http://www.copyrightinformation.org/the-copyright-alert-system/
Let the screaming begin…
Artists Rights Watch – Monday Feb 25, 2013
A Weekly Review of Artists Rights, Copyright and Technology News for Creators from Around The Web.
THE NEW YORK TIMES:
* For Music Industry, a Story of Two Googles
…as long as the search side of Google causes friction with the music industry, its other side — the one that is trying to compete with Apple, Amazon and every other digital music service out there — will face some rough patches.
SF GATE:
* New tune at SF MusicTech Summit
The freewheeling era of file sharing, it appears, is slowly coming to a close as artists begin to assert their rights and tech companies consider business alliances with the creators they once flagrantly ignored.
“Here we are, stuck with all these people who want music for free,” said Dave Allen, founding member of Gang of Four and interactive strategist at the branding agency North. “We have to find a way for musicians to make a living.”
SF WEEKLY:
* SF MusicTech: Dead Kennedys’ East Bay Ray Lashes Out at Internet “Pimps”
“There’s opportunists on the Internet that have taken advantage of the artists,” he said, at one point calling them “pimps.” The slim royalties from streaming services, coupled with the proliferation of free MP3s online, meant the music industry was “selling a free ride on a carnival horse, but they’re starving the carnival horse.”
SOLVEIG
* Recap SF Music Tech Summit XII 2013
REUTERS:
* Content economics, part 1: advertising
TV is still the monster, the elephant: for all the talk of cord-cutting, Americans have clearly voted that, given the choice, they’d much rather have cable TV than broadband internet.
And for web-based publishers, the situation is much, much worse even than this chart makes it look.
SEATTLE WEEKLY:
* The Misplaced Zeal of Aaron Swartz
The late activist’s efforts helped put power and public sympathy into the hands of corporations at the expense of artists, musicians, and the people.
Past and present facilitators of digital piracy like Napster, Audiogalaxy, Grokster, Megaupload, and The Pirate Bay are not misunderstood beacons of freedom of speech. They are digital black-market distributors who never asked artists’ permission to feature their works or paid creators a penny, and whose owners took money for themselves via venture-capital funding, subscription fees, or advertising revenue.
DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
* The Pirate Bay Is Actually Suing Someone for Trademark Infringement…
* I’m East Bay Ray. And I Think YouTube Has Forced 12,000 Musicians Out of Work…
* Spotify, Pandora & Google Have a New Problem: The New York Times…
MUSIC ALLY:
* Writing or speaking about streaming music screwing artists? Read these articles first
* Harlem Shake tops Billboard Hot 100 chart thanks to YouTube streams
ALL THINGS D:
* Big Music Says Google Isn’t Cracking Down on Pirate Sites, After All
“We have found no evidence that Google’s policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy.”
THE VERGE:
* Spotify pushing labels to lower costs, open up free service to phones
Spotify, the popular music subscription service, is due to meet in the coming weeks with its major counterparts in the record industry to renew their licensing agreements. The Verge has learned that managers at Spotify are expected to ask for substantial price breaks from the music labels as well as the rights to extend its free pricing tier to mobile devices.
VOX INDIE:
* Smokey the Bear Fuels Piracy’s Fire?
* Google Wants to Pass the Buck on Piracy, but Keep Theirs?
Any progress in severing piracy’s blood supply is a certainly a good thing BUT for Google to claim the company is working to “block funding” of pirate sites–while simultaneously profiting from them–seems more than a tad disingenuous. What about blocking access to funding via their AdSense accounts on YouTube and Blogger? Why focus on Visa and Mastercard when one’s own house is in such disarray?
COPYRIGHT ALLIANCE:
* The vine should suffer, not the artist.
THE CYNICAL MUSICIAN:
* The Limits of Copyright
* Copyright Maximalism
The misapplication tends to be especially apparent in the comments section of TCM, where the strangest things are brought up as examples of what would happen if we let up the good fight against copyright. The fact that they strangely failed to materialise over the 300 years or so that copyright had been in existence prior to 2000 (when it tended to be enforced a good deal better) doesn’t throw those who would put forward such theories.
FORBES:
* Congressman Says He’ll Propose Ban On 3D-Printable Gun Magazines
THE TELEGRAPH UK:
* Google looks to Cut Funds to Illegal Sites
* Google’s Copyright War Rages On
In private, the creative industries argue that Google’s supposed favoured status began in Number 10.
David Cameron’s former director of strategy, Steve Hilton, is married to Rachel Whetstone, head of communications at Google. It handed Ms Whetstone a “hotline” to Number 10, opponents argue. Although the couple now live in California, that hotline is “still hot”, says one source. “But it doesn’t matter anyway, because the damage is done.”
