It gets even crazier when compared to other IP law:
Engineer makes an invention: Write 30-Page patent application. Multi-year patenting process with USPTO, pay 1000s of $ if DIY, 10x that if using an IP law firm. Multiply by 4x if going international. With luck, patent gets issued 3 years later. It protects you for 25 years, but only if you have deep pockets for an IP lawsuit in case someone does copy you -- and with uncertain outcome.
Artist releases a song: automatically enjoys 100+ years of protection, even for minor samples, hooks, melodic elements. Lawsuits are easily won as long as you can prove you are the copyright holder.
I have my theories about how we ended up in this state of affairs but no jurist with a sliver of common sense can seriously claim that this is fine.
I think it's worth mentioning that with a patent, nobody else is allowed to use the patented idea. This holds even if they have never heard of you before, and were entirely unaware your patent (or your version of the patented concept) existed. You are granted a monopoly.
With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours. Someone unaware of your work cannot infringe your copyright. You do not have a monopoly on anything, you are just protected against someone deriving their work from yours directly.
This difference probably factors into how easy it is to win a lawsuit: for a copyright infringement, you need to show they made a copy. You wouldn't be bringing suit in the first place if there were substantial doubt in that area. It also factors into how easy it should be to get a patent vs a copyright: a patent closes off much, much, MUCH more idea-space than a copyright.
> With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours.
That is patently false for music - a songwriter's claim today that they never heard a slightly similar hook from 40 years ago generally doesn't hold in court.
The burden of proof of infringement is on the plaintiff in either case.
If you have an obscure patent nobody has ever heard of, you can win the suit by showing that the defendant had the same idea you did - you don't need to show their work derives from yours.
If you have an obscure song nobody has ever heard (or even an unpublished one!) you are going to have a difficult time proving infringement for a similar riff.
Perhaps you're most familiar with litigation around very famous songs, like the Under Pressure / Ice Ice famous case? In those cultural-saturation cases the court may make the assumption that the later party could have been exposed to the work of the earlier one, but that is not the case universally.
Harrison's song was "My Sweet Lord", the song allegedly infringed was "He's So Fine" by some girl group in the 1950s or 1960s. It shouldn't be hard to hear either one. My recollection is that the songs did some pretty much alike.
It's clearer than you think. Did Dua Lipa hear an obscure Florida reggae band's tune that isn't available on any major platform to listen to any more? It took some time, but eventually the court agreed she'd never heard the song she supposedly copied:
How is that different from a patent then? I don't think anyone would sue you for patent infringement against your hobby project. IP only typically becomes an issue when you want to make some money from your work, and then someone claims that it's actually their work, and thus should be their money.
Also, patents are for frankly more important things. It's a much bigger deal if life-saving medicine or a more efficient car are locked out for 100 years than Winnie the Pooh wearing pants.
Copyright and patents are very different things. Lumping them under the disingenuous umbrella term "IP" only serves to muddle the waters and create FUD. They are not property rights.
It's best to criticize each precisely and surgically. Know the terms, know the rules, the exceptions, etc. Know the history, know the original purpose of these laws. That kind of broader knowledge in broader society is what can help. The big corps are interested in having a vague blurry idea around "IP" that just makes you scared and think "wouldn't download a car" and has a chilling effect of thinking that all "that stuff" is electrified and better not touch it, and that it's just natural that there's "intellectual property" and it's just minor details whether it's copyright or patents or trademarks or whatever else. Property rights are ancient. By associating copyright with that, they make it seem that it's also just as fundamental and civilization-grounding as private property, when most of intellectual history had no such concept. Derivative works, tweaking ideas, splicing them in new ways was just normal.
A related disingenuous propaganda term is "content consumption", again creating the association between e.g. reading a book or listening to a song on the one hand and eating food, or using up soap or fuel on the other.
What? Copyright and patents are exactly the same thing. Making "you copied me!" actionable at a court of law, by statute, when before that there was no such legal fiction of "intellectual property" or any other exclusive rights to reproduce a thing.
Copyright and patents are absolutely not the same thing at all.
