In future, if artists have to rely almost exclusively on the income from these services, they’ll be out of work within a year. Some of us have other sources of income, such as live concerts, and some of us have reached the point where we can play to decent numbers of people because a record label believed in us at some point in the past.
I can’t deny that label-support gave me a leg up – though not every successful artist needs it. So, yes, I could conceivably survive, as I don’t rely on the pittance that comes my way from music streaming, as could Yorke and some of the others.
But up-and-coming artists don’t have that advantage – some haven’t got to the point where they can make a living on live performances and licensing, so what do they think of these services?
We were also very happy to see this plug for the Content Creators Coalition. Be sure to read the full interview at The Guardian, the link is below.
The major labels are happy, the consumer is happy and the CEOs of the web services are happy. All good, except no one is left to speak for those who actually make the stuff. In response to this lack of representation, some artists – of all types, not just musicians – are forming an organisation called the Content Creators Coalition, an entity that speaks out on artists’ behalf.
We’re not sure how The London School Of Economics (LSE) could get something so basic so wrong as to suggest that because a some contemporary major label and heritage artists may be making more money from live shows (arena concert grosses) that somehow basic artists rights are not important for protection.
The New Music Express reports that Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich get’s it right in response the the LSE’s shortsighted misunderstanding about artists revenue streams.
“T-shirts and tickets are nothing to do with ‘copyright and creation’, which is the supposed subject of this document.
I hope the government sees how ridiculous this document seems to people who make records.
The authors are ‘pro piracy’ and they wish to influence the UK government’s upcoming review of digital copyright law.
It’s madness.”
Indeed.
It appears that the LSE report would be suggesting that artists never should have been paid royalties from the distribution of recorded music because there have always been other ways to make money from music.
If one were to truly let this logic sink in, it would appear that the LSE is making a general argument against all copyright because the distribution of copyrighted works is only a loss leader to live performances, synchronization fees or endorsement deals. This is of course absurd on every level.
This lopsided logic from LSE seems to favor illegally operating internet corporations distributing music without consent or licenses. We know that there is a lot of money being made in the illegal distribution of music online and the LSE’s report seems aligned with the economic interests of those who knowingly exploit artists for profit.
We expect better from such a respected institution then to ignore the economic interests by companies and corporations that are profiting illegally from advertising supported music piracy.
Visit the top torrent search engines, and you’ll find ad calls from Yahoo, Google, Turn, Zedo, RocketFuel, AdRoll, CPX Interactive and others.
According to AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley, it’s an easy problem to fix, but ad companies are attracted by the revenue torrent sites can generate for them. Kelley said his company refuses to serve ads to torrent sites and other sites facilitating the distribution of pirated content. It’s easy to do technically, he said, but others refuse to do it.
“We want everyone to technically stop their customers from advertising on these sites, but there’s a financial incentive to keep doing so,” he said. “Companies that aren’t taking a stand against this are making a lot of money.”
You are no doubt aware of the hearings currently being undertaken by the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet – part of a major review of existing copyright law (and if not, I just told you). As can be expected in this enlightened (or, at least, interconnected) age – recordings are available on the web and I’ve been trying to catch up with the debate.
Whilst watching the hearing from two weeks ago (with representatives from the “rights holder side” present) I couldn’t help feeling that none of the witnesses was able to articulate just why copyright was so important to the nation as a whole – not just the small portion of it that actually owns marketable copyrights. Given that the House of Representatives represents all Americans, it would seem that such an explanation is deserved.
This got me thinking of how I would go about explaining it and I offer it for your reading pleasure.
This post by Devlin Hartline at Copyhype was Cross-posted on the Law Theories blog.
In the never-ending copyright debate, one often comes across certain words the usage of which both sides vehemently disagree upon. One such point of contention is the use of the word “theft” to describe copyright infringement. Ars Technica ran an article a few years back where Vice President Joe Biden was quoted as saying that “[p]iracy is flat, unadulterated theft.” Copyhype’s Terry Hart had a post a week later discussing the infringement-as-theft meme, mentioning the fact that even Justice Breyer, a copyright skeptic, had referred to deliberate infringement as “garden-variety theft.”1 The response from the other side of the debate was predictable, with the usual suspects demanding that copyright infringement is not theft—though the skeptics conspicuously neglected to define the word theft or to actually explain why it’s wrong to refer to infringement as theft.
