Author: thetrichordist

Faux “Data Mining” is the Key that Picks the Lock of Human Expression

The Artist Rights Institute filed a comment in the UK Intellectual Property Office’s consultation on Copyright and AI that we drafted. The Trichordist will be posting excerpts from that comment from time to time.

Confounding culture with data to confuse both the public and lawmakers requires a vulpine lust that we haven’t seen since the breathless Dot Bomb assault on both copyright and the public financial markets. 

We strongly disagree that all the world’s culture can be squeezed through the keyhole of “data” to be “mined” as a matter of legal definitions.  In fact, a recent study by leading European scholars have found that data mining exceptions were never intended to excuse copyright infringement:

Generative AI is transforming creative fields by rapidly producing texts, images, music, and videos. These AI creations often seem as impressive as human-made works but require extensive training on vast amounts of data, much of which are copyright protected. This dependency on copyrighted material has sparked legal debates, as AI training involves “copying” and “reproducing” these works, actions that could potentially infringe on copyrights. In defense, AI proponents in the United States invoke “fair use” under Section 107 of the [US] Copyright Act [a losing argument in the one reported case on point[1]], while in Europe, they cite Article 4(1) of the 2019 DSM Directive, which allows certain uses of copyrighted works for “text and data mining.”

This study challenges the prevailing European legal stance, presenting several arguments:

1. The exception for text and data mining should not apply to generative AI training because the technologies differ fundamentally – one processes semantic information only, while the other also extracts syntactic information. 

2. There is no suitable copyright exception or limitation to justify the massive infringements occurring during the training of generative AI. This concerns the copying of protected works during data collection, the full or partial replication inside the AI model, and the reproduction of works from the training data initiated by the end-users of AI systems like ChatGPT….[2] 

Moreover, the existing text and data mining exception in European law was never intended to address AI scraping and training:

Axel Voss, a German centre-right member of the European parliament, who played a key role in writing the EU’s 2019 copyright directive, said that law was not conceived to deal with generative AI models: systems that can generate text, images or music with a simple text prompt.[3]

Confounding culture with data to confuse both the public and lawmakers requires a vulpine lust that we haven’t seen since the breathless Dot Bomb assault on both copyright and the public financial markets.  This lust for data, control and money will drive lobbyists and Big Tech’s amen corner to seek copyright exceptions under the banner of “innovation.”  Any country that appeases AI platforms in the hope of cashing in on tech at the expense of culture will be appeasing their way towards an inevitable race to the bottom.  More countries can be predictably expected to offer ever more accommodating terms in the face of Silicon Valley’s army of lobbyists who mean to engage in a lightning strike across the world.  The fight for the survival of culture is on.  The fight for survival of humanity may literally be the next one up.  

We are far beyond any reasonable definition of “text and data mining.”  What we can expect is for Big Tech to seek to distract both creators and lawmakers with inapt legal diversions such as trying to pretend that snarfing down all with world’s creations is mere “text and data mining”.  The ensuing delay will allow AI platforms to enlarge their training databases, raise more money, and further the AI narrative as they profit from the delay and capital formation.

[1] Thomson-Reuters Enterprise Centre GMBH v. Ross Intelligence, Inc., (Case No. 1:20-cv-00613 U.S.D.C. Del. Feb. 11, 2025) (Memorandum Opinion, Doc. 770 rejecting fair use asserted by defendant AI platform) available at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.72109/gov.uscourts.ded.72109.770.0.pdf (“[The AI platform]’s use is not transformative because it does not have a ‘further purpose or different character’ from [the copyright owner]’s [citations omitted]…I consider the “likely effect [of the AI platform’s copying]”….The original market is obvious: legal-research platforms. And at least one potential derivative market is also obvious: data to train legal AIs…..Copyrights encourage people to develop things that help society, like [the copyright owner’s] good legal-research tools. Their builders earn the right to be paid accordingly.” Id. at 19-23).  See also Kevin Madigan, First of Its Kind Decision Finds AI Training Is Not Fair Use, Copyright Alliance (Feb. 12, 2025) available at https://copyrightalliance.org/ai-training-not-fair-use/ (discussion of AI platform’s landmark loss on fair use defense).

[2] Professor Tim W. Dornis and Professor Sebastian Stober, Copyright Law and Generative AI Training – Technological and Legal Foundations, Recht und Digitalisierung/Digitization and the Law (Dec. 20, 2024)(Abstract) available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4946214. 