The close relationship between Number 10 and the top brass at Google’s Mountain View headquarters has become the framework for all subsequent discussion, critics say. It was emblematic when, nearly a year ago, Downing Street was apparently so in tune with Google’s thinking that the company’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, and the Chancellor, George Osborne, published a joint leader in The Financial Times.
COMPUTER WORLD:
* A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace
You allege that government has had no role in the Internet, and for this reason it has no claim to the Internet today, but this accusation is founded on nothing more than ignorance and superstition. Government labs and government-funded research programs gave birth to the Internet’s essential technologies, and government policies continue to guide the development of important Internet innovations today.
SALON:
* Stop pretending cyberspace exists – Treating the Internet as a mythical country makes us dumber
If you’re not convinced by now that the very notion of cyberspace is silly, try substituting “fax” or “telephone” or “telegraph” for “cyber” in words and sentences. The results will be comical. “Activists denounced government criminal surveillance policies for colonizing Fax Space.” “Should Telephone Space be commercialized?” Again, the point is not that telecommunications should not be structured and governed in the public interest, but rather that the debate about the public interest is not well served by the Land of Oz metaphor.
SPIEGEL.DE:
* ‘Liquid Democrazy’: Pirate Party Sinks amid Chaos and Bickering
The Pirate Party has been too busy tearing itself apart, with members fighting leaders, who are bickering among themselves and antagonizing the members too. In just the last two days, party leaders for the states of Baden-Württemberg and Brandenburg have stepped down, citing the negative climate. “The atmosphere is so poisonous, there’s hardly any constructive work taking place anymore,” says Udo Vetter
TORRENT FREAK:
* Former File-Sharing Site Admin Fined 6.4 Million Euros
* Google Refuses to Index Huge Streaming Movie Portal Homepage
THE VOICE OF RUSSIA:
* US to crack down on intellectual property theft
The 141-page document refers to China at least 188 times. Russia is mentioned 45 times, and India is also mentioned.Those cases cited mostly involved employees stealing trade secrets on the job rather than cyber-attacks. US corporate victims of the theft included General Motors, Ford, DuPont, Dow Chemical, Motorola, Boeing and Cargill.
Hypebot Have No Defense of Ad Supported Piracy So They Resort To Name-Calling.
East Bay Ray of The Dead Kennedys and I had an informal bet going. Well maybe not a bet, just a sort of prediction that once Ray spoke against ad supported piracy at SF Music Tech, the music tech bloggers would start with the usual name calling.
Sure enough right on cue we see Bruce Houghton’s Hypebot giving Mike Masnick (see the “Google Shill List”) a platform to bash Ray and other artists. “Whining” “Old” “Grumpy” and “Rant” were some of the unfair and unbalanced terms that Ray and I predicted they would use in the de rigueur post–SF Music Tech cyber bullying. And they did.
This is pretty sad since ending ad supported piracy is a no-brainer—even Google and Yahoo! fall over themselves to try to explain their unexplainable connection (see USC Annenberg Innovation Lab report). Both artists and the legitimate music tech firms are negatively affected by ad supported piracy. For instance legitimate music streaming services have to compete against these same unlicensed services for ad revenue. Why the music tech space bloggers fail to grasp this is a mystery.
Bruce Houghton also owns the talent agency Skyline Agency. This agency tends to have a lot of “Old” and “Grumpy” artists that would probably go on a “Rant” if they were to see that their agency head is tacitly defending this practice. So we prepared a few screenshots.
Any comment Bruce? Do you think that this practice is acceptable? How do our “future” music models like streaming compete with the guys that don’t pay any royalties to artists? We’re all ears.
Pure Prairie League piracy brought to you by BMW.
Al Stewart By Celestion and zZounds.
The Smithereens By Priceline
Grand Funk Railroad By Banana Republic, Amazon and others.
Greg Sandoval is one of the great reporters on tech and music. While I don’t always agree with him, I think he’s fair and one thing I know for sure–he is old school when it comes to getting facts and sources right. So when Sandoval says Spotify is going back to the well to drive down artist royalties even further, you better believe that I believe him.
According to his story at the Verge:
About 70 percent of Spotify’s revenues pays music-licensing fees while another 20 percent covers customer acquisition, these sources said. That leaves 10 percent to pay all of the company’s other costs, including its much praised technology platform. Insiders have told The Verge that this cost structure zeroes out Spotify’s profits.
