs in the event the takedown results in a lawsuit for copyright infringement.”

Google tells us “[they] believe even the small number of videos [Google] are able to protect will make a positive impact on the entire YouTube ecosystem, ensuring
YouTube remains a place where creativity and expression can be rewarded.”

The promise of Google’s million-dollar fair use indemnity promotion effectively provides a faux license against copyright liability without the consent of the copyright owner, and purports to protect YouTube partners for fair use cases that Google judges worthy, i.e., cases that promote Google’s private interests in protecting and expanding YouTube’s advertising inventory. It is unclear which, if any, cases Google or YouTube have taken on under this indemnity or what the criteria would be because Google does not disclose
when or if they get involved. One can easily discern through market behavior, however, that the threat alone more than satisfies Google’s imputed aims to dissuade creators from even attempting to enforce their rights.

[To be continued…]

by thetrichordist

Copyright Office Regulates The MLC: Selected Public Comments on the Copyright Office Black Box Study: Zoë Keating

[The Copyright Office is asking for public comments on best practices for dealing with the black box as part of the “Unclaimed Royalties Study” mandated by the Music Modernization Act.  We are posting comments or excerpts from comments that we found interesting starting with comments by our friend Zoë Keating.  You can find other the posted comments here.]

Regarding unclaimed royalties: To facilitate the population of correct metadata going forward, when someone registers a composition or a composition with a sound recording, that information should lead to an automatic registration with the MLC.

Why is it necessary in the first place to register works in so many places? Why can’t I as a self-published composer who owns all my copyrights, register my compositions and my recordings with the copyright office and have that information shared with the MLC for mechanical rights, SoundExchange for digital performing rights and a selected PRO for the performance right?

I am making this comment here in the unclaimed royalty study because as long as this is not facilitated, there will continue to be more unclaimed royalties than there should be. As long as the process remains confusing and opaque to self-published creators, who will rely exclusively on the MLC, there will be gaps in the data. As long as there are gaps in the data, the more likely it is that royalties will go unclaimed.

Rather than spend money on continually educating the public as to where they need to register their information in order to collect a royalty – why not spend the money to automate the process from the inception?

As for the unmatched royalties themselves, I have the following comment:

A database of the unmatched compositions for which there are royalties should be publicly searchable in order to effectively crowd-source and facilitate at least part of the matching process. There are bound to be errors on the DSP reporting side, some of which the copyright owners themselves might be familiar with from reporting errors in the past with other types of royalty databases, and know what to look for.

Also, given that the MLC will be collecting royalties on behalf of foreign songwriters and publishers, I would expect the core MLC database itself and any searchable index of the unmatched database to feature standardized character normalization for search and subsequent matching of diacritics, umlauts, accents etc.

by thetrichordist

There are untold riches in running the internet of other people’s things: Supreme Court Brief of @davidclowery, @helienne, @theblakemorgan and @sgawrites in Google v. Oracle, Part 4

Google’s appeal of its major loss to Oracle on fair use is shaping up to be the most important copyright case of the year, if not the decade.  It could set fair use standards for years to come.  We’re going to be posting installments from the friend of the court brief that David, Helienne, Blake and The Songwriters Guild filed in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Oracle in the Google v. Oracle fair use case.  This is part 4.  We decided to omit the footnotes for this posting, but you can read the whole brief here.

Cover Page
Cover Page of Friend of the Court Brief

ARGUMENT

II. GOOGLE’S USE IS CLEARLY COMMERCIAL.

Against this backdrop, Amici agree wholeheartedly with the Federal Circuit that “the fact that Android is free of charge does not make Google’s use of the Java API packages noncommercial.” Oracle Am., Inc. v. Google, LLC, 886 F.3d 1179, 1197 (Fed. Cir. 2018) (“Oracle II”). In arriving at this conclusion, the Federal Circuit cited evidence that Google generated over $42 billion from Android through advertising. Id. at 1187, 1197.