[3] Jennifer Rankin, EU accused of leaving ‘devastating’ copyright loophole in AI Act, The Guardian (Feb. 19, 2025) available at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/19/eu-accused-of-leaving-devastating-copyright-loophole-in-ai-act

ARI Comment in IPO Consultation v F 2Download
by thetrichordist

MTP Interview: Attorney Tim Kappel and Abby North Discuss Landmark Vetter v. Resnick case with Chris Castle

In a rare treat, Abby North and Chris Castle got to speak with New Orleans attorney Tim Kappel about his client’s case Vetter v. Resnick. The landmark case stands for winning the long-fought principle that termination rights in copyright cause the transfer of the worldwide copyright not just US rights as had been the business practice. The case is a major victory for songwriters and their heirs.

Cyril Vetter and Don Smith co-wrote the song “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” in 1962. They assigned all their interests in the song to Windsong Music Publishers. Vetter later served a termination notice on Resnick to recapture his rights under the U.S. Copyright Act, arguing that this termination applied globally, not just in the U.S. Resnick rejected Vetter’s global termination and Vetter sued for declaratory relief in the Middle District of Louisiana.

In a major win for songwriters and their heirs, Chief District Judge Shelly D. Dick agreed with Vetter, granting him worldwide rights to the song, which contradicted established but inequitable business practices in the U.S. music publishing industry. In the podcast, Chris Castle and Abby North discuss the case with Vetter’s attorney, Tim Kappel. These documents are referenced in the podcast.

Vetter v Resnick Doc 28Download
Vetter-v.-Resnik-Order-on-Summary-JudgmentDownload
by thetrichordist

@ArtistRights Institute’s Newsletter 2/3/25

A weekly artist rights news compilation from our friends at the Artist Rights Institute.

Ticketing

After Bruno Mars Bot Scalping Debacle, Hawaii to Prohibit Ticket Resale above Face Price (MusicTechPolicy/Chris Castle)

Artificial Intelligence

Maybe Figure Out What Happened Before Overreacting to the DeepSeek Bombshell? (National Review/Andrew McCarthy)

Oh, I’m sorry, tech bros – did DeepSeek copy your work? I can hardly imagine your distress (The Guardian/Marina Hyde)

Is There an AI Bubble? And Will it Burst in 2025? (24/7 Wall Street/Joey Frenette)

DeepSeek: Good for Nvidia, Great for America (Gilder Report/George Gilder)

Copyright Office Report on AI and Authorship

Spotify Streaming Mechanicals

Your Morning Coffee Special Episode: Jay Gilbert Interviews Liz Pelly on her Spotify Expose

No one should be suprised Spotify beat the MLC (Hypebot/Chris Castle)

Judge throws out MLC’s audiobooks bundle lawsuit, says Spotify can keep cutting songwriter royalties through its “cynical trick” (Complete Music Update/Sam Taylor)

Books

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914, by David McCullough

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, by Stuart J. Russell

For more information on the Artist Rights Institute go to ArtistRightsInstitute.org

by thetrichordist

Confirm Your Mechanical Rates Have Escalated

By Chris Castle

As you probably already know, the statutory mechanical royalty rate for physical or downloads (not streaming) has increased as of January 1, 2025. This means that all floating rate licenses (e.g., not subject to controlled comp rates) should have increased as of January 1, 2025 from 12.4¢ to 12.7¢ due to the Phonorecords IV cost of living adjustment. (And of course should have increased in prior PR IV years in 24.). And of course we have Trichordist readers to thank for helping to persuade the Copyright Royalty Judges to reject the Phonorecords IV frozen mechanical rate settlement that led to the labels agreeing to an increase from 9.1¢ to 12¢ plus a cost of living adjustment on physical and downloads that rose to 12.4¢ in 2024 and now to 12.7¢ in 2025. (But remember there is no cost of living adjustment for streaming mechanicals like Spotify.)

It’s probably just a glitch, but I understand that HFA hasn’t updated the 1/1/25 rates yet for “licensing out” in at least one instance (see screen capture below obtained this week). I’m inclined to believe that the issue is with the database and would not be a one-off, but I could be wrong. That suggests to me that every songwriter and publisher with either a newly issued license since 1/1/25 or a floating rate license in place during PR IV rate period (2023-2027) should probably confirm that the respective COLA escalations have been properly applied as of January 1 of 2024 and 2025. I would imagine that this isn’t an isolated incident, but maybe it is. No reason to let grass grow, however.

