Weatherley: ‘Cutting off ad revenue to illegal sites is key to piracy battle’ | Music Week
“Following the money is the key to shutting down the vast majority of websites that host illegal material,” said Weatherley. “This report explores a number of issues surrounding the piracy debate and I hope that it will spur further discussion both in the UK and, given the international nature of this problem, in other countries across the world.
“As the Intellectual Property Adviser to the Prime Minister, I feel that it is my role to highlight just how damaging piracy is to the UK economy. It is paramount that we curb advertising revenue that is going to pirates who are, in turn, seriously damaging our creative industries.”
Commander Steve Head, head of economic crime at City of London Police, said: “Disrupting revenue to pirate websites is vital to combating online intellectual property piracy and I therefore welcome the recommendations in Mike Weatherley’s report. We must take the profit out of this type of criminality and where legitimate companies, such as payment providers, are facilitating that profit they must be held to account if they fail to act.
READ THE FULL STORY AT MUSIC WEEK:
http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/weatherley-cutting-off-ad-revenue-to-illegal-sites-is-key-to-piracy-battle/058830
The Pirate Bay must be fought for the sake of exploited musicians | The Sydney Morning Herald
In Australia, there is very little that a musician can do to stop illegal streaming and downloading sites from using their work. These illegal sites make massive amounts of money from ads and nothing goes back to the artists who provide the content. Not one cent.
Sites such as the Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents exploit artists in the worst sense of the word. These illegal sites do not support musicians’ careers. They deprive musicians of the right to have their work valued in a free and open market.
The success of these sites is predicated on taking without paying on a massive scale. In fact, that is their business model. They don’t create anything. I feel infuriated when I see my work and my friends’ work being used in this way by people who don’t give a damn.
READ THE FULL STORY AT THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD:
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-pirate-bay-must-be-fought-for-the-sake-of-exploited-musicians-20140623-zsiqo.html
2.5 Million P2P Users Worldwide Illegally Shared The Top 60 Video Game Titles | Digital Journal
It’s not just music…
“With most of these games being $20 and $50 or more to download, the loss of revenue from this amount of piracy is huge,” said Kyle Reed, Co-Founder and COO, CEG TEK. “There’s been a lot of debate about whether or not piracy is really an issue for the massively successful video game business, but if publishers like Electronic Arts are losing nearly $30M a day in potential revenue on 13 of their hottest titles, that’s something to be concerned about.”
READ THE FULL STORY AT DIGITAL JOURNAL:
http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1983503
Songwriter’s Pie Anyone? | Shelly Peiken @ HuffPo
Financially, it’s less and less possible for a songwriter to make a decent living. I know of a few who have contributed to hit songs that are still having trouble paying their rent. I can’t help but wonder about the aspiring up and comer with big dreams and empty pockets, pockets that might still be pretty bare even after their dream comes true. Some reason that if they get their name on a few big hits it will open the door to bigger and better opportunities. They may be right about that but it remains to be seen whether the resulting royalties will allow them to make a down payment or put their kids through college.
READ THE FULL POST AT THE HUFFINGTON POST:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shelly-peiken/songwriting-hollywood-music-industry_b_5509579.html
Artists Take To The Streets to Protest Google/YouTube in NYC | NY Times
Last week, the dispute spilled out into the streets of New York. On Saturday afternoon, a few dozen supporters of the Content Creators Coalition, an artists’ advocacy group, picketed Google’s office in Chelsea, playing New Orleans-style marches on horns and carrying signs like “Economic justice in the digital domain” and “What YouTube pays? Nothing.”
Marc Ribot, a guitarist who has played with stars like Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, summarized how the larger conflict over streaming revenue affected artists’ careers.
“If we can’t make enough from digital media to pay for the record that we’ve just made,” Mr. Ribot said, “then we can’t make another one.”
READ THE FULL STORY AT THE NEW YORK TIMES:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/business/media/small-music-labels-see-youtube-battle-as-part-of-war-for-revenue.html
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/
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/
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/
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/
The Trichordist 
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