Category: Copyright Policy

Copyright Policy Discussions

CCC-NYC.ORG | RALLY & CONCERT FEB 25 2014 feats David Byrne, Marc Ribot, Mike Mills, John McCrea, More!

About CCC-NYC

The New York City Chapter of the Content Creators Coalition is a new group united with the national CCC behind the idea that creators of cultural content need to join forces in order to ensure fairness and dignity for artists in the digital age. If the past fifteen years has taught us anything, it’s that artists cannot depend on industry professionals or journalists or fans to advocate for them—we must speak up for ourselves.

The group is enacting bylaws and seeking nonprofit status so we can operate and address these issues over the long-term.

Statement of Principles:

1) We believe in an Artist’s Control Of Their Work; that it’s the right of any creator of cultural content to choose when, how, and whether their work is distributed for commercial gain, monetized with advertising, or otherwise exploited.

2) We believe in the Ability to Opt-Out of services; the right of artists, writers, and other creators of cultural content to refuse, individually and collectively, to participate in business models that threaten our livelihoods.

3) We believe in Fair Pay; the right of content creators to a fair share of the wealth our work generates.

4) We believe in Collective Representation; the right of all creators of cultural content to aggregate our power to protect our livelihoods and our art forms.

Join Us!

If you are a NYC area creator of cultural content and would like to get involved, please contact us at cccnewyorkcity@gmail.com (or the form below). We want you at our meetings and events. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

If you are outside the New York area, please visit the national CCC website: www.contentcreatorscoalition.org.

by Trichordist Editor

Is The Piracy Threat Really Decreasing?

Flat or declining revenues at major media companies like Sony and Viacom is contrary to recent reports that digital piracy is declining.

Guest post by Robert Steele

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion surrounding a few articles suggesting that online piracy is decreasing.  From where I sit that is not the case.  I am the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer of a company that helps monetize copyrighted intellectual property (IP) for the artists and holders of copyrights.

A brief overview of the public filings of Viacom and Sony, two major players in the production and distribution of copyrighted intellectual property shows that one has no growth over 3 years and the other has declining revenues. In fact, Moody’s recently expressed concern that Sony will be unable to maintain future profitability and has downgraded the Company’s debt rating to “junk” status. Due to various external circumstances including “rapid changes in technology”, Moody’s announced that it would be difficult for Sony to improve their financial position in the near-term

Much of the claims that piracy is declining are based on a new report published by Sandvine,  To get our levels set correctly here, Sandvine is a Canadian company, which as it ends up, makes software to assist ISPs to “shape” i.e. control, BitTorrent traffic.  BitTorrent is the primary tool for file sharing and pirating content online.  This report declares that “Filesharing now accounts for less than 10% of total daily traffic in North America”  This has been widely touted in various blogs as a decrease in piracy.  Specifically, the report states that during the second half of 2013, filesharing’s share of aggregate peak-period traffic in North America (not worldwide) fell to 8.93% from 10.5%. This data is being shown as proof that the proliferation of legal services that distribute copyrighted content such as Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, are helping to combat the fight against piracy.

If we had written a narrative regarding the same data, we would have stated that BitTorrent piracy grew by data volume during the period.  Since Sandvine’s clients are ISPs, they don’t want to highlight this embarrassing fact about how their clients are harming companies like Sony and Viacom, so they feature the statistics that paint their client’s in the best light. 

In regards to their narrative on their findings we see problems with the report–all of which should cause companies, investors and owners of copyrighted IP to be skeptical of any optimism about the decline of online piracy. Among them:

1) The report estimates that total traffic from the first half of 2013 to the second half of 2013 increased 20-30%.  This means that the total amount of data used for filesharing increased.  The 8.93% of internet traffic in the second half of 2013 is more movies, music and video games consumed illegally than the 10.5% indicated in the first half of 2013 because the overall “pie” grew by 20% to 30%.

2) The report shows BitTorrent’s share of total Internet traffic increased, as did total volume of BitTorrent traffic, everywhere else they measure–Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America (as it has in every report published).

3) The narrative does not take into account the increase use of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) or proxies increasingly used by BitTorrent users to “mask” where their traffic is coming from. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) traffic, used by VPN services, more than doubled in the past year (as reported by Sandvine).  They include data on VPN usage but leave that out of their analysis on filesharing.

4) We believe that the report is misleading when it states “Long are the days when filesharing accounted for over 31% total daily traffic, as we had revealed in our 2008 report.”  The total amount of fixed data transferred on the internet grew by more than 310% between 2008 and 2012 from 9,927 Petabytes per month to 31,388 Petabytles per month.  We are still waiting for total 2013 internet traffic totals.  So 8.93% of internet traffic in 2012 used for filesharing is a lot more music and movies files than 31% of internet traffic in 2008.