Here’s the Copyright Royalty Board’s timely notice of the new rate effective 1/1/25–which means that the HFA system does not appear to have been updated unless the screen capture reflects a one-off which seems doubtful to me.

And for reference, this is the rate for 2024 with the COLA adjustment that may also have been misapplied–everyone would have to check to know if it was misapplied to them.

by thetrichordist

Crowd Sourced Charitable Funding and FEMA

If you’re affected by the Los Angeles fires, you may want to determine if you are eligible for funding by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Hypebot has a handy page devoted to resources for those affected by the fires that you can access here.

It’s always a good idea to let FEMA tell you what the current rules are that apply to your particular situation as these may change. The basic rules are available on the FEMA website and are quite extensive. You can access the FEMA rules on FEMA’s website here. This falls under the general heading of “eligibility requirements for FEMA assistance”. This post is not meant to be legal advice, just a heads up about some of the bureaucracy involved with disaster relief.

Some of this involves proving who you are, your citizenship status, residence and a few other things. FEMA lists the kinds of documents they accept to prove eligibility. As these are also the kinds of documents that may get lost in a rushed exit from your residence in the face of a fire or were stored in bank safe deposit box in a bank that burned down, consider how you are going to get these documents together. If you have been blessed enough not to have been affected by the fires, consider organizing these documents in an cloud based or paper folder that you can grab in a hurry or access online at any time (or both).

Sometimes you may be eligible for a crowd funded charitable source of money like gofundme. Realize that this very likely has to be disclosed to FEMA and is addressed in their online FAQ:

When individuals apply for federal emergency aid through FEMA, FEMA assesses their needs and what aid they have already received from other sources. This includes any funds raised through platforms like GoFundMe.

Here’s how it generally works:

  • Duplication of Benefits: FEMA’s assistance is designed to help individuals and communities recover from disasters, and it cannot duplicate the benefits received from other sources. If fire victims receive aid through GoFundMe or other donations for the same expenses FEMA would cover (like home repairs, temporary housing, medical expenses, etc.), those funds might be counted against the federal assistance they’re eligible for.
  • Transparency and Documentation: When applying for federal aid, it’s crucial for individuals to be transparent about all the financial assistance they have received. FEMA will require documentation of all income sources, including any funds from GoFundMe.
  • Types of Assistance: While GoFundMe can provide immediate relief for specific needs, FEMA assistance covers a broader range of recovery efforts. It’s important to understand that FEMA provides different types of aid which might not be addressed by GoFundMe campaigns, such as grants for rebuilding and repair, rental assistance, and other necessary expenses not covered by insurance.

To sum it up:

  1. Setting up a GoFundMe page doesn’t automatically disqualify fire victims from FEMA aid.
  2. It’s important to disclose all received funds when applying for federal assistance to avoid duplication of benefits.
  3. GoFundMe donations might affect the amount of federal aid provided, depending on the use of the funds.

It may help to state that a GoFundMe is to cover items not covered by FEMA with the understanding that you will likely have the need before you get approved by FEMA, and the GoFundMe monies may be available sooner than the FEMA monies. There will likely be a true up between the two at some point.

When in doubt, ask FEMA if you apply for aid.

by thetrichordist

Step Right Up: The Chamber of Progress’s Ticketing Chamber of Horrors Fools Nobody

It’s one of those sad facts there are people you meet in life who just always seem to have the wrong side of the deal. Sometimes it’s emotionally understandable in the case of kids like the Cox character from William Boyd’s Good and Bad at Games or even Smike from Nicholas Nickleby. But when you see one of these cringy Silicon Valley policy laundries like “Chamber of Progress” keep getting the wrong side of the deal, there’s a much simpler explanation.

And now they are wrapping themselves in the flag of progressivism as they run the thimblerig on–of all things–ticketing. And cutesy names like “Chamber of Progress” notwithstanding, the group’s latest “report” if you can call it that would have state legislators believe that the StubHubs of this world are actually on the side of all that is good, just innocent puppies scampering across the stage with an IPO in their mouth. 

