Category: artist rights

EFF’s John Perry Barlow is Wrong, says Google’s Chief Economist

just in case you missed it the fist time around…

The Trichordist

What Artificial Scarcity?

John Perry Barlow is the outspoken EFF co-founder who wrote the sophomoric and nonsensical manifesto for the internet. Much of Barlow’s principal talking points regarding his complete disregard for the protection of artists rights in the digital age centers around the idea that “property” especially of the intellectual kind should not exist on the internet.

“Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”- John Perry Barlow

The fact that this is posted on the EFF website should be at the very least alarming, if not completely absurd for a policy group to display publicly as part of its mission.

There is much talk online by freehadist’s that digital bits are worthless and the cost of a copy is zero, therefore all content online has a near zero marginal…

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by Trichordist Editor

The Declining Utility of the ASCAP and BMI Consent Decrees: Music Licensing Study

Required Reading from Music Tech Policy.

Music Technology Policy

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

I filed comments with the Copyright Office and this post is the last of a three part post focusing on each of the three points I made in my comments (see Songwriter Liberty and Audit Rights Under Section 115 and “Successful” Licensing Models and the Opt Out.)  This post discusses the out…

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by trichordist

In China Digital Music Services Go After Ad Supported Piracy and Illegal Services.

I’m in China for the next two weeks performing and doing a series of IP and Music Industry events.   I will be occasionally updating readers on my activities. 

Congress Should Ask Digital Music Services Why They Don’t Go After Ad Supported Piracy.

Why don’t services like Spotify go after unlicensed competitors like Grooveshark? Why didn’t Apple or Amazon complain about unfair competition from the likes of MegaUpload? Why don’t the ad supported services like Pandora or Spotify complain about the ad supported piracy that directly competes with their advertising dollars?  This is something that has always puzzled us here at The Trichordist.  Why would otherwise rational business people who are obligated to protect their shareholders interest allow unlicensed competitors to get away with it?   Hell I’ve watched them cozy right up to unlicensed competitors. I’m not gonna name names here but a little people watching at SF Music Tech is quite instructive.  (The FTC or DOJ should try it sometime).

Well we gave these services the benefit of the doubt.  “Maybe no one has really thought this through? So we  back-channelled to one of these companies and asked them to join us in our campaign against ad supported piracy.  They declined.  Why?  Because they claimed they didn’t want to be seen as “anti-consumer.”  Huh?!

While it’s tempting to just call the entire digital music distribution business a bunch of glassy eyed free-culture Kool-Aid drinkers who’ve never grown up and actually  turned a profit, I won’t.  Cause while they’ve never made a profit they aren’t totally stupid.   In fact I believe they are consciously (and perhaps illegally) running a fairly sophisticated racket.

I believe that the digital services have specifically used the threat of piracy to negotiate exploitative deals with artists and rights holders.  Now they can’t come right out and say “That’s a real nice album you got there, I’d hate for it to get torrented” cause that would be illegal.  But they can create a fake scientific corporate study that says the same thing and here it is.

But as a regular reader you know this is just business as usual for these guys. This isn’t really news. What is news, is that in China the services and the content owners have come together to fight the illegal services.  As  China Music Business reports

It is impossible to make a concerted switch into a paying model when there are hundreds of sites with freely available music. While there are definitely fierce rivalries at play here, the key stakeholders are making an aligned move towards addressing this, including setting up bodies like the Alliance of the Digital Music Industry (ADMI), representing both content and service providers.

Holy shit.  Why don’t the western services get this? It’s a no brainer.  Maybe it’s time for Shareholders to ask some questions.

Read the rest here: http://www.chinamusicbusiness.com/article/china-great-digital-music-leap-forward/

by Dr. David C Lowery

Jaron Lanier on Internet and middle class: “We have screwed things up” | Salon

Salon Q&A: Tech visionary Jaron Lanier on Thomas Piketty, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, how to save the creative class

His latest book, published in the U.S. last May, covers an enormous amount of ground in what’s often a personal and eccentric style. “Who Owns the Future?” describes in especially stark terms the Internet’s false promise to artists – “trinkets tossed into the crowd spread illusions and false hopes” — and the larger creative class. “The clamor for online attention only turns into money for a token minority of ordinary people, but there is another new, tiny class of people who always benefit,” he writes on the book’s opening page. “Those who keep the new ledgers, the giant computing services that model you, spy on you, and predict your actions, turn your life activities into the greatest fortunes in history.”