4) The report hinges its filesharing debate solely on public BitTorrent, ignoring the rise in popularity of “dark nets” including Tor and other encrypted digital lockers used for online piracy.

5) Despite the increase in total traffic, U.S. digital track sales decreased for the first time ever in 2013, dropping from 1.34 billion to 1.26 billion, according to Nielsen SoundScan. CD sales also declined, dropping 14% to 165 million.

The data provided by Sandvine says nothing about the number of files share, or the number of files shared per person. That is the information that matters, and what we attempt to solve everyday at Rightscorp.

Ignoring all the other factors, this is reason alone to question the claim that “piracy is decreasing”.

VPNs and Proxies

US BitTorrent users are becoming more savvy and turning to VPNs to mask their traffic from their ISP. It has been shown that this method is effective in avoiding piracy lawsuits and strikes. TorrentFreak, a popular piracy blog, reports “a majority” of BitTorrent users are turning to VPNs.

The results in the Sandvine report show that SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) traffic, used by VPN services, has increased significantly over the last report, more than doubling from 2.5% to 5.4% of total traffic. Since actual traffic has increased even more, the true usage of VPNs could be significantly more.

As TorrentFreak pointed out

“This increase in VPN use also means that the actual percentage of BitTorrent traffic is even higher, since the Sandvine report puts the traffic generated by these users in the SSL category.”

Other Piracy Channels

The metric Sandvine uses for all “piracy” is BitTorrent. This is flawed, as recently many pirates have been abandoning torrent-based peer-to-peer file sharing, partially because there are many other ways available to share material.

“Dark nets” such as Tor and other encrypted digital lockers have experienced an exponential growth in number of users in recent months. Particularly following the attention drawn to them by the Edward Snowden case. Other popular anonymous networks including I2P, and Freenet have combined to more than double in size in the past year.

The limitations in Sandvine’s tracking data for anonymous networks such as Tor suggest that the report is missing one of the fast growing segments of the piracy market.

What Does This Mean?

Well, to be frank, piracy is not decreasing, and investors should be skeptical about reports stating that it is. On the contrary, there are many reasons to believe that it is in fact on the rise. Artists are still unable to properly monetize their copyrights.

Hopefully, with services, including our own at Rightscorp (RIHT), artists will be able to protect what is theirs. Additionally, Rightscorp has been successful at getting VPN companies to adopt its copyright monetization services to discourage misuse of VPN services.

The cultural acceptance of piracy–particularly with young people–creates a lot of media incentives to mask the consequences of this system. It also leads to optimistic reports like the one above.

by Trichordist Editor

Google pretends to care about human rights | Vox Indie

It’s not the message, but the messenger–a hypocrite to its very corporate core.  If Google as a company truly believed in “human rights” why does it continue to disregard the rights of artists at every turn?  Perhaps those who doodle for Google might want to review the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 27, paragraph 2) which includes this passage:

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Why is Google so keen on “fair play” and the rights of athletes to compete, but when it comes to artists, not so much?

READ THE FULL STORY AT VOX INDIE:
http://voxindie.org/google-lgbt-olympic-doodle-opportunism

by Trichordist Editor

U2 Manager Paul McGuinness on Artists Rights and Piracy

What needs to be done is simple, take the sites down and keep them down. If the pirates can manage to replace their sites instantly with legions of bots, Google, with their brilliant algorithm engineers can counter it.

We need the technology giants like Google to do the things that labels, the publishers, the artists, the writers repeatedly ask them to do. They need to show corporate and social responsibility. Take down the illegal sites, keep them down and clear the way for the legal digital distributers like iTunes, Spotify, Deezer, the new Jimmy Iovine Beats service, which promises to be a very serious competitor. Those services now exist, it is no longer acceptable to say that the music industry is not available, not making its wares available online.

We’re all aware in this room that subscription is now replacing downloading — legal or illegal — but we do need those mega corporations to make a genuine effort to cooperate and feed the industry that has been so good to them.

READ THE FULL STORY AT BILLBOARD:
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/global/5893877/u2-manager-paul-mcguinness-receives-billboards-industry-icon-award

RELATED:

U2 Exploited by United Airlines, Jet Blue, HP, State Farm, Westin, Urban Outfitters, Sprint, AT&T, Amazon, Disney Resorts, Crate and Barrel

 

by Trichordist Editor

Google Can Bite Me | The Illusion of More

Never wanting to lose an opportunity to be bizarrely two-faced, Google is sending around a little graphic today to all you GMail users implying that stopping SOPA in January of 2012 actually enabled creativity to continue to thrive on the Web. Never mind that nothing in SOPA could have stopped you or me or any other would-be creator from uploading our works, ideas, or captured events to the Web; that’s just pesky reality.