Google concedes that its creation of Android was “a commercial endeavor,” but argues more amorphously that its copying of Oracle’s code and organization served the noncommercial purpose of “promoting software innovation.” Pet. Br. at 43-44. Likewise,
Google’s amici argue that because Android was offered to consumers for free, its copyright cannot be commercial. See Copyright Scholars Br. At 12.

Yet contrary to the views of Google’s amici, the Federal Circuit properly found that Google’s use was commercial and properly weighed such a commerciality finding in the fair use inquiry. Just because Google did not sell Android to consumers does not mean its
copying did constitute commercial use. In fact, the $42 billion figure cited by the Federal Circuit is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

A. Google’s Market Dominance Lowers the “Customary Price” of Copyrighted Works.

As this Court stated in Harper & Row, whether a use is commercial “is not whether the sole motive of the use is monetary gain but whether the user stands to profit from exploitation of the copyrighted material without paying the customary price.” 471 U.S. at 562 (emphasis added). In other words, a commercial use is found where a defendant is “[g]iving customers for free something they would ordinarily have to buy.”  Oracle II, 886 F.3d at 1197 (quoting A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004, 1015 (9th Cir. 2001)).

The Federal Circuit is in accord with the other Courts of Appeals that have considered this proposition. See, e.g., Soc’y of Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Inc. v. Gregory, 689 F.3d 29, 61 (2d Cir. 2012) (“‘Profit,’ in this context, is thus not limited simply to dollars and coins; instead, it encompasses other non-monetary calculable benefits or advantages.”); Weissmann v. Freeman, 868 F.2d 1313, 1324 (2d Cir. 1989) (factor one disfavored use where professor’s benefit in academic prestige and recognition was “ill-measured in dollars”); A&M Records, 239 F.3d at 1015 (“Direct economic benefit is not required to
demonstrate a commercial use.”); see generally Nimmer on Copyright 13.05  “Commercial uses’ are extremely broad.”).

Here, there should be no question that the purpose of offering a mobile platform was commercial in nature: Google simply wanted to maintain its ad sales dominance. See Oracle II, 886 F.3d at 1210.

One thing that content creators have grown to understand is that Google is not a tech company—it is an advertising company. When one sees this, all is revealed. See Jake Swearingen, Can Google Be More Than an Advertising Company? New York Magazine
(Feb. 5, 2019) (“Of the $39 billion [Google’s parent Alphabet] brought in [during Q4 2018], $32.6 billion of it was in advertising revenue — that’s 83 percent of its total revenue.”). Google has become enormously successful, though not always transparently.
Moreover, Google dominates the market for online advertising, with disturbing  implications for privacy.

As is well-known by now, Google extracts value from its users through selling advertising on works that Google makes available at no charge to the user, and through scraping user data in the background that Google then adds to its ballooning behavioral knowledge database through highly complex user profiling. Google extracts this value by selling targeted advertising, often in connection with verbatim copies of works generally offered for free to users on YouTube. There are untold riches in running the
internet of other people’s things.

The reason is this: free is critical to Google’s model, which depends on the en masse exploitation of copyrighted content. This business model is the sort that this Court has analyzed as commercial:

[Defendants] make money by selling advertising space, by directing ads to the screens of computers employing their software. As the record shows, the more the software is used, the more ads are sent out and the greater the advertising revenue becomes. Since the extent of the software’s use determines the gain to the distributors, the commercial sense of their enterprise turns on high-volume use, which the record shows is infringing.

See Grokster, 545 U.S. at 940. Likewise, Google’s business model enables staggering profits with little to no direct commercial transactions between it and the
end-user, particularly on YouTube. See Jason Fitzpatrick, If You’re Not Paying for It; You’re the Product, Lifehacker (Nov. 23, 2010).

Google’s evangelists have even coined a term to describe such takings: “permissionless innovation.” See Adam Thierer and The Mercatus Center, Permissionless Innovation and Public Policy: A 10 Point Program at 12 (2016). Vinton G. Cerf, Keep the Internet Open, N.Y. Times (May 24, 2012) https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/opinion/keep-theinternet-
open.html.

