Rosanne Cash Testifies Before Congress In Defense Of Artists’ Rights | American Songwriter

I am a singer/songwriter, author and performer. I wanted to be a songwriter from the time I was a teenager. I thought songwriting was an honorable, even noble profession. I believe that songwriting is far beyond just self-­‐expression, but a powerful means of service: we, songwriters and musicians, help people to understand themselves better by helping them to feel— through music. We shine light on the dark corners of the soul. We help reveal the nooks and crannies of our shared humanity. We provide a community for the language of the heart. As Hans Christian Andersen said, where words fail, music speaks.

READ THE FULL STORY AT AMERICAN SONGWRITER:
http://www.americansongwriter.com/2014/06/songwriter-u-rosanne-cash-testifies-congress-defense-artists-rights/

by Trichordist Editor

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

Privacy Trumps Piracy: Google’s Double Standard | Creativity Tech

Google’s Poor Track Record on Piracy

We reported on the 100 million takedown request milestone that Google sheepishly pushed past earlier this year. Compared with the rapid action the company has taken on European privacy rights, the earlier figure and the lack of action that it represents is even more astonishing.

And it’s not only privacy where Google flexes its significant muscle to disrupt illicit operations.

Since becoming the world’s most popular search engine, accounting for roughly 70% of North American searches and as much as 90% of those in Europe, the company has worked tirelessly to upgrade its algorithm to destroy low quality sites that aim to game Google’s system.

Those sites, it says, devalue its search product and leave users frustrated from a sub par experience. Sounds a lot like poor quality piracy sites that are riddled with malware, doesn’t it? So those sites should really receive similar punishment in the form of demotion or even being stripped from Google’s results. Instead, the company maintains a double standard that now stretches back more than a decade.

READ THE FULL STORY AT CREATIVITY TECH:
http://creativitytech.com/google-privacy-piracy-double-standard/

by Trichordist Editor

Google ordered by BC court to block websites selling pirated goods: Equustek Solutions Inc. v. Jack | Barry Sookman

The decision made several important findings related to enforcing rights online including that:
 
* the court had territorial jurisdiction over Google
 
* the court had the jurisdictional competence to make a blocking order under its broad equitable jurisdiction even if it would have extra-territorial effects
 
* URL blocking was not as effective as website blocking
 
* the balance of convenience favored granting a blocking order to assist the plaintiffs in enforcing their judgment against defendants who continued to violate their intellectual property rights
 

 
READ THE FULL POST AT BARRY SOOKMAN:
http://www.barrysookman.com/2014/06/18/google-ordered-by-bc-court-to-block-websites-selling-pirated-goods-equustek-solutions-inc-v-jack/

by trichordist

YouTube Squeeze on Indies Instructive | Illusion Of More

Very insightful and accurate analysis of our digital life and the online ecosystem which devalues the rights of the individual in favor of unprecedented corporate power against citizens.

Tube, yes. You, not so much.

If there has been one consistent theme in everything I’ve written since diving into the morass we call the digital age, it’s that the Internet is not ours despite all appearances to the contrary. Like it or not, all the populist, free-speech rhetoric that’s been spoon-fed to the public by the chief propellorheads of the land is just a gateway drug meant to dull our senses so we don’t notice the monopolistic power grab that’s been taking place. No, the Internet is not ours so much as it belongs to a very small consortium players, most especially Google, which controls nearly all search and nearly all advertising worldwide.

As I argued during the heated squabble over SOPA, these companies don’t really give a damn about free speech or about liberating creators and consumers of content from the media elite gatekeepers; they simply want to be the new media elite, and have the potential to be far more ruthless gatekeepers. Instead of an oligopoly of studios, labels, and publishers we’re gleefully handing over absolute power to a couple of companies, not only calling it progress but even more shockingly calling it democratic.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE ILLUSION OF MORE:
http://illusionofmore.com/youtube-indies/

by trichordist

Musicians fear they’ll take a beating | Winnipeg Free Press

SAN FRANCISCO — Recording artist Zoe Keating only needs to look at her earnings to zero in on why she has misgivings about Apple Inc. buying Beats Electronics.

The cellist made $38,196 selling downloads on Apple’s iTunes last year, along with about $34,000 from three other download services. By contrast, five streaming outlets, from Spotify to Pandora Media, netted her just $6,381.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE WINNIPEG FREE PRESS:
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/music/musicians-fear-theyll-take-a-beating-261411471.html

by Trichordist Editor

YouTube’s Ultimatum and The Economic Survival Of Musicians | Hypebot

By copyright and intellectual property attorney Wallace E. J. Collins III, Esq..

The most serious problem facing the artist community is that, at some point, it becomes economically unfeasible to pursue a career as an artist, songwriter or musician. Of course, as has been the case for many decades, most musicians barely survived without the dreaded day job. However, this extreme downward pressure on the creators of original audio and audio/visual content may force matters to a breaking point the likes of which the creative community has never seen.

No kidding.

READ THE FULL STORY AT HYPEBOT:
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2014/06/youtubes-ultimatum-and-the-economic-survival-of-musicians.html

by trichordist