Both the PS3 and the XBOX 360 have anti-piracy and digital rights management mechanisms in place that lock out users who are detected to have loaded cracked or unauthorized versions of the games.
It’s no wonder then that Grand Theft Auto 5 is the fastest selling entertainment product to reach one billion dollars in gross revenue. In just three days the game that took over $250 million dollars and years to produce had set a new record.
This is what we should all be looking at. This is the kind of wild imagination, innovation and investment that is possible when piracy is managed into acceptable levels. Of course we know there may be people who find functional work-a-rounds, but they are largely the exception, not the rule, and the numbers pretty much prove it.
What is interesting about the release of GTA V is that it looks more like the release of an iphone than a new album or movie. In other words, it is a digital entertainment release with the same potential of sales as a piece of hardware (or pre-internet piracy entertainment products).
This alone illustrates the possibilities for the size and scope of the digital entertainment market with adequate (not perfect) anti-piracy measures in place. You’ll also note that the #2 and #3 fastest selling products are also console video games which employ the same anti-piracy mechanisms.
With an estimated production/marketing budget of $265 million, GTA V is not only the most expensive video game of all time, but also more expensive than most of today’s Hollywood blockbusters. Considering this, it seems only fair to compare GTA’s commercial success to that of Hollywood movies.
“By default, copyright closes the door on countless ways that people can share, build upon, and remix each other’s work, possibilities that were unimaginable when those laws were established.”
NO IT DOESN”T. IT JUST MEANS THAT YOU HAVE TO ASK PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR OF THE WORK IF YOU USE IT PUBLICLY AND/OR COMMERCIALLY EXPLOIT IT. HOW CAN ANY DECENT HUMAN BEING BE AGAINST THAT?
Permission is the foundation of civilization or have you forgotten that Ms Caverly?
But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Chief of Creative Commons would utter such idiocy. For they claim they offer a license “that lets creators take copyright into their own hands”. WTF? It actually does the opposite. Isn’t this a false statement? False advertising? Fraud? Reading that statement I can’t imagine there are NOT artists out there that unwittingly put their now valuable work into Creative Commons thinking they were gaining more control over their work when in actuality they were doing the opposite. I’m not a lawyer but isn’t there a problem misleading people in this manner?
Plain old normal copyright IS creators right to their works in their own hands.
Creative Commons licenses are a permanent surrendering of some or all of your copyrights as an artist. To use the same analogy these CC licenses take creators’ works from their hands.
Now some people see Creative Commons as a elaborate put up for a particular large Internet corporation that would like nothing better than to monetize every book, film, photograph and song without ever having to ask permission of the author. They often point to Sergey Brin’s (Google) financial support of the organization and the fact that his mother-in-law is the vice chair. Or they point out that their board is completely dominated by people with ties to technology companies and opponents of Copyright. I don’t agree with this. The pseudo-intellectual Creative Commons movement was afoot long before Google existed. Still one can certainly argue that Creative Commons are “useful idiots” and I won’t object.
But here is the question that no one is asking:
“Why are Creative Commons licenses even necessary?”.
For you can do everything you do with Creative Commons that you can do with old-fashioned-non-googly copyright! For instance I allow the non-commercial sharing of recordings of my bands live shows on the non-profit Internet Music Archive. There are thousands of our recordings on the internet music archive. All I had to do was state on our website that we allow this. Voila. Thousands of recordings appeared.
Neither do we object to fans posting ukele cover versions of “Take the Skinheads Bowling” on their facebook pages. And may I remind you that the Grateful Dead enacted their famous taping policy without a Creative Commons license?
Photographers who wish to freely share their photos in any manner commercial or non commercial may state so on their websites without using a Creative Commons license. Plus they have the added advantage of being able to change their minds later. Something that is not possible with a Creative Commons License.