Yet “permissionless innovation” is just another term for what polite creators call the underpinning of the infamous “value gap” currently plaguing the global community of music creators and artists. In fact, the disparity between artists’ royalties and Google’s
enormous ad-based music distribution profits off of their music has become its own market phenomenon and largely led to the adoption of the European Copyright Directive in 2019 which seeks to address the devastating value gap by requiring Google to
operate on a more level playing field for creators.

In order to achieve and maintain permissionless innovation in the United States, accused infringers in contrast continue to lean on burden-shifting regimes like the DMCA safe harbors to impose the costs of policing infringement onto copyright owners while
giving Google leverage in licensing negotiations.

From a copyright perspective, permissionless innovation relies on a system of risk shifting safe harbors and forces artists into an unsustainable game of whack-a-mole to which Google’s amorphous interpretation of fair use is tightly bound. Google leverages this commercial windfall into exerting dominance at scale. For example, while Google makes much of the purported (and unsubstantiated) “lock in” effect that would result from Oracle’s vindication of its copyrights, see Pet. Br. 40, Google itself locks in creators to coerce their agreement to commercial deals with YouTube. For example and
as further discussed below, contracting with YouTube’s subscription service was a condition of access to YouTube’s infamous Content ID system28 a linkage that
continues to draw scrutiny.

Any revenue that copyright owners receive, then, must price in the transaction costs of dealing with Google’s unpredictable policies. The aggregate revenue from Google after deducting transaction costs is a long way from a “customary price.”

[To be continued]

by thetrichordist

It sure costs a lot of money to give things away for free: Supreme Court Brief of @davidclowery, @helienne, @theblakemorgan and @sgawrites in Google v. Oracle Part 3

Google’s appeal of its major loss to Oracle on fair use is shaping up to be the most important copyright case of the year, if not the decade.  It could set fair use standards for years to come.  We’re going to be posting installments from the friend of the court brief that David, Helienne, Blake and The Songwriters Guild filed in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Oracle in the Google v. Oracle fair use case.  This is part 3.  We decided to omit the footnotes for this posting, but you can read the whole brief here.

Cover Page
Cover Page of Friend of the Court Brief

ARGUMENT

I. INDEPENDENT ARTISTS AND SONGWRITERS RELY ON COPYRIGHT
PROTECTION AND CLEAR FAIR USE STANDARDS TO DEFEND THEMSELVES
IN THE MARKET (continued from Part 2).

Google interacts with the music industry in a variety of ways, but primarily through its YouTube video platform. YouTube is by far the world’s most popular music streaming service, with over 1.9 billion registered users as of June 2018. It is much, much
larger than subscription-based services like Spotify (with 160 million users) or Apple Music (with 45 million users). According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, nearly half of all streaming users consume music on YouTube. It is hard to be in the music business online and not do business with YouTube.

And in turn, music is a large part of YouTube’s business. As of Jan 2020, 93% of the most-watched videos were music videos.” Kit Smith, 54 Fascinating and Incredible YouTube Statistics, Brandwatch (Jan. 17, 2020) available at https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/youtube-stats/; “47% of time spent listening to on-demand music is on YouTube,” Music Consumer Insight Report, International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) at 13 (2018). This revenue accrues to Google’s great benefit, with its parent company Alphabet reporting more than $15 billion in revenue from YouTube last year alone.

Unfortunately, despite YouTube’s market success, revenue does not proportionately flow back to copyright owners. In the aggregate, advertising-supported free streaming services (of which YouTube is by far the largest) contributed one-third of all streams in 2018, but only 8% of total revenue. See Recording Industry Association of America, RIAA 2018 Year End Music Revenue Report (Feb. 2019). YouTube’s royalty rates are consistently lowest among the top digital music services.  In fairness, Google does contract with aggregators representing independents to collect YouTube royalties, such as Audiam.
However, in Amici’s experience, YouTube is the primary music service that actually incorporates an ad hoc and arbitrary exploitation of copyright safe harbors
and exceptions like fair use as a part of its largely advertising-supported business model which is grounded substantially on “user-generated content” or “UGC.”