So brace yourself–Spotify is about to do a Pandora-style argument about how artists should take even less because Spotify’s “profits” are consumed by royalties. (And…
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MTP readers no doubt saw the coverage on last month’s installment of the USC-Annenberg Innovation Lab transparency report that identified ad networks that facilitated IP theft. Now we see that this month’s report names brands. You can read all about it here.
Here’s a sample of the top brands driving brand sponsored piracy and theft from artists:
Amazon
American Express
AT&T
BMW
Buick
Converse
Dropbox
Equifax
FingerHut
General Motors
Honda
K Swiss
Lenovo
Lexus
Mazda
Mercedes Benz
Nationwide Insurance
Nissan
Nokia
Progressive Insurance
Saks Fifth Avenue
Samsung
State Farm Insurance
Toyota
Transunion
Verizon
Victoria’s Secret
Visa
Volkswagen
WalMart
Artists Rights Watch – Monday Feb 11, 2013
A Weekly Recap of Artists Rights, Copyright and Technology News for Creators from Around The Web
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:
* Reappearing on YouTube: Illegal Movie Uploads
The recent problematic uploads may have undercut the rental effort. Movies produced by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, such as “I Am Number Four” and “Shanghai Noon” are available free on YouTube, even though the studio struck a rental deal through the site.
HYPEBOT:
* Spotify Listener Data Used To Predict Grammy Winners
THE GUARDIAN UK:
* Pirate sites are raking in advertising money from some multinationals
Sites such as Pirate Bay often portray themselves as altruistic, non-profit “freedom fighters”, when the truth is they’re nothing of the sort – their exploitation of artists for their own monetary gain is far worse than the most unscrupulous labels ever were, as they pocket large sums of ad revenue without having to invest it into developing the content they flog.
MUSIC TECH POLICY:
* Pirate Site Isohunt Selling Dead Kennedys Tickets
JAPAN DAILY PRESS:
* Japan’s ‘Operation Decoy File’ to help deter online piracy
THE DEANS LIST:
* Music, Copyright and New Technology in the News From a Creator’s Perspective 02/05/2013
COPYHYPE:
* Friday’s Endnotes – 02/08/13
* Bringing Reality Back to Copyright Debates
Smith and Telang found that of the papers based on empirical data (as opposed to theoretical models), 25 found economic harm from piracy, while only 4 found little or no harm. And for those who are skeptical of non-academic papers: Smith found that 12 peer-reviewed papers published in academic journals found a negative impact from piracy while only 2 did not (and there are legitimate questions concerning the methodology of those 2 outlier papers, some of which are explored in Stan Liebowitz’s 2005 article Economists’ Topsy-Turvy View of Piracy).
Evidence like this, of course, does not tell us where to go from here. But it is amazing how many who join with skeptics of copyright either don’t know about the scholarly record on piracy or don’t care.
DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
* The Average TuneCore Artist Now Makes $120 a Year…
* Spotify Executive: “We’re Totally Transparent, and We Definitely Live by That Principle.”
* In Just 3 Years, P2P Usage Has Dropped 35% In France…
FORBES:
* We Need Strong Copyright Laws Now More Than Ever
So why does CEA attack songwriters in this way? Flawed logic. They reason that member companies can make more money if they pay songwriters and other creators less. The truth is that music creators and technology companies need each other. Many innovative and wonderful music-related products are made by CEA members. But many of these products have no purpose without music. The copyright and associated costs—often pennies on the dollar—are deemed harmful. Make no mistake, the companies of the CEA believe in intellectual property. Just ask them about their own intellectual property, such as their patents or trademarks.
Mr. Shapiro’s conclusion is that copyright laws are hurting America. Nothing could be further from the truth.
CNET:
* Next-gen Xbox will require constant net connection
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER:
* Recording Academy Chief on the Grammys, Pandora and Getting Artists Paid (Q&A)
The problem is, in the transition of all this, we have to remember that it all comes back to the men and women who are creating this wonderful music, and do they have a real ability to make that a full-time vocation as opposed to a part-time hobby?
USWITCH:
* Fines to replace disconnections for internet pirates?
SMART COMPANY:
* Why Telstra plans to slow you down to fight online piracy
Telstra will soon conduct a “limited trial of a range of technical options for better managing broadband internet performance for our customers during peak periods”. One of those options is to “shape”, as the industry euphemism puts it, customers’ access to peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution networks such as BitTorrent.
PC PRO:
* Anti-piracy letter plans face delay over costs
COMPLEX:
* The 25 Most Important Civil Rights Moments in Music History
BILLBOARD:
* Business Matters: MP3 Stores Harder to Find as Google Search Removal Requests Accumulate
Legitimate MP3 links are becoming harder to find even as the RIAA has sent more than 3,400 removal requests to Google relating to approximately 10 million specific URLs from its search results. Legal stores like Amazon and Myxer, as well as legal streaming sites like YouTube and legal streams and downloads at music blogs, are buried under more illegal MP3 links than when Billboard.biz examined 30 artists in November.