A patent makes it illegal to use a particular idea, by any means. It is a limited-time universal monopoly on a set of specific "claims" (the selected applications of the idea). It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you or not.
A copyright is a prohibition on someone copying you, with certain exceptions where they are allowed to do so ("fair use" or "fair dealing"). Copyrights also, in the USA, bring certain protections against people attempting to use a work in a way you did not intend even where they are not duplicating it.
A trademark is a prohibition on someone causing confusion by copying something you use to identify yourself, or by using/referencing it (without copying) in a context you don't wish.
A trade secret is a criminal prohibition on someone intentionally causing another to divulge certain information that you contractually banned them from divulging.
A security classification is a ban on certain ideas/information being shared with parties that a government agency did not wish them shared with, or used in certain contexts. This is not a protection available to individuals, only to governments.
A license is an intentional weakening of one or more of the above types of protection, potentially with attached civil penalties in the event the bounds of the license are exceeded. It can thus, when accepted, limit behaviour beyond what would normally be allowed by one of the IP types above.
All six of these IP types protect against Person B doing something that is in some way related to an activity Person A did earlier, but they are really quite different in what they cover and how. I don't agree at all they're the same thing.
Also the purpose is important too, to know how to move forward when the tech landscape shifts.
Patents are there to incentivize making it public how inventions work. Inventors would tend to keep their inventions as trade secrets, in fear that someone else will reap all the profits. This would slow the compounding effect of later inventions building upon previous ones. Therefore, patents give exclusivity to the inventor for a set period. In exchange, during this period competitors and others become aware of how the new tech works and hence they can prepare for the time when the patent expires, and then a host of derivative tech can appear. It has been perverted to an absurd parody where the vast majority of patents are not intented for actual use, never get licensed and simply provide cannon fodder and deterrent stockpiles in the lawyer wars between companies. The patents are so broad and vague that legally speaking tech companies are constantly tramping on each other's ground, resulting in a kind of stalemate truce where they agree not to sue, because the other would countersue.
Copyright is there to incentivize creative authorship and its dissemination to the public. By giving exclusive rights, the author can pull a revenue stream, making cultural/artisitic/intellectual creation more viable and hence spurring intellectual and cultural activity in society. The goal is to make authors incentivized to create. Not to drive up the stock prices of mega-publishers and music labels.
Trademarks are there to avoid confusion for buyers as to the identity of a seller or by falsely implying endorsement.
What's common to these is that they are overwhelmingly there to help broader social interests, a common good, in accordance with the enlightenment, somewhat romantic ideals of the optimist zeitgeist of the time when the concepts were defined. They involve restricting individual rights, such as free speech (you can't recite this or that poem in public). That restriction was done reluctantly, to serve higher purposes, like a thriving intellectual exchange and technological progress on a societal scale. It was not about trying to make things as cushy and profitable for huge conglomerates as possible.
>A patent makes it illegal to use a particular idea, by any means. It is a limited-time universal monopoly on a set of specific "claims" (the selected applications of the idea). It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you or not.
Just FYI, as a layman with no opinion on whether they are "the same thing" in this context, this paragraph sounds self-contradictory. It sounds like you're describing copying somebody's idea, and then you say "It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you", so I ended up confused as to your meaning.
Let's say I come up with the idea of using a fan to blow a balloon into the air. I get a patent with the claim "a device made buoyant in air and propelled by forced wind".
Someone else comes up with the idea of blowing a dust bunny into the air with their breath.
Their idea, which has nothing at all to do with my idea and is certainly not a copy, infringes my claim because what they are doing matches what I've claimed as the core idea in my patent. They didn't "copy" me, for two reasons:
1. Their idea was had independently of mine, with its own creativity
2. Their idea is fundamentally not the same as mine, but because my enumerated claim is sufficiently broad to cover their concept too, it's still infringement
With a copyright, their additional creativity would have made their work not infringe. With a copyright, you can't claim anything broader than the work you actually produced.
> With a copyright, their additional creativity would have made their work not infringe.
But not generally. You can't sell a new Hogwarts-based book with Harry Potter characters. This is both due to copyright and trademarks. But already copyright blocks derivative works even if there's additional creativity with a new plot.