Therefore, YouTube is incentivized to unfairly attempt over and again to utilize narrow, statutory exceptions to copyright protection, including the fair use doctrine, on a seemingly ad hoc and extremely expansive basis to undermine the very protections that
creators rely on. This unpredictable fiat guides YouTube’s partners toward monetizing their UGC—which generates a reward of revenue that YouTube shares with the partner. Google’s exploitation of fair use as a business significantly increases the transaction cost of dealing with YouTube beyond what independents like Amici can reasonably afford. It sure costs a lot of money to give things away for free.

This is particularly true since independents cannot credibly use litigation as leverage against a commercial giant. Examples of these costs include engaging services to identify infringements and send takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (hereinafter DMCA) for infringing links in search or on YouTube, or analyzing fair use claims in counternotifications. See 17 U.S.C. §§ 512(c)(1)(C), 512(g). Nor are these costs common across other ad-supported digital music services. For example, Amici
do not bear these high transaction costs with other ad-supported digital music services such as Spotify’s free version.

It appears to Amici that Google’s business model, both with YouTube and with its verbatim copying in Android, are prime examples of what one of Google’s
amici has repeatedly proclaimed to be the “fair use industries.”

Amici—like most creators—do not think of fair use as the basis for an “industry” whose “rights” can be asserted separately from authorship furthered by reliable rules of copyright protection and narrow exceptions under individualized, special circumstances.
If fair use were an “industry,” Amici would be rendered into both the unlicensed input and the royalty-free output of that economic sector, destroying the market balance that has developed under copyright regimes over a period of centuries. Rather, fair use is a
statutory defense that permits creators to use copyrighted materials for well-defined and generally noncommercial or noncompeting purposes. Without copyright, of course, there is no fair use. At best, the notion of “fair use industries” and its protection is a non-sequitur. At worst, it is a destroyer of markets and eventually of national cultures.

In short, the “fair use industries” spin is Google’s attempt to invent cover for its extremely predatory market practices against creators.  Amici are concerned that “fair use industries” are merely those markets in which Google’s monopoly power permits it to simply ignore the copyright interests of other market actors (including and especially independent creators) and call its conduct fair use, safe in the knowledge that challenging Google in court is a nonstarter for most independents. This spin is bolstered through funding academic research as well as outright lobbying and strategic litigation that consistently weakens copyright and undermines creators. Even Google’s amici in this appeal include individuals paid by or otherwise associated with Google. See Br. of 83 Computer Scientists at A1 n.1.

In fact, Google reportedly said as much to former Prime Minister David Cameron when lobbying him in 2011 to amend UK copyright laws to remove “barriers to new internet-based business models” raised by the “costs of obtaining permissions from existing rightsholders.”  Adam Sherwin, David Cameron’s “Google-Model” Vision for Copyright Under Fire, The Guardian (March 14, 2011) (“[Prime Minister Cameron’s announcement] was greeted with unalloyed delight at Google’s California HQ—and left the music industry, ravaged by web piracy, with that all too familiar sinking feeling.”).

Of course, Google’s responses are essentially the same each time—as they are [in the Oracle case].  Google wields a variety of weaponized copyright exceptions on top of rhetoric that is both deceptively public-spirited (letting Google win is “promoting innovation”) and ominous (impeding Google would “break the internet”). Google further seeks to justify these exceptions by trying to hide behind small players. It engages in astroturfing tactics to give the impression that it has more public support than it does.

All of this is on display in Google’s brief and its many amicus briefs. See, e.g., Pet. Br. 44 (“Android is an open source initiative that benefits hundreds of device manufacturers, millions of developers, and more than a billion consumers around the world.”), 45
(Android “enabled Java developers to unleash their creativity” by using Google’s platform), 49 (“Android benefitted Oracle”); 50 (finding against Google “would
disrupt the ongoing development of modern, interoperable computer software”).