Why is it left to me rather than a real journalist to point out that there is no point to Creative Commons licenses? Where are the grown-ups?
Well perhaps I’m too hasty. There may be ONE point to these Creative Common licenses:
They serve to confuse the public as to the true nature of copyright. And that looks suspiciously like propaganda to me. “Useful idiots” indeed!
Therefore we hereby present our 3rd Nyan Cat Award to Cathy Caverly of Creative Commons. Enjoy.
From the forthcoming documentary Unsound: Bad Religion guitarist and Epitaph Records founder Brett Gurewitz talks about how large tech corporations make millions of dollars selling advertising- essentially making people the product, without them even realizing. The promise of free or cheap music is often used to draw eyeballs to websites, apps, and social networking platforms, allowing corporations to make large amounts of money from advertising. The public is generally unaware and happy to have free/cheap music, corporations make tons of money from advertising, but how is the musician benefiting from this?
Unsound uncovers the dramatic collapse of the music industry and its impact on musicians and creators of all kinds trying to survive in the ‘age of free’.
WHO WE ARE
A dedicated group of artists, creators, and stakeholders are forming a new and unprecedented coalition. This coalition will allow the people who create the content that powers the web — recording artists, songwriters, journalists, filmmakers, producers, photographers, visual artists, and performers — to join together and exercise their collective voice in shaping the future of their industries.
If you are a professional artist, manager, or creator of what is often described as ‘content’, please join us. Sign up on our email list and we will contact you soon with details on how you can get involved.
WHY WE ARE ORGANIZING
Creators of all content have the right to a collective voice. We are joining together to represent the interests of participating creators in order to reshape our industries into fair and sustainable environments.
HOW WE FUNCTION
We are presently developing the legal, organizational, and technical infrastructure to create a unique organization for creators: one that harnesses the advantages of a representational and participatory structure and provides a platform for members to suggest actions, provide feedback, and vote directly in coalition campaigns.
CCC MISSION STATEMENT
We believe that individual artists cannot be expected to negotiate with corporations the economic size of nation-states. As professional creators of cultural content we join together to aggregate our power and to represent our interests in discussions and decisions that not only impact our ability to thrive from our work but, also enrich society with the benefits of a flourishing creative economy.
This may be the single most important piece of work to date that explores the rights and concerns of creators in the digital age. The film details how Google has made plans to commercially monetize and monopolize all creative works for their own corporate profit.
The goal of accumulating all human knowledge in one repository has been a dream since ancient times. Only recently, however, has that dream become a reality. Quietly and behind closed doors, Google has been executing a project to scan and digitize every printed word on the planet. Working with the world’s most prestigious libraries, the webmasters are reinventing the limits of copyright in the name of free access to anyone, anywhere. What can possibly be wrong with this? As “Google and the World Brain reveals,” a whole lot.
Some argue that Google’s actions represent aggressive theft on an enormous scale, others see them as an attempt to monopolize our shared cultural heritage, and still others view the project as an attempt to flatten our minds by consolidating complex ideas into searchable “extra long tweets.”
At first slowly, and then with intensifying conviction, a diverse coalition mobilizes to stop the fulfillment of this ambitious dream. Incisive and riveting as it uncovers a high-stakes multinational heist, Ben Lewis’s film voices an important alternative to the technological utopianism of our time.
Faza at The Cynical Musician explores the question of control in copyright.
Copyright “skeptics”, like TechMike, tend to focus on the language of the “Copyright Clause” and construct elaborate theories about what “promoting the progress of science and the useful arts” really means. While they’re at it, they may wish to also consult the dictionary with regards to the meaning of the word “secure”2 and how it isn’t a synonym for “grant” – though that is besides the point here. Giovanetti rightly points out that promoting progress is the goal of the Copyright Clause and doesn’t actually say much about the means (that’s done in the other bit, about securing exclusive rights). What I wish to do today is to examine how the control aspect of copyright helps promote progress and why it is important.
The Trichordist 
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