If I worked for a company like Google that got slammed by Members of Congress for promoting “sex club” apps on Android and YouTube, I’d be a bit careful about using the word “fetish” to describe anything, even metaphorically.

But Google spends hundreds of millions in legal fees annually to try to force creators into submission and induce a state of learned helplessness so using “fetish” to describe a business that Google wants to compete with shouldn’t surprise anyone.  Evidence?  Here’s a few recent examples, backing an appeal by the adjudicated thief Isohunt, receiving well over 19 million takedown notices a month for links to infringing sites that Google drives traffic to in their monopoly search engine, supporting brand sponsored piracy, trying to disallow the authors ability to sue as a class in the Google Books case so that authors would have to individually bring millions of…

“It’s really important that we protect the rights of really good looking people in this society,”

Attorney Andrew Bridges of Fenwick & West (frequently representing Google) quoted at Beautiful Person Derek Khanna’s SXSW Panel

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First They Send the Missionaries

If you read much about the expansion of the British Empire, you will begin to get the idea: First they send the missionaries.

This is the thought that went through my mind a few years ago when I was on a panel with Alex Curtis from Public Knowledge at the Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville.  (MTP readers will remember this is the panel at which we formed the rule–don’t participate in panels when your fellow panelists are using iPads on the stage.  They may be tweeting questions to a ringer in the audience who then asks questions that the Tweeting Panelist wants to answer.)

That summit was…

“It’s possible to make forgetting impossible, because we can all wear our Google Glasses that will store everything we see. Whereas if you actually thought deeply about the role of forgetting in enabling us to become who we are, perhaps you would actually find some redeeming features to that process.”
–Evgeny Morozov, quoted in the Globe and Mail

Riddle me this:  Would there have been a Street View without a Wi-Spy?  Or a Wi-Spy without a Street View?  If Google had sent cars around the world with just the Wi-Spy sniffers, would they have gotten away with it for as long as they did?  Which is the more valuable to Google long term?  Pictures of your house or the location of your wi-fi?  Which gives them more hyperaccurate (you know…innovative) maps?  Can they resell the pictures of your house to the National Security Agency, or would the government be more…

“It’s really important that we protect the rights of really good looking people in this society,”

Attorney Andrew Bridges of Fenwick & West quoted at Beautiful Person Derek Khanna’s SXSW “Fashion Week” Panel

In today’s News of the Beautiful, we find that the  founders of the very beautiful Pirate Bay–who are both beautiful and innovative–have discovered yet another law that must be reformed and “updated”.  Yes, we are of course speaking of the unspeakably out of date European Convention of Human Rights.  We, of course, commend the beauties to take their appeal to only the highest level of appeal for they are obviously Too Beautiful to be judged merely by their peers.  Yes, the Beautiful may only be judged by the European Court of Human Rights–but they unfortunately found that the reach of the running dogs of the MPAA penetrate even unto that august body.

The section…

In case you were wondering what ever happened to the so-called Internet Radio “Fairness Act”, here’s another little taste of what Big Tech has in store for artists–particularly “legacy” artists, meaning artists with strong catalog from the past.  Let’s say from before 1972.

What’s magic about 1972?  That was the year that the US Congress recognized a copyright in sound recordings (February 15, 1972 to be precise).  “Pre-72 masters” as the recordings are known were protected by state law before that.  So it is not that these older recordings are not protected–such as those by Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Bob Wills, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Buddy Holly, Glenn Miller or Robert Johnson–it’s just that they are not protected by federal law.

True to form, Big Tech and their pals at the National Association of Broadcasters are busily trying to screw artists on pre-72 masters out of public performance royalties on…

Greg Sandoval is one of the great reporters on tech and music.  While I don’t always agree with him, I think he’s fair and one thing I know for sure–he is old school when it comes to getting facts and sources right.  So when Sandoval says Spotify is going back to the well to drive down artist royalties even further, you better believe that I believe him.

According to his story at the Verge:

About 70 percent of Spotify’s revenues pays music-licensing fees while another 20 percent covers customer acquisition, these sources said. That leaves 10 percent to pay all of the company’s other costs, including its much praised technology platform. Insiders have told The Verge that this cost structure zeroes out Spotify’s profits.

So brace yourself–Spotify is about to do a Pandora-style argument about how artists should take even less because Spotify’s “profits” are consumed by royalties.  (And…