But Google isn’t satisfied just to effect public policy in its own interests, it also wants to behave like the abusive and negligent father, who creepily shows up with a smile and a hug when his kid wins an award or becomes famous.

After all, this week isn’t just the anniversary of SOPA Blackout Day, it’s also the week Google received its 100 millionth takedown notice from recording artists who would rather not have their works exploited without permission or compensation. So, the whole, “we protected creativity together” message just kinda makes the skin crawl. Y’know?

READ THE FULL POST AT THE ILLUSION OF MORE:
http://illusionofmore.com/google-bite-me/

by Trichordist Editor

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

While Artists are Bitching About Spotify Royalties… Google, YouTube and Grooveshark are in the Getaway Car…

While artists bitch about low payments from Spotify royalties,  YouTube,  Grooveshark and The Pirate Bay pay artists less or even nothing.  The reason Spotify pays so little is because it’s forced to compete with illegally operating, unlicensed sites who pay nothing at all. Artists need to focus on the big picture.

Spotify has become the symbol of inequity for artists in the digital age, and we’re not saying artists are wrong to focus on the Spotify royalty payments as an example of this inequity. We’ve written our own criticisms of Music Streaming Math and our doubts that Spotify could ever actually scale to be a sustainable business for both artists and labels.

Whatever the criticisms we may have of Spotify it is important to note that they are legal and licensed with secured rights.

The truth is that Spotify is only a symptom of a much larger disease.  The actual cause of the inequity is mass scale, enterprise level, corporate sanctioned piracy for profit. Ad Funded Piracy is the primary mechanism by which the work of artists and musicians has been devalued to fractions of cent and here’s how it works.

Imagine creating a business where you could profit by attracting every fan of every musician and band.

Imagine not requiring any licenses or permission from any of the musicians and bands.

Imagine selling advertising based on not only the overall popularity of the musicians and bands, but also from providing free streaming and/or downloads to the music of the musicians and bands.

Imagine not having to pay musicians and bands and keeping all of the advertising (and/or subscription/access fee) money.

GOOGLE:

One of the most accessible points of piracy starts at Google search and they can absolutely do more to assist legal and licensed businesses that pay artists. Digital Music News recently reported that “Google Receives Its 100 Millionth Piracy Notice. Nothing Changes…” As we’ve seen with Google’s swift retribution to Rap Genius, search can very effective to discourage or remove bad actors from the legitimate marketplace (When it is in Google’s business interest to do so!). Google is also tracking over 200,000 known domains engaged in active piracy. This seems like an easy problem to solve.

Not only did a series of research studies by the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab identify Google as one of the primary companies feeding advertising to pirate sites, but there is actually a longer darker history of Google assisting illegally operating business online.

Artists don’t get paid anything from pirate sites profiting from advertising revenue. This is the big one, those who pay nothing at all but distribute the most music at the highest volumes.

YOUTUBE:

YouTube is a company that was intentionally founded and designed to profit by ripping off artists, musicians and creators. These practices are well known from court documents published by sources such as Daily Finance.

It appears that much of the music on YouTube may still be generating profit for YouTube but not so much for musicians. East Bay Ray of the Dead Kennedy’s details the state of things here on NPR.

Even when YouTube is paying, they are paying half as much (or less) than Spotify on a per play basis.

GROOVESHARK:

We’d love to hear from artists (musicians and songwriters) who actually have their music legally licensed on Grooveshark. And, for those who do, we’d love to see what some of those royalty statements look like. We can’t imagine that Grooveshark is paying better than Spotify and that’s only for those artists who may actually have a valid license from Grooveshark.

As of this writing Grooveshark is still embattled in a number of lawsuits, which at one time included every major label. Essentially Grooveshark designed their business to be like an audio and music only version of YouTube. We detailed their practices in the post “Grooveshark, Notice and Shakedown”.

We don’t know how much money Grooveshark is making, but it’s enough to put the companies founders on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List… It seems that it is the (new boss) gatekeepers controlling the money and once again it is the artists themselves getting screwed.

PANDORA:

As of this writing Pandora has abandoned it’s ill conceived attempt at legislation that would have reduced artists royalties by 85%. But let us not forget that the arguments used by Pandora for attempting that move were also motivated by the downward economic pressure placed on artists whereby the majority of music consumption is happening with no compensation at all due to various forms of Ad Funded Piracy.

Welcome to the Exploitation Economy.

We suggest that artists focus on the disease that is creating the symptoms of businesses like Spotify.

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


by trichordist

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