Category: Artists Rights Watch

The Hubris Behind Google’s Demotion of Rap Genius (Guest Post) | Billboard

by Chris Castle

Rap Genius topped any Google results for practically any lyric search string, so the site was very well-known to music fans. That enviable ranking doesn’t seem dissimilar from search results for Isohunt, the Pirate Bay or Kickass Torrents.

So what was the cardinal sin justifying Google in disappearing Rap Genius? Operating without licenses? No, certainly not that. Openly challenging the music industry? No, not that either.

It would appear Rap Genius did the one thing Google doesn’t permit — it spoke openly about beating Google at its own game. Rap Genius evidently tricked Google’s search algorithm into ranking it higher than the site should have been absent the manipulation. And for this cheeky violation of Google’s rules — not a law — the search giant demonstrated two points in one flex of its dominant muscle.

READ THE FULL STORY AT BILLBOARD:
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/5869795/the-hubris-behind-googles-demotion-of-rap-genius-guest

by Trichordist Editor

Don Henley Talks Google Versus Musicians | LA Times

In the technocratic world of Google (which owns YouTube), my musical brethren and I are no longer artists; we’re not creators — we are merely “content providers.” Copyright and intellectual property mean nothing to the technocracy. They’ve built multi-billion-dollar, global empires on the backs of creative, working people who are uncompensated. They’re wrecking entire industries.

…

There might be a legislative fix, but there seems to be no political will. Google alone has about a dozen lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Google spent over $11 million last year on lobbying and over $18 million the previous year. They spread the money and the propaganda around like manna, employing their favorite buzz words like “innovation.” Regulation, they say, will “stifle innovation,” and the legislators all nod in agreement. It’s an oligarchy, plain and simple.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW AT THE LA TIMES:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-don-henley-qa-20140115,0,5745299.story

by trichordist

Google Receives Its 100 Millionth Piracy Notice. Nothing Changes… | Digital Music News

“After 100 million piracy notices, it’s time for Google to take meaningful action to help curb online copyright infringement.

Google, with its market capitalisation of more than US$370 billion, is directing internet users to illegal sources of music.

This is not only harming a recording industry whose revenues have fallen by 40 percent in the last decade to US$16.5 billion, but it is also harming the more than 500 licensed digital music services worldwide that offer up to 30 million tracks to internet users.”

READ THE FULL STORY AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/01/14/googlereceives

RELATED:

Google, Advertising, Money and Piracy. A History of Wrongdoing Exposed.

 

Lou Reed and Dead Kennedys Go Public Against Ad Funded Piracy with Facebook Posts


How to DMCA : Google Web Search, De-Listing Infringing Links

 

 

by Trichordist Editor

Early Results and Evolution of the UGA Undesirable Lyric Website Study to Include Advertisers. | UGA

As a result of the publication of the UGA Undesirable Lyric Website List and action taken by the National Music Publishers Association there have been a number of noteworthy updates. Many sites have come forward wishing to obtain licenses and others updated their licensing compliance. We updated our database accordingly. We also learned of at least one website that now has an expired licenses.

In addition we are now ready to expand the study to examine which brands are advertising on these unlicensed sites.

Finally the next iteration of the list will be followed by a list of brands which appear on the top 10 Undesirable Lyric websites.

READ THE FULL REPORT AT UGA LYRICS:
http://ugalyricwebsitelist.org/2014/01/01/early-results-and-evolution-of-the-uga-undesirable-lyric-website-study-to-include-advertisers/

by trichordist

Spotify, YouTube, Streaming Services Are Killing Digital Downloads | TIME.com

Since the iTunes Store launched in 2003, digital music sales have been viewed as the music industry’s saving grace in the face of declining physical album sales and rampant online piracy.

“What we were thinking about was having full track download sales somehow replace the lost revenues from the rapid decline of physical [sales],” says Larry Miller, a music business professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. “What wasn’t so widely anticipated five or six years ago was that full-track download sales would begin to decline as rapidly as they have this year, especially given how nascent the streaming services still are.”