These high minded choir boys fancy their souls are just purer than everyone else’s in their cyberlibertarian progressivism who oppose asymmetrical commercial power except when it suits them and only when it suits them. We see it with Chamber of Progress’s “Generate and Create” obfuscation campaign to promote Silicon Valley’s interests in the “fair use” copyright exception absurdly applied to generative AI. This under the guise of “supporting” artists while destroying their craft and, yes, their humanity. OK, I went there. And we now we see it in ticketing, too. Can’t these guys get a real job?

As we will see, what the Chamber of Progress is really about when it comes to our community is locking in asymmetrical power relationships and protecting Silicon Valley’s cybergod-given right to extract money from relationships where they are not wanted and transactions where they don’t belong. Far from “forget the middleman”, StubHub’s entire business model is based on imposing themselves as the middleman with, it would appear, some pretty nefarious partners. While Chamber of Progress wants to point to the pending Department of Justice case against LiveNation as an excuse for just about anything you can think of, it is well to remember that pending cases don’t always turn out as advertised and flags can become shrouds. Since they seem to like DOJ investigations so much, let’s not forget there’s another one that may be in the offing they’ll like a lot less.

The Flawed Premise of Faux Property Rights

The report starts off from a very flawed premise and a classic projection about the plethora of state ticketing laws backed or opposed by StubHub & Co. The Chamber tells us that “legislators should adopt resale ticketing laws to foster competition, reduce ticket prices, and increase transparency.” Reduce ticket prices? Really? If anyone is acting to increase ticket prices it’s the middleman resellers whose very existence undermines the longstanding economic relationship between artists and fans. Economic relationships that thrive in an environment of classical enforceable property rights.

It begins like a lot of these propaganda campaigns do–identify your villains (those you want to unseat) and then trot out a parade of horrors you create by shading the facts. By the end, a busy legislator or staffer is ready to believe they discovered the cause of cancer and that the potholes are somebody else’s fault!

But here is the essential flaw that I think brings down the entire chamber of horrors this report tries to manufacture. They really want you to believe that once an artist sells a ticket, that ticket can then be resold or repackaged because the artist has sold the right to control the ticket to the purchaser. This tortured analysis of the artist’s property rights is simply incorrect and this one error is the beginning of a cascading effect of really bad stuff for everyone in the chain. Here’s what the report says:

The use of “license” language in ticketing legislation has created a loophole that unscrupulous venues can exploit. When a ticket is defined as a “license” rather than a property right, it gives venues and event organizers the power to revoke the license of any ticket that is resold. This means that even if a ticket was legally purchased, the venue can declare it invalid if it is resold to another party. 

Resale freedom laws provide essential benefits to consumers by ensuring their rights to buy, sell, and transfer tickets without arbitrary restrictions by primary sellers like Live Nation. These laws help to keep ticket prices affordable and enhance consumer choice and access to live events. Resale freedom laws ban anti-consumer practices and empower fans to find tickets on the platform of their choice, increasing their chances of securing seats for popular events. 

See what they did there? First, they are selling “freedom” as in “resale freedom.” This is both laughable but truly Orwellian Newspeak, as in SLAVERY IS FREEDOM. This is not supposed to be a funny joke, somebody paid a lot of money for this report. Yet what do you expect from people who think “Chamber of Progress” is a great brand?

But seriously, they skip over the fact that the artist sets the price for their ticket. They skip over it because they have to if they want to make their sponsor’s case. That doesn’t make them correct, however. The report bungles the economic relationships in ticketing because they either fail to understand or don’t want to understand the reality.

The Report Gets the Economics Backwards

Live shows are not fungible or interchangeable. The ticket starts out as the artist’s property and the artist decides the ticket’s face price based on the economic relationship the artist wants with their fan. As David Lowery has said many times, the economic relationship between artists and fans is analogous to a subscription, it’s not a one-time transaction from which the artist wants to extract the net present value of all possible transactions with the fan. The resellers have the opposite relationship with the fan because to them, fans are fungible. Resellers want to extract the maximum from each fan transaction because they don’t care about a long-term relationship with the fan. Upside down world, right?

When the artist sells a ticket, they sell a right to attend the show under certain conditions. They don’t sell a piece of property. They don’t sell a pork belly or a can of Coke. They sell an emotional connection. That’s not a “loophole.” Pretending that a ticket is a pork belly is creating a loophole out of thin air.