[To be continued:  Google’s Use Is Clearly Commercial]

by thetrichordist

Google’s Fair Use Industries Part 2: Supreme Court Brief of @davidclowery, @helienne, @theblakemorgan and @sgawrites in Google v. Oracle

Google’s appeal of its major loss to Oracle on fair use is shaping up to be the most important copyright case of the year, if not the decade.  It could set fair use standards for years to come.  We’re going to be posting installments from the friend of the court brief that David, Helienne, Blake and The Songwriters Guild filed in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Oracle in the Google v. Oracle fair use case.  This is part 2.  We decided to omit the footnotes for this posting, but you can read the whole brief here.

Cover Page
Cover Page of Friend of the Court Brief

ARGUMENT

I. INDEPENDENT ARTISTS AND SONGWRITERS RELY ON COPYRIGHT
PROTECTION AND CLEAR FAIR USE STANDARDS TO DEFEND THEMSELVES
IN THE MARKET.

Copyright is of critical importance to independent creators and artists. It is not empty rhetoric to say that without the statutory and constitutional protections of copyright, professional creators could not earn their livings and simply would not produce new works, and the world would be poorer for it.  The reason is simple but profound: copyright protection allows for a vibrant creative environment in which artists can predictably recover the gains of their creative labors. See U.S. Const. Art. I, § 8, cl. 8; see also Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 558 (1985) (“By establishing a marketable right to the use of one’s expression, copyright supplies the economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas.”). Because Congress has codified this incentive structure through centuries of copyright legislation, independent artists
and songwriters regularly rely on the exercise of their exclusive rights by creating, reproducing, distributing and publicly performing their works.

Importantly, these rights are not just abstractions.  They tangibly alter the licensing negotiations vital to a modern creative ecosystem. An exclusive right to exploit a creative work (such as a musical composition or a sound recording) can be the only backstop against markets where the marginal cost to digitally create perfect copies of an original is nil. See Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 928 (2005) (noting “digital distribution of copyrighted material threatens copyright holders as never before, because every copy is identical to the original [and] copying is easy”). These burdens do not fall solely on creators of sound recordings or musical compositions, but extend across copyrightable subject matter, including visual arts, motion pictures, and literary works such as novels or software. See 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 102(a).

To be sure, independent creators may also benefit from uses that fall under the category of fair use. Fair use helps disseminate the artist’s work to the larger culture, and increases the amplitude and quality of discourse within and surrounding the work—all without compromising the work’s value. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 578 (1994) (noting fair use must be analyzed “in light of thepurposes of copyright”); Pierre N. Leval, Toward a Fair Use Standard, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1105, 1107 (1990). (“[f]air use should be perceived . . . as a rational, integral part of copyright, whose observance is
necessary to achieve the objectives of that law.”). It is therefore not surprising that a significant number of fair use cases arise in the music business. See, e.g., Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994); Estate of Smith v. Graham, No. 19-28 (2d Cir. Feb. 3,
2020); Capitol Records, LLC v. ReDigi Inc., No. 16-2321 (2d Cir. Dec. 12, 2018); Lennon v. Premise Media Corp., 556 F. Supp. 2d 310 (S.D.N.Y. 2008); Fisher v. Dees, 794 F.2d 432 (9th Cir. 1986); Elsmere Music, Inc. v. Nat’l Broad. Co., 482 F. Supp. 741 (S.D.N.Y.), aff’d, 632
F.2d 252 (2d Cir. 1980).

Yet these fair use benefits only accrue when the analysis is predictable, consistent, and respectful of the underlying existing copyright incentives for original creation. Under such market conditions, independent creators nearly always stand ready to license their works at a fair market rate to those who respect their rights. This is how fair use works effectively within the creative industries. On the other hand, the more amorphous and unreasonably expansive the analysis and application of the fair use doctrine, the harder it becomes to establish the value of the copyrighted work during licensing negotiations that are the lifeblood of the creative ecosystem.