READ THE FULL STORY AT TIME:
http://business.time.com/2014/01/03/spotify-and-youtube-are-just-killing-digital-music-sales/?iid=biz-article-mostpop1

RELATED:

Music Streaming Math, Can It All Add Up?

No, Streaming is not more profitable than Transactional Sales… Not Today, Maybe Not Ever…

by trichordist

60 Minutes Reports on Kim Dotcom…

By selling advertisements and premium subscriptions, Megaupload brought in an estimated $175 million. It became one of the most frequented sites on the Internet. How did it get so popular and profitable? According to federal authorities, by also allowing users to illegally share the hottest new movies, or hit songs, or TV programs, including some CBS shows.

Shawn Henry: Megaupload knowingly created and facilitated the distribution of stolen property.

Shawn Henry is former executive assistant director of the FBI. He was responsible for the Megaupload investigation.

Shawn Henry: No different than if somebody has a warehouse where stolen property is being dropped off. If you created the environment that facilitated it, and you encouraged it, and you incentivized people by paying them to drop off stolen property, I think that you are complicit.

In its indictment, the Justice Department calls Megaupload a “Mega Conspiracy”… a “worldwide criminal organization whose members engaged in criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale…”

WATCH THE EPISODE HERE AT CBS NEWS:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kim-dotcom-60-minutes/

RELATED:

The case against Kim Dotcom, finally revealed

Kim Dotcom Parody Video Appears on YouTube

by trichordist

No, Streaming is not more profitable than Transactional Sales… Not Today, Maybe Not Ever…

There’s a recent report from the Wall Street Journal that is being grossly misinterpreted from this line,

“Data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal showed that one major record company makes more per year, on average, from paying customers of streaming services like Spotify or Rdio than it does from the average customer who buys downloads, CDs or both.”

This does NOT mean that streaming will be more profitable than transaction sales anytime soon. It seems to suggest that streaming could possibly, possibly become more profitable than transactional sales, but that is seemingly unlikely due to simple math which will review below.

What that sentence says is that a premium paid subscriber spends approximately $120 per year on music purchasing, whereas an average music consumer spends less in total over the course of a year. This does not take into account the non-average music consumer who spends much more than $120 a year, nor does it take into account that the number of “average music consumers” is hundreds if not thousands of times larger than the number of premium paid subscribers.

What would be truly interesting and important to the conversation is to see how much total revenue is being generated by streaming in the aggregate against transactional sales. As we’ve reported before, using a simple spreadsheet, streaming services would need at least 90 million subscribers to be competitive as a viable option to replace transactional sales.

By most estimates there are few people who think Spotify can scale up to and maintain 30 Million paid subscribers in the US. So this begs the question…

If streaming is the future how does $2.5b in revenue from a massively successful Spotify replace the loss of $8.3b in annual earnings?

Complicating discussions around the streaming revenue issues are also the risks of cannibalization. As the early year end numbers come in for 2013 we’re already seeing transactional download numbers starting to flatten and decline.

As Music Downloads Decline, Expect More Anti-Spotify Anxiety | FastCoLabs

It’s official: We’re buying less digital music. Just like vinyl, cassettes, and CDs before it, the digital download may have reached it peak, with total sales dropping 4% from last year. The culprit? It’s complicated, but expect the already-raging debate over Spotify, streaming, and the future of music distribution to heat up.

Here’s a breakdown. In the first half of this year, U.S. music fans paid for 25-30 million digital tracks per week, according to Billboard. In October and November, that number dipped below 20 million. Billboard blames “a web of interrelated stories that show new technologies affecting consumer behavior” for the decline, with the most obvious culprit being that little green and black icon on your home screen.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304020704579276123352482930

by Trichordist Editor

Is Rap Genius F*cked? | Gawker

A fascinating twist in the saga of Rap Genius…

“We effed up,” lyrics annotation supersite Rap Genius admitted this week after its SEO cheating was revealed. They sure did. And there’s good reason to believe this isn’t just a gaffe for the cartoonish startup posse: a Google eff up could haunt them forever—but no one search should have all that power.

