I like this case. It's about recordings that are 70 years old or more, the vast majority are out of print, and the rest are often precariously in print.
If I'm reading correctly, the silly nature of the claim that
> [...] of the 2,749 recordings listed in the complaint, all but a “small sample” are already available to stream or download from licensed online platforms so they “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.”
when the 2,749 recordings have been cherry-picked from
> [...] more than 400,000 works [...]
is pretty much an attack on their own claims that
> [...] to retain, restore and redistribute content that they believe should never be lost to history [...is...] nothing but a “smokescreen” to hide what amounts to IA offering “free and unlimited access to music for everyone,” regardless of copyright.
Not to mention that the IA constantly looking for copyrighted works uploaded that are not part of the "Great 78 Project" and reducing them to 30 second previews.
Prevailing on this would be a good thing. IA needs a win, even though it doesn't need to be paying to defend itself against another lawsuit. This is obviously vexatious. They're not really concerned with 78s. They're hoping to bankrupt IA with legal expenses, and/or they think that they have the fix in at a particular venue that they think they can steer the case to.
I like how they've even managed to shove the middleman bullshit into digital distribution, where there's practically no way to even justify it.
You can't just upload music to Spotify or Apple Music or whatever as an independent artist. You need to pay rent to a distributor who is allowed to interact with the streaming service. (Some of them offer the convenient feature of administering royalties for cover songs, but it's an additional cost and not a given...) Most will probably never make enough royalties to cover the fees.
Then you have the whole growing SubmitHub thing. (Pay for consideration on playlists to get exposure.)
Worked with a company that did stuff like that for a while.
My view on it (take it for what you will) is those companies exist mainly as a way for the streaming platforms to outsource and scale their quality control/checks.
The expectation from platforms like Spotify was basically that anything we sent over can go up without further review and that it added value to the platform, didn’t violate copyright law, was appropriately encoded, etc. If we let anything they rejected or later found issues with through, our status as a distributor was at risk.
I expect if Spotify had to staff and scale to deal with the garbage our users were trying, they would end up charging enough extra that you’d pay the same anyway. Basing that mostly on the fact that we weren’t really making much money.
I do wonder how much the influence of the distributors has helped the streaming music world avoid the problems of the streaming movie/TV providers, where content rights are usually exclusive and it’s almost impossible to be an indie service
The blessing of the way the music side is set up is that if you want to be an indie streaming music company, you can, you just need to contract with a critical mass of the big distribution houses and royalty reporting agencies and you’ll be able to play pretty much anything your customers might want to hear. If that didn’t exist, nobody would bother uploading their music to anyone but the giant incumbents like Spotify and Apple
One or two years ago, they started requiring you to be a label or something to start uploading. Before that, individuals could join and start publishing their own music, and I assume everyone already in was grandfathered.
This is the bogus argument made by so-called "tech" companies profiting from user-generated content. The so-called "tech" company middleman needs to get paid, otherwise so-called "creators" will not produce works nor share them.
I'd say lets run the experiment in production. "Stop" the music! We could have the year "without" music then do more similar experiments.
On the other end of the spectrum we could charge royalties on the sales of instruments and require musicians and listeners to buy a license. We would have so much more music that way! No one would listen to it but it would be there behind the great paywall!
Interesting. Do you believe, your applaudable position, should be enforced on anyone doing anything, or just anyone creating 'art'? Seems odd to weaken a musicians chances of making a living (not majors, individuals - copyright laws are odious). The position implies a 'living' will not be permitted by means of creativity. Is that the intention?
> The position implies a 'living' will not be permitted by means of creativity.
You're begging the question, here. Also, you know that there exist people who distribute creative works for free, and make money by donations, sponsorships, patronage, and grants. Therefore you know that the statement as you have made it is false, and that you should be looking for a weaker one.
edit: I don't know how somebody goes from "weaken the chances" to "not be permitted" in subsequent sentences, and in addition tries to derive "not be permitted" from "weaken the chances" through the weasel word "imply," and still feels like they're engaging in good faith argument. If you're confident, you don't need to make up a position for your opponent, and your position is not as weak as you're making it look.
I am not or have not or do not advocate 'one way or my way', at any point, anywhere in any post, but simply to remind people just be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I do not believe people should be forced to share their art freely. I also don't believe people should be forced to not re-share art they have received, which is what copyright is. This should not be a thing the government wastes resources on.
You are framing weakening copyright as some kind of act of violence onto the poor artists when copyright is the status where everyones rights get violated in order to help the few.
If it were a proper random sample then it would be a decent-sized sample that should permit the calculation of a useful confidence interval on a non-negligible proportion. The cool thing about random samples is that the size you need is generally not dependent on the size of the population you're sampling from.
If it's not a random sample then I think we probably shouldn't allow them to get away with using the word "sample" at all. It's a bowl of cherries that they picked.
You're misunderstanding a little, although it's exactly what you think. The 2.7K recordings are not at all a random sample of the 400K, they were probably chosen because the labels could find a reasonably clean copyright history for them (i.e. be pretty sure they actually owned them.)
The "small sample" is the number of those 2.7K that have gone out of print. They're playing language games to imply that almost all of the music that is part of the "Great 78s" project is currently in print by only suing over 0.7% of it, and saying that most of that 0.7% is available as a digital download.
So to summarize, they combed through an IA project, and probably found that it consisted 99.3% of recordings that the entire RIAA (which represents the entire mainstream US recording industry) doesn't think that it can prove ownership of. These, they insist, are just cover so they can distribute the 0.7% of Bing Crosby 78s.
If I'm reading correctly, the silly nature of the claim that
> [...] of the 2,749 recordings listed in the complaint, all but a “small sample” are already available to stream or download from licensed online platforms so they “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.”
when the 2,749 recordings have been cherry-picked from
> [...] more than 400,000 works [...]
is pretty much an attack on their own claims that
> [...] to retain, restore and redistribute content that they believe should never be lost to history [...is...] nothing but a “smokescreen” to hide what amounts to IA offering “free and unlimited access to music for everyone,” regardless of copyright.
Not to mention that the IA constantly looking for copyrighted works uploaded that are not part of the "Great 78 Project" and reducing them to 30 second previews.
Prevailing on this would be a good thing. IA needs a win, even though it doesn't need to be paying to defend itself against another lawsuit. This is obviously vexatious. They're not really concerned with 78s. They're hoping to bankrupt IA with legal expenses, and/or they think that they have the fix in at a particular venue that they think they can steer the case to.