In the modern music business, such licensing negotiations are intricate and delicate. The exclusive rights guaranteed by the U.S. Copyright Act have allowed independent songwriters, recording artists and labels to contract with distributors such as Audiam, CD
Baby, INgrooves, Merlin Network, The Orchard and TuneCore. These aggregators in turn sublicense collectively to interactive, on-demand digital delivery services like Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, iTunes, Google Play Music, Pandora, and Spotify in return for royalties that the aggregators pay to their songwriter or artist licensees.

SoundExchange, for example, administers the limited statutory performance license for
noninteractive exploitations of sound recordings. See 17 U.S.C. § 114. Through this statutory scheme, SoundExchange oversees the statutory license of sound recordings used by many noninteractive services such as Pandora, SiriusXM, iHeart Radio and other Internet radio services as well as business establishments. Meanwhile, performing rights organizations like ASCAP, BMI, Global Music Rights and SESAC collectively license the public performance of the corresponding compositions.

Artists and songwriters rely on this intricate market system of licensing that is entirely based on the exclusive rights of copyright owners and the traditionally reasonable application of the fair use doctrine. These market practices have, over the past two decades, undergone a metamorphosis, as new customs evolved in the digital age, emerging once again into a predictable licensing landscape. The exclusive rights that independents enjoy as copyright owners allow them to compete with the licensing, distribution and marketing operations of major labels and music publishers—when those rights are respected.

And that is where Google’s seemingly perpetual campaign for fair use expansion becomes a major hindrance in the equitable and efficient functioning of
the marketplace.

[To be continued]

by thetrichordist

The Fair Use Industries: Supreme Court Brief of @davidclowery, @helienne, @theblakemorgan and @sgawrites in Google v. Oracle

Google’s appeal of its major loss to Oracle on fair use is shaping up to be the most important copyright case of the year, if not the decade.  It could set fair use standards for years to come.  We’re going to be posting installments of the friend of the court brief that David, Helienne, Blake and The Songwriters Guild filed in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting Oracle in the Google v. Oracle fair use case.  You can read the whole brief here.

Cover Page
Cover Page of Friend of the Court Brief

SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
Independent creators rely on copyright protection to safeguard their works. This is true not just of songwriters and composers, but of countless creators, including recording artists, photographers, filmmakers, visual artists, and software developers. Copyright is,
in fact, of existential importance to such creators, who would be utterly lacking in market power and the ability to earn their livings without it.

Google’s business model is a prime example of the need for strong copyright protection. Since Google’s founding, Amici have experienced, observed and believe that Google has used its unprecedented online footprint to dictate the terms of the market for creative works.  By tying together a set of limited exceptions and exclusions within the U.S. Copyright Act and analogous laws in other countries, and then advocating for the
radical expansion of those exceptions, Google has amplified its own market power to the great detriment of copyright owners. Thus, where fair use is meant to be a limited defense to infringement founded on the cultural and economic good for both creators and the public, Google has throttled it into a business model: what its amicus brazenly refers to as the bedrock on which rests the fictitious “fair use industries.”

There is no shortage of amici exhorting this Court to weigh carefully the implications of this case’s fair use issues, and their resolutions. Amici today simply join the chorus of those seeking to illustrate Google’s longstanding pattern of integrating willful copyright
infringement into its business model. Google does so, as it did here, by advocating for fair use exceptions so broad as to include its wholesale, verbatim copying of Oracle’s declaring code and structure without a license.  Google’s flagrant disregard of original expression in order to make a larger profit—by taking without authority the works belonging to others—compromises any argument that its use is non-commercial,
transformative, or in any sense “fair.”