Rap Genius will never be safe on the internet again, because as far as they’re concerned, Google is the internet. The search engine functions like public infrastructure, a road that takes anyone who wants to look up lyrics to the internet lyrics store, but it thinks like any Walmart of Exxon. It has its own secret rules, its own private penalties, and its own willingness to harm any company that dares make it look stupid. The Rap Genius co-creators must have known what they were getting themselves into: an inordinately complex game of Mouse Trap with the devil that’s finally snapped back.

READ THE FULL STORY AT GAWKER:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/is-rap-genius-fucked-1489917137

RELATED:

Rap Genius Says It Will Seek Licenses for Lyrics

Google Renders Rap Genius Unsearchable As Punishment for Spamming

by Trichordist Editor

The case against Kim Dotcom, finally revealed | Ars Technica

Feds lay it all out: Megaupload made $150+ million, and Dotcom must stand trial.

The government’s 191-page “Summary of Evidence” also details the stunning sums that Dotcom and his colleagues made running their site. Dotcom, who owned 68 percent of Megaupload and all of sister site Megavideo, made more than $42 million in calendar year 2010. CTO Mathias Ortmann, who owned 25 percent share of Megaupload, made more than $9 million that same year; designer Julius Bencko (2.5 percent) made more than $1 million, and programmer Bram Van Der Kolk (also 2.5 percent) made more than $2 million. Chief Marketing Officer Finn Batato, who was not a shareholder, made $400,000. And no perk was too excessive: the company spent $616,000 renting Mediterranean yachts.

READ THE FULL STORY AT ARS TECHNICA:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/us-unveils-the-case-against-kim-dotcom-revealing-e-mails-and-financial-data/

by Trichordist Editor

The Failure of the DMCA Notice and Takedown System | CPIP

Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act will be turning 15 years old soon, and it’s showing its age. Its design belongs to a different era. Like a 15-year-old automobile, it no longer runs as well as it used to. It can’t keep up with the newer, faster vehicles on the road. Its users are beginning to look for alternative forms of transportation. Pieces of it have been wearing down over time, and ultimately something is going to break that outweighs the cost of replacement.

That time may be now: the notice-and-takedown provision of Section 512 is straining under the weight of a blizzard of notices, as copyright owners struggle to abate the availability of infringing copies of their most highly valued works. The tool is no longer up to the task. Mainstream copyright owners now send takedown notices for more than 6.5 million infringing files, on over 30,000 sites, each month. Printing out the list of sites for which Google receives takedown requests in just one week runs to 393 pages. And that just counts the notices sent to Google; duplicates of many of those notices are sent to the site hosts and to other search engines. For example, over a six-month period ending in August, the member companies of the Motion Picture Association of America sent takedown notices for 11,996,291 files to search engines, but sent even more notices—for 13,238,860 files—directly to site operators. (See chart below.)

…

The problem is that notice-and-takedown has been pressed into service in a role for which it was never intended. Section 512 was originally designed as an emergency stopgap measure, to be used in isolated instances to remove infringing files from the Internet just long enough to allow a copyright owner to get into court. That design reflected the concerns of its time. In 1998, the dawn of widespread public use of the Internet, there was considerable anxiety about how the law would react to the growing problem of online infringement. Online services worried that they might be held directly liable as publishers for infringing copies of works uploaded by users, despite lacking any knowledge of those copies. Section 512 addressed these concerns by giving service providers a safe harbor to protect them from liability for unknowingly hosting or linking to infringing material.

READ THE FULL STORY AT CPIP:
http://cpip.gmu.edu/2013/12/05/the-failure-of-the-dmca-notice-and-takedown-system-2/

by Trichordist Editor