Now, using the same 30 artists as before, it took an average of 11.06 search results to find the first legal search result of any kind and 26.84 search results to find the first legal MP3 store. In November, the results were 7.9 and 11.75, respectively. (Each search was conducted by typing in “MP3” and then the name of the artist. Two spellings were used for Ke$ha and P!nk.)
SONIC SCOOP:
* Input\Output Podcast: David Lowery and the Future of Artists’ Rights
SPIN:
* Music Piracy’s Search Problem: Recording Industry Bringing the Fight to Google
THE DUQUESNE DUKE:
* Pirating or advancing; Debating illegal music downloads – Stealing intellectual property is still a crime
The debate against music piracy has also decreased in popularity. Illegal downloading has become a socially accepted practice and as friends talk about what music they recently downloaded, they forget that they are discussing a crime.
Because of piracy, the music industry is in a downward spiral. And when the time comes for our favorite musicians to pack up their instruments and cancel their tours, we will look at each other, dumbfounded, wondering what could have caused such misfortune to manifest. We will blame the labels. We will blame iTunes. We will demonize Justin Bieber and denounce greed.
But what is really holding the industry back isn’t the greed of the structure. It’s the greed of the people who believe they have the right to all the music they want without paying for it. For the love of music, buy the album and appreciate it for what it is worth.
RAPID TV NEWS:
* Legal content downloading up in France, video and TV series stir piracy
CNN:
* What happens if the price of music falls to zero?
THE HUFFINGTON POST:
* The Internet Is Not Free by Lowell Peterson Executive Director, Writers Guild of America, East
So far, the brightest minds in the business have not figured out how to replicate the revenue streams currently generated by television advertising, theater tickets, and DVD sales, so the market for programs created directly for digital distribution has been pretty thin. Thus, if traditional television and cinema are displaced by the Internet, there will not be enough high-quality content for the ISPs to distribute unless we can figure out how to generate more money to pay people to create it.
TERRIBLE MINDS:
* 25 Thoughts On Book Piracy
MUSIC ALLY:
* Pandora’s active listeners dropped by 1.5m in January
HARPERS:
* Google’s Media Barons
As a journalist and board member of the Authors Guild, I’ve watched in dismay as writers, living and dead, have suffered steep drops in income and copyright control thanks to Google’s — and its smaller rivals’ — logistical support for pirating and repackaging everything that we writers, editors, and publishers hold dear. From the humblest newspaper reporter to the most erudite essayist, we do the work, we invest the money and time, some of us risk our lives — and Google, broadly speaking, reaps the benefits without spending a dime.
FROM THE TRICHORDIST:
* What You Can Do Today to Stop Brand Sponsored Piracy Through Touring Contracts or Sponsor Deals: Artists Helping Artists
* Yes, Piracy Does Cause Economic Harm
* Streaming Services Ranked By “Artist Friendliness”
* Wolves in Sheeps Clothing Criminalizing All Who Oppose Them But for He Who Brings the $unlight: The Troubled, $trange, Fearful, Frightened World of Gary $hapiro, the Diogenese of Anti-Copyright Lobbyists
* Google, Advertising, Money and Piracy. A History of Wrongdoing Exposed.
* Google’s Dehumanized “Safe” Advertising Practices in Gmail: More Laughs From the Leviathan of Mountain View
* Music Streaming Math, Can It All Add Up?
* One Bad Apple: The Complete Checklist on Google’s “Non Anti-Piracy” Anti-Piracy Policies
We love Google. We really do. However it’s these kinds of practices that harm artists and creators that are very, very disappointing.
Written by Chris Castle
[Editor Charlie sez: It was recently reported that Google has now received notices for over 10 million infringing links in search results–actually a low number given that Google receives 3 million notices a week for search alone–i.e., not counting Blogger or YouTube. Before the anti-copyright crowd goes spinning into the ether that the volume of notices is somehow evidence of the orphan cause of action “copyright misuse”–Google acknowledges that 97% of these notices are properly sent. “One Bad Apple” was first posted on 9/2/2011 after the COICA legislation caught Google’s attention and the company announced it was taking steps to protect the interests of artists because they really do care. It was reposted on January 13, 2012–no change. And as we all know–purity is a prophylactic against scrutiny. Let’s see how much–if anything–has changed since January 13, 2012. The answer? Nothing.]