That is true of cover charge for bands at your local dive bar and it is true of Taylor Swift at your local soft-seat venue or stadium. It’s also true in dynamic pricing situations–I’m not a fan of dynamic pricing, but I respect the artist’s decision if they think it’s right for them. Big or small, this is the core relationship that must be respected if you want live music to survive and it’s something I think about in Austin where the city styles itself the Live Music Capitol of the World.

So Chamber of Progress objects to state laws that confirm this license relationship, and that’s an important distinction. These laws confirm the reality of the true original property right, they don’t recreate an alternate reality out of whole cloth. The fact that it is even necessary to pass these laws belies the oligopoly power of StubHub & Co. 

But Chamber of Progress goes even further because the point of the report is to identify a villain. And here is where the fudging starts. They tell you “When a ticket is defined as a “license” rather than a property right, it gives venues and event organizers the power to revoke the license of any ticket that is resold.”

Not true. The artist has that right and delegates that right to the venues as part of the ticketing function. But even StubHub is leery of attacking artists directly so they devise this bizarre rhetorical construct of licensing vs. ownership in order to blame venues, and for what? Preventing scalpers from profiting from their scams and preventing resellers from profiting from their arbitrage. 

Bots and Scammers

This fallacy alone is really enough to refute the entire report, but wait, there’s more. There are two key foundations for the ticket reselling business at scale: bots and making a market for scammers to sell what they don’t own, aka speculative ticketing. They need bots because it allows scalpers to beat fans to tickets in quantity and they need spec ticketing because it allows them to sell a ticket that doesn’t even exist yet but for which there is demand.

Remember–bots are illegal. The Better Online Ticket Sales Act of 2016 sponsored by Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal banned the use of bots for ticket sales in the US. The National Independent Talent Association asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate open and notorious bot technologies on sale at the big ticket resellers convention:

Our organization recently attended the World Ticket Conference organized by the National Association of Ticket Brokers (NATB). At this event, we observed a sold-out exhibition hall filled with vendors selling and marketing products designed to bypass security measures for ticket purchases, in direct violation of the BOTS Act.

Realize, this isn’t a question of whether or not resellers profit from the use of bots on their platforms–the question is why aren’t people being prosecuted for violating the BOTS Act. But the Chamber of Progress wants you to believe there is something wrong with passing state laws to give state Attorneys General the power to prosecute these laws shoulder-to-shoulder with the overworked and under-resourced FTC.

Bills that purportedly claim to enhance transparency through speculative ticket bans, protect consumer rights through anti-bots legislation, or improve access through customer data sharing often contain hidden provisions that restrict competition and limit consumer choices. 

In other words, the report opposes banning speculative ticket sales–selling something you don’t own is already illegal, probably since the dawn of our legal systems–and opposes state anti-bots legislation–already illegal under the federal BOTS Act. This should tell you all you need to know.

It’s Just Business: Racketeering, Silicon Valley Style

The real story that goes unreported is that StubHub is currently being sued in a New York class action for violating the civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations laws in selling tickets to a UK football match without rights. They have managed to punt that case based on their one-sided adhesion contract requiring arbitration in their terms of service, but interestingly the federal judge overseeing the case has retained jurisdiction. Imagine the risk factor in the StubHub IPO prospectus about how they could be subject to the RICO laws.

I recently posted about a “model” ticketing legislation that some of these characters were trying to get adopted by ALEC (the conservative state lobbying operation) which I gather has been dropped since the old link to the model bill is dead. It looks to me like the Chamber report is a new offensive rising out of the ashes of the ALEC lobbying effort. 

“Progressives” Who Fail to Address Asymmetry between Big Tech and Artists are Not Progressives

So once again, our friends in Silicon Valley are trying to elbow their way into a place they are not wanted, not needed, and are poisonous all in the aid of making them even richer all under a miasma of crap about “reseller freedom.” Fortunately, the public is getting wise to their scams no matter how much they try to sell their oppressive tactics as some kind of freedom. If they want to really be progressive, they’d help artists establish a resale royalty so that we could share in the riches from their arbitrage in return for a right to resell our tickets. Don’t hold your breath.

As we’ve seen with their logical backflips in AI and now with ticketing, the Chamber of Progress may be a lot of things, but “progressive” they ain’t. Maybe we can help them find productive work in this season of hope.

[A version of this post first appeared on MusicTechPolicy.]

by thetrichordist

Kim Dot Com Emerges from the Memory Hole

By Chris Castle

“If you get down on your knees and beg to be arrested, don’t be surprised if you are.”