Accordingly, the Federal Circuit was correct in finding that the nature and purpose of Google’s unlicensed use of Oracle’s code and program organization was to create a commercial substitute in the form of Android. It is abundantly clear that this
unauthorized substitution is not in the public interest. Here, Google’s claim to be, “promoting software innovation” is just a code word for promoting Google’s
interest in extracting higher profit margins out of the pockets of creators. Given that its interest in doing so is antithetical to incentives to create original works, finding fair use would clearly not serve the constitutional and statutory purposes of copyright.

[Tomorrow: Independent Artists and Songwriters rely on copyright protection and clear fair use standards to defend themselves in the market.]

by thetrichordist

TikTok Gets an NMPA Special Out the Back Door as the FBI Comes in the Front Door

dogs-playing-poker
A Friend in Need

It’s becoming more apparent with each passing day that TikTok is about to get shut down by the U.S. Government for any one of a variety of crimes like it has been in India and other countries.  Which means that they are a perfect candidate for an “NMPA Special” which is where a handful of insiders decide on the terms and a pool of money is paid by the infringer to the NMPA for what amounts to a promise not to sue the infringer by the insiders and whatever useful idiots the NMPA can get to opt in to their deal.  (Or at least the deal they tell you about–and remember that some running dogs are more equal than others.)

Then some impenetrable claiming portal is set up for the average dog to “claim” a share of a revenue pool they had nothing to do with negotiating while being forced to give up any rights to sue (because the last thing that the NMPA wants is getting shown up again by a David Lowery, Melissa Ferrick, Randall Wixen or anyone represented by Richard Busch), and then the money just kind of disappears.  The amount of the pool is always so low it makes you wonder if that’s all there is, but in any event it has a distorting effect on the market place to drive down the rates paid to songwriters.

In a world where Cox Communications, a stupid but largely legitimate company, pays $1 billion for copyright infringement on a handful of copyrights, TikTok should pay $1 billion to get a meeting.  And if the FBI is right that TikTok is a front for the Chinese Communist Party, they could easily pay $1 billion for a meeting.  Anyone want to bet the over/under that the NMPA settlement is less than $1 billion?

How much the NMPA gets to keep out of the gross on the front end or the unclaimed after the claiming period expires is never disclosed and as you will see, the NMPA deal with TikTok, like all other NMPA deals, only applies to NMPA members.  So if you want to participate, you most likely will have to join the NMPA and pay a fee (sometimes based on market share).  And as came up in The MLC designation, The NMPA members may have a large market share of revenue but not necessarily on the number of songs.

Here’s the twist:  TikTok has no way to track what music has been used, much less account for it.   TikTok has no Content-ID type technology or control over what music is used so has no way to count or monitor what uses are made of which songs. So unless that gets fixed,  it’s a bit unclear exactly what you would be claiming from the NMPA’s claiming portal  Based on the NMPA’s YouTube and Spotify settlement portals, this one is almost certainly going to be absolute shite.

So what is the deal?  According to MusicAlly:

The deal “accounts for TikTok’s past use of musical works and sets up a forward-looking partnership” according to the announcement.

“This new partnership will give NMPA members the ability to opt-in to a licensing framework that allows them to benefit from their works included on TikTok and is effective retroactively as of May 1, 2020.”

The deal comes a day after TikTok announced a licensing deal with independent distributor Believe, and its TuneCore subsidiary.

“We are pleased to find a way forward with TikTok which benefits songwriters and publishers and offers them critical compensation for their work,” said NMPA boss David Israelite.

“Music is an important part of apps like TikTok which merge songs with expression and popularise new music while also giving new life to classic songs. This agreement respects the work of creators and gives them a way to be paid for their essential contributions to the platform.”

That might be true–but remember, there’s nothing in it for anyone who is not an NMPA member.  And a lot of people are not NMPA members regardless of what they tell judges.  So what happens to the great unwashed who are not NMPA members?  Unclear, but NMPA has likely set the market rate for TikTok settlements, so unless you plan on suing, they’ll just jam that deal down your throat.  Which works out well for TikTok.

But some lobbyist at TikTok has a friend when they are in need.

by thetrichordist