This post is a compilation…
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Music Streaming Math, Can It All Add Up?
Music streaming is clearly a challenge for the recording industry and even more so for the new generation of artists hoping to build professional careers in music like Zoë Keating. This new report from the New York Times, “As Music Streaming Grows, Royalties Slow to a Trickle” is the latest to reignite controversies about music streaming royalties.
We’ve leveled our own criticism of streaming sites in the past perhaps focusing unfairly on Spotify. But as we reported in the, Music Streaming Price Index : Pay Rates as of 12/31/11 our complaint is more with the revenue models and royalty payments than with the services themselves.
To be clear, we like Spotify and the people we’ve met that work there. We’d just like to see better royalty rates and the kind of transparency requested by Zoë Keating, and/or the kind we get from Apple’s Itunes.
We also like that Spotify and other music streaming services are legal and licensed. Spotify (Rhapsody, Zune and Napster) are far more ethical businesses than YouTube and Grooveshark. There are no unauthorized copies of an artists material on Spotify and no massive DMCA issues. We’d love to see more brands spending their money with legitimate services than the shady ad networks that feed advertising to pirate sites.
It’s now clear that the brands themselves are a big part of the problem by supporting piracy when they could be supporting the legally licensed sites. Brands, advertising networks and payment processors are driving the race to the bottom in the “optional payment” and “Illegally free” world of exploiting musicians through online piracy.
In a recent interview for Hypebot, music and technology veteran Ted Cohen sums it up well,
Do you still favor subscription over advertising-based music services?
Yes, I do. I don’t think that the advertising model so far has proved to be sustainable. I think that we have undervalued subscription. I am paying $150 a month for cable. I watch 20 or 30 hours of TV a week. I probably listen to 50 to 60 hours of music a week. I’d argue with you that music is worth more than $10 a month subscription service.
The labels were so concerned about (piracy)—and I was there at the time—that we had to come up with a price that was just a little bit more than free to convince people that they should pay. So far, we have not been able to raise the price. I think that music is worth at least $20 or $25 a month.
In the chart below calculations are created in tables to illustrate the simple math required to determine the revenue opportunities in different streaming models. For example, lines 5, 6, and 7 detail how much revenue Spotify can generate to artists, songwriters and rights holders paying out 70% of their gross at 1m, 30m and 90m paid subscribers.
If Spotify can capture what most believe is an optimistic amount of paid subscribers in the USA (30m) that would only generate $2.5b in revenue for rights holders. Line 2 represents the revenues of the record industry in the USA between 1999 when it was $14.6b through 2009 when it had plummeted to $6.3b leaving a loss of $8.3b annually since that time.
Maybe we’re missing something. 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?
So in 2012 when Spotify has claimed 1 million paid subscribers in the US, that’s a payout to artists and rights holders of only about $84m. In simple math, this is about 12m albums at $7 wholesale each (what iTunes pays on a $9.99 album).
Additional food for thought is that Spotify is currently valued at 3 billion dollars. That’s just a little less then half of the entire earnings of the entire US record industry in 2012 at an estimated 7 billion dollars. This means that if the same valuation method is used for both Spotify as a single company, and the domestic record industry as a whole, than either Spotify is overvalued or the record industry is undervalued.
But there are larger problems here than Spotify. As you can see in the chart above YouTube also represents a challenge for artists and rights holders. The site was born of infringement as a business model, and despite policy changes at Google (YouTube’s parent company) the situation is still completely unacceptable for artists as East Bay Ray of The Dead Kennedy’s explains to NPR.
YouTube really deserves it’s own post, and there will be several forthcoming. In the new “exploitation economy” artists seem to be willing to trip over transactional dollars attempting to pick up streaming pennies. Again, one of the most important distinctions between Spotify and YouTube is that Spotify does not have a massive DMCA and rights management issues that cheats artists of their due. Additionally, YouTube is paying a fraction of what Spotify is, so if this is the future, everyone is really in trouble.
There are lots of people who have had lots of questions about Gmail, Google’s “free” email service. You know, “free”–as in you give them your data and they sell it to advertisers to push ads to you in your emails based on–what exactly?
I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t believe that the ads get to your email by scanning your emails for keywords. And therein lies the rub for doctors, lawyers and–world governments. What does Google say about this? Well, they don’t say they monetize your “information” (meaning your email correspondence). They also don’t say that they read your mail, or at least not exactly.
Here’s what they say (or what they said today in response to criticism from Microsoft) according to Politico’s Morning Tech:
“‘Advertising keeps Google and many of the websites and services Google offers free of charge. We work hard to make sure that ads are…
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