That was what I told a TV news anchor in an interview I did in 2012 right after Kim Dot Com was arrested on his vast estate in New Zealand.  Dot Com’s arrest started a long running extradition proceeding between the United States and New Zealand that Dot Com and his team of lawyers somehow managed to drag out until this year.  That’s right—twelve years.  That puts him right up there with Roman Polanski and Meng Wanzhou.  So now Dot Com is subject to extradition back the US to face criminal charges, and yet nobody in New Zealand seems to be in a big hurry to arrest him and send him Stateside.

The first time I connected the dots on Dot Com’s piracy site Megaupload was when film maker Ellen Seidler launched a site called Pop Up Pirates.   Megaupload figured large in her site for a simple reason:  When you tried to access a film stored on Megaupload, it launched a popup with an ad.  At that time, many of those ads included a credit saying “Ads by Google.”  Ellen gave me a short clip of her launching the Mega popup in real time with a close up of that ad.  I played the clip on a panel with one of the Google charm offensive folks who I thought was going to vomit when he realized what I had just shown the audience.  I thought I conclusively demonstrated that Google profited from piracy and paid pirates—being Kim Dot Com aka “Defendant.”

Shortly after, I started posting about this obvious connection, which is how Dot Com and his confederates were getting rich from their the-Hong Kong-based pirate site.  And of course, I would find it hard to believe that anyone was operating a lucrative pirate site from Hong Kong without taking care of people if you know what I mean.  So there’s that.

Fast forward a year and I was in front of the National Association of Attorneys General demonstrating Google’s many, many connections to crime, terrorists, and general issue bad guys.  

Right about this time I got a call from a distinguished music industry executive who asked me whether I was seriously suggesting that a public company was involved in funding crime.  I said that’s exactly what I was saying.  If that were to happen today, nobody, and I mean nobody, would question that Google is the paymaster of the dark web.

Which leads me to the Dot Com indictment.  It turns out that we are not the only ones who made the connection between Google and massive piracy. The Department of Justice did, too, and describes the connection quite clearly in the indictment.

Adbright and Google were Sequoia investments and PartyGaming was one of the big donors to Creative Commons (and the whole Lessig/Nesson poker lobbying extravaganza).

So who had an interest in keeping Kim Dot Com out of an American jail in case he might negotiate a plea deal as did his confederate Andrus Nomm back in 2018? According to the New Zealand Herald:

While [Dot Com] and his co-accused have denied all charges, Nomm testified in support of the US case. As an insider, his testimony will be key to supporting prosecution arguments the so-called “Megaconspiracy” knew what it was doing, attacking any claim the accused were acting in the belief the website was lawful.

Nomm’s testimony was included in the case for extradition in New Zealand but documents showing how will not be made public until after the judge’s decision has been made. The Herald is unable to report the details of the US case that Nomm pleaded guilty to in the United States until then.

The press release from the U.S. Department of Justice tells us:

In court papers, Nomm agreed that the harm caused to copyright holders by the Mega Conspiracy’s criminal conduct exceeded $400 million.  He further acknowledged that the group obtained at least $175 million in proceeds through their conduct.  Megaupload.com had claimed that, at one time, it accounted for four percent of total Internet traffic, having more than one billion total visits, 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors.

In a statement of facts filed with his plea agreement, Nomm admitted that he was a computer programmer who worked for the Mega Conspiracy from 2007 until his arrest in January 2012.  Nomm further admitted that, through his work as a computer programmer, he was aware that copyright-infringing content was stored on the websites, including copyright protected motion pictures and television programs, some of which contained the “FBI Anti-Piracy” warning.  Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites.  Despite his knowledge in this regard, Nomm continued to participate in the Mega Conspiracy. 

An extradition hearing for co-defendants Kim Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Bram Van der Kolk and Finn Batato is currently scheduled for June 2015 in Auckland, New Zealand.  Co-defendants Julius Bencko and Sven Echternach remain at large.

This case is being investigated by the FBI’s Headquarters and Washington Field Office.  The case is being prosecuted by Senior Counsel Ryan K. Dickey and Brian L. Levine of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay V. Prabhu of the Eastern District of Virginia.  The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs also provided significant assistance.