The book received mostly positive reviews, though some objected to his proposed solution – that citizens be reimbursed with micro-payments whenever their personal information led to the generation of revenue. Since people’s Facebook preferences help companies sell, for instance, and the work of human translators provide the basis for online translation programs, these people should be compensated: “A new kind of middle class, and a more genuine, growing information economy, could come about if we could break out of the ‘free information’ idea and into a universal micro-payment system.”

We spoke to the Berkeley-based Lanier about “Who Owns the Future?,” the explosion of surveillance, Amazon’s policies, Kickstarter and his role as a critic both inside and outside the beast.

READ THE INTERVIEW AT SALON:
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/jaron_lanier_on_internet_and_middle_class_we_have_screwed_things_up/

by Trichordist Editor

CCC-NYC : International Fete de la Musique day

We’re looking forward to seeing coverage from the event in NYC yesterday.

Google-owned YouTube’s new streaming service has rates so low it will put many indie labels and hardworking artists out of business.   According to the CEO of Merlin (rights licensing organization), “the service that pays the least is the service that’s the most well funded and run by the biggest company in the world: their figures are by far the worst, whether you measure them on a per-stream basis or a per-user basis.”

Support Artists’ Rights by demanding that Google and others:

1.Stop using the copyright reform process to attack artists rights.

2.Cease brokering ads to the corporate black market.

3.Support sustainable pay models for the cultural creators on whom its profits depend.

READ THE FULL POST AT THE CCC-NYC:
http://ccc-nyc.org/2014/06/support-artists-rights-this-saturday-june-21st/

by Trichordist Editor

Songwriters Are Losing $2.3 Billion A Year Due To Outdated Government Regulations | BuzzFeed

Right now a byzantine system is in place that not only dates back more than 70 years but also differs depending on the distribution platform. Traditional radio stations, for instance, pay royalties to the composer of a song, but not to the artist or band performing it — known in industry parlance as a performance right — if they are different. Sirius XM only pays royalties for songs released after 1972. Pandora does pay government-mandated royalties to songwriters but has been aggressively lobbying regulators to lower the rate in recent years. Use of music in both professional and user-based content on YouTube and other websites and in TV shows or commercials is yet another category of music licensing, with the difference being that it is free-market-based and not subject to government oversight.

READ THE FULL STORY AT BUZZFEED:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/songwriters-are-losing-23-billion-a-year-due-to-outdated-gov

by Trichordist Editor

YouTube’s Attack On Indies Gets Strong Response From WIN, But It’s Time For Artists To Take Action | Hypebot

YouTube/Google and Amazon Are Using Their Power Against Creatives

If you’ve been watching the last 15 years or so of web development, you’ve seen a relatively wide open field of entrepreneurial potential gradually get taken over by major corporations in a manner similar to what occurred in industrial societies beginning in the late 1800s. They may be dropping fewer bodies than did the industrial giants but close-to-monopoly digital land grabs by companies like Google and Amazon have put them in a situation where they seem to feel that any terms they name are acceptable if they have the power to force compliance.

Amazon’s current battle with Hachette is but one example of how they’ve used their dominating position in book and ebook retail on the web to have their way with companies that are often struggling to survive.

YouTube’s dominance of the web video space sets up a similar near-monopoly situation in which they’re willing to use their position to behave in monopolistic fashion and force non-compliant entities into line.

READ THE FULL STORY AT HYPEBOT:
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2014/06/youtubes-attack-on-indies-gets-strong-response-from-win-but-its-time-for-artists-to-take-action.html

by trichordist

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

* * MUST READ * * From Music Tech Daily

Music Technology Policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Trichordist Editor

The MTP Interview: Canadian Artist Suzana Barbosa Who Really Did #walkmilesformusic

An artist walked 500 miles to the Googleplex, but Google would not meet with her, not even to buy her a cup of coffee at one of their fancy campus restaurants?

Music Technology Policy

Suzana Barbosa is a Canadian artist who walked from Los Angeles to the Googleplex (well…not inside the Googleplex) and used her #walkmilesformusic campaign to call attention to the absurdly low streaming royalties that are cannibalizing sales.  In a serendipitous coincidence, Suzana’s protest coincided with the release by the Copyright Board of Canada of its new statutory rates for Pandora in Canada.  Remember those really low rates that Pandora pays in the US?

The Canadians are now paying less than 10% of those rates for sound recordings thanks to Pandora’s lobbying efforts.

That’s right.  $0.000102 per play.  And of course the artist’s share is 50%–got your scientific calculators ready?–$0.000051.

So Suzana’s direct action couldn’t have come at a better time in both her home country and in the U.S. as Pandora is trying to do the same to artists in the U.S. in a rate proceeding with SoundExchange.

We were lucky…

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by thetrichordist