So if there was a “conspiracy”, it takes more than two to tango. That racketeering and money laundering conspiracy might have included the advertising companies that played an essential role in providing illicit revenue to the “Megaconspiracy”. Recall that Google got caught in a federal sting operation, paid a $500,000,000 fine and entered a nonprosecution agreement with the same DOJ for promoting the sale of illegal drugs online, all at roughly the same time as they appear to have been the paymaster for Mr. Dot Com. Why else were Adbright, Google and Partygaming mentioned in the indictment?

Stay tuned, boys and girls.  The plot sickens.

by thetrichordist

Guest Post: Taylor’s Guitar

By Charles J. Sanders

Recently, a viral video originating from Waxahachie, Texas made the social media rounds featuring the winning bidder of a Taylor Swift guitar immediately, publicly destroying it with the auctioneer’s hammer.  The perpetrator claims the stunt was intended as a light-hearted act of political satire protesting celebrity endorsements of a presidential candidate he does not support.  Most folks of a similar political bent cheered gleefully, while members of the other camp generally eye-rolled and shrugged their way through what appeared to be a somewhat more mean-spirited statement than the disgruntled, new owner was willing to acknowledge.  It’s tough to tell, but hey, free speech is free speech.

I suppose that in a world in which the legendary, guitar-smashing prowess of a Pete Townshend or Jimi Hendrix has long been celebrated, and in a country where Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy turned the dismantling of upright pianos into an art form, perhaps the nonchalant reactions over the sad end to the icon’s former axe are understandable.  We are surely a country and a music community with bigger issues on our plate.  That reality, combined with the dangers of crying wolf being what they are, would ordinarily render the engagement in a humorless, long-winded diatribe against a gavel wielding, wannabe cowboy defacing a guitar a meaningless exercise. 

But in my role as chair of the National Music Council of the United States, the Congressionally-chartered umbrella organization of American music groups advocating for the advancement of musical culture and education, I feel obliged to at least offer reflections on what some may consider to be the far less-benign overtones of this seemingly trivial event. In simplest terms, the alternative of silence is made unacceptable by the ghastly results that such a non-response has produced in the past, particularly when it comes to the long, grim, global history of political violence against music creators and musical culture.  Shining a light just seems the better course.

Last year, it was NMC’s honor to host a series of discussions with several incredibly brave members of the international music community fighting to keep creators and their works safe from political harm.  One such hero of musical culture is Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, founder of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music currently in exile under the protection of the Government of Portugal.  Dr. Sarmast, who had nearly been beaten to death in previous run-ins with the ultra-rightist Taliban movement over his audacious teaching of young, female Afghani music students how to play musical instruments, was unsurprised that one of the first targets of the resurgent Taliban in 2021 was his world-renown music program. 

The group’s initial act in its renewed crackdown on infidelity was the burning not only the school’s instruments, but also of a large percentage of musical instruments throughout the entire country.  The teacher, his students and their families fled for their lives to Qatar and then Lisbon, where they remain two years later in defiant pursuit of musical creativity and freedom.  This week, meanwhile, the Taliban announced its intention to bar the artistic depiction “of any living thing” throughout Afghanistan pursuant to Sharia law.

The experiences of another international champion of artistic freedom NMC interviewed, Cambodian Living Arts organizational founder Arn Chorn Pond, serve as an even more fraught example of violent, music-related suppression and its horrific results.  Professor Pond, whose parents’ national opera company in Phenom Penh was one of the great gems of Southeast Asian musical culture, was a ten-year old flautist when ultra-leftist Khmer Rouge terrorists seized power in Cambodia during the mid-1970s.  The party’s first acts of cultural cleansing included the summary execution of most musicians and composers (including his parents and family), the destruction of virtually every traditional and modern musical instrument in the country, and the banning of all unapproved music on threat of death. 

The details of young Arn’s enslavement and unspeakable torture, even as he was relied upon as a resource for the creation and performance of new and “acceptable” Khmer musical works, are far too graphic to repeat here.  It has taken him a half-century following the defeat of the Khmer to rekindle the light of traditional Cambodian musical culture throughout his nation, all the while carrying scars that cannot possibly be fully healed even after a lifetime of fighting for greater protections for others.    

Other historical examples are legion.  In 1973, one of the first acts of the Pinochet military junta following its coup in Chile was the arrest of progressive singer-songwriter and nationally celebrated guitarist Victor Jara.  Rather than merely destroying his confiscated guitars, the regime mutilated both his hands prior to executing him at the National Soccer Stadium as a warning to others who might be contemplating musical protest.  Days later, the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was dead, as well.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin terrorized the towering composer Dimitri Shostakovich into an emotional wreck through political manipulation and death threats starting in the 1930s. Nazi Fuhrer Adolph Hitler launched an immediate program of terror against “degenerate art and artists” upon rising to power in 1933, culminating in the forced expatriation and eventually the execution of Germany’s greatest composers, conductors and performers (many of them Jewish victims of the Holocaust).  One such target, the poet and songwriter Ilse Weber, actually composed the famous lullaby “Wiegala” while imprisoned at Prague’s Terezin concentration to comfort the children in her care.  She later volunteered to accompany her physician-husband and those children to Auschwitz, where they were murdered in 1944 just as she expected they would be.  Only her music miraculously survived, attributable to the panic of the fleeing killers at war’s end.

And finally, in our own country the great jazz singer Billie Holiday was one among many American creators and artists with more than just a passing acquaintance with the travails of brutal, sometimes fatal repression.  Intimidation of music creators knows no geographical or political boundaries. 

As desperately uncomfortable as these past and continuing events may be to contemplate, the crucial reason to educate ourselves about them is their value as examples of exactly what must be avoided at all costs in the future.  Clearly throughout history, music creators and performers have not only been frequently subject to pressure to conform, or to participate in propaganda efforts by governments and extremist groups, but also victimized by repressive actions up to and including murder to enforce their silence. 

This depraved strategy often eliminates the most persuasive voices of protest, while at the same time setting an example of what happens to those less-visible citizens who choose dissent.  The threatening or carrying out of violent repression against outspoken music creators, performers and educators is simply one of the preferred means of warning everyday people in the bluntest possible terms, “if this is what we’ll do to them, imagine what we’ll do to you.” 

Nevertheless, even armed with such knowledge one might still legitimately ask in the current instance, “what has any of this really got to do with a laughing man in a cowboy hat destroying a celebrity’s former musical instrument?”  Well, probably nothing.  But potentially everything.

Visitors today to Berlin often wander over to the enormous square fronting the library at Humboldt University, a revered institution of learning whose alumnae include some of the greatest thinkers and artists in western history, from Mendelssohn and Heine to Planck and Einstein.  The empty cobblestoned plaza, restored after repeated wartime bombings some 80 years ago, remains completely devoid of any structures whatsoever.  There is only a barely discernable, rectangular glass plate embedded into the pavement in front of the library, allowing viewers to gaze downward into a room of empty bookshelves two stories below, and an equally flat plaque sunk into the ground next to it.  That view, gazing through the glass darkly into history, is why most visitors come. 

This is the very spot on which Joseph Goebbels lit the bonfire of books written by many of Humboldt’s most illustrious graduates, and where the people laughed and cheered as those works burned in 1933.  The empty shelves are self-explanatory, and the plaque has only one simple quote, written by Heinrich Heine fully one hundred years prior to the day that the Nazis struck their match. “Where they burn books,” it reads in German with extraordinary prescience, “they will eventually burn human beings.” 

As our own Mr. Twain was fond of reminding us, while history doesn’t actually repeat, it surely does rhyme.  Is a private citizen smacking a recently acquired guitar with a hammer for political effect the same as a government or terrorist group burning a book, banning a musical work for its content, or assaulting a creator?  No, probably not.  Was the destruction of the Waxahachie guitar a symbolic, political warning issued by an individual or group seeking power through intimidation, intended to be interpreted as a threat of actual violence to any one or all of us in the music community? 

That’s a harder question to answer.  We simply do not and cannot know the intent, effect, or seriousness of the action at this time, nor do we possess Heine’s cursed gift of farsighted genius. 

As a result, on the advice of the American bard of Hannibal, Missouri, we less-gifted prognosticators are left with just one inquiry that absolutely must be asked under this circumstance –and in every other instance like it– for the safety, security and freedom of everyone in our music community and in this country:

“Does the Waxahachie event, or any subsequent one, rhyme?” 

Whether it does or not, now or in the future, will in large part depend on us– not just on the folks with the hammers and the matches.

About the author: Attorney, historian and author Charles J. Sanders is outside counsel to the Songwriters Guild of America, chair of the National Music Council of the United States, and an adjunct professor of music business and its history at New York University.  For more information, visit https://www.musiccouncil.org/. All opinions are his own.

by thetrichordist