You can't sell a Harry Potter book, but you can sell any number of Magical School for Wizards books. They can use similar themes to Harry Potter, similar pacing, even similar artwork styles.
They just can't copy the characters, significant chunks of text, or images.
That's the difference between a copyright and a patent in a nutshell: you copyright an implementation of an idea, while you patent the idea itself.
I think you want them to be meaningfully different, for whatever reason, but at the end of the day, they both come down to "if I did the thing you already did, and that you laid claim to through some form of artificial statutory fabrication of rights, you can sue me".
Whether that means me exploiting having heard your song by playing your song myself, or exploiting your invention I examined by building it myself, they both come down to: statutory fabrication of fictitious "you can't do because they did already" rights, that at common law could have (rightly) only been achieved through keeping the thing a secret (e.g. still present to this day in say trading algorithms, and in software through the now ubiquitous SaaS model) and contacts (i.e. NDAs) flowing from that.
See my other reply parallel to yours. There's no principle of "I did it first, therefore it's my property!". For example, if that was so, you could report an invention and get a patent for it without disclosing exactly how you did the thing. After all you did do it first, so it should be off limits by the (non-existent) "I did it first" principle. Instead, patent law requires "sufficiency of disclosure", meaning that you MUST disclose enough information that another skilled person can recreate the invention from the specified information. You get the time-limited exclusivity in exchange for disclosing the method so that others can work on top of it, refine the technique etc, so when the time comes that the patent expires, there will be improved versions. It is explicitly there to inspire others to work on the thing afterwards, just with some time delay.
Blurring distinct laws and their nuanced purposes into some generic "I call dibs!" principle is exactly what the propaganda part is. Because that creates a kind blurry haze in people's minds that even fills gaps that none of the existing laws currently block out. So people will feel like "that just feels illegal, but I can't exactly say what it violates". A kind of FUD around doing all manners of free intellectual activity in society.
Outwith the U.S.A. there is a thing called a design right that applies to that.
In the U.K., the design right took its initial form in 1787 and applied to printed patterns on fabrics; so it has been on point for clothing design for over 230 years. (-:
Indeed. Good example where value comes from. It's all the same crap, but since you've seen My Crap worn by Anne Hathaway a couple of times in ads at the airport, I can charge 10x price.
Classic case of how democracy isn't, in practice, majority rule.
If you put this demented situation to a vote, it'd lose 9-to-1.
Frankly the whole concept of copyright is absolutely stupid though, the equivalent of escalating schoolyard "stop copying me!" to actionable at a court of law. But since when did something being absolutely frothing at the mouth retarded stop it being an entrenched part of the world we live in.
The most ridiculous part of music copyrights is that the DMCA explicitly encodes statutory damages of at least 750$ up to 30,000$, and up to 150,000$ for willful infringement per work [1].
Yet musical compositions are subject to compulsory mechanical copyright licenses at a fixed rate of 12.4 cents or 2.38 cents per minute, whichever is higher [2] for music covers [3] (i.e. same song, different singer/band or even same singer different time). Meaning you can make a cover without permission as long as you pay the copyright holder at the rates specified in the law.
So we already have cheap compulsory licensing for musical compositions which caps damages at a 1/6,000 to 1/240,000 of the DMCA rates. We should just have compulsory mechanical licensing for recordings as well.
If we really want to get crazy, we could even let copyright holders declare a compulsory licensing rate per work then multiply that by some number to get their intellectual property value and then charge them property tax on that intellectual property. So you can set a high compulsory licensing rate, but then you have to pay more property tax on your income generating property or vice versa. This allows valuable works to be protected to support the artists making them, while allowing less valuable works to be easily usable by whoever wants to.
> The most ridiculous part of music copyrights is that the DMCA explicitly encodes statutory damages of at least 750$ up to 30,000$, and up to 150,000$ for willful infringement per work
That's not from the DMCA. Those statutory damages were there long before the DMCA. (Also, they can be reduced to $200 in the case of innocent infringement). The DMCA did add some new statutory damages for violations of the new rights DMCA added to US copyright law, such as circumventing protection.
> So we already have cheap compulsory licensing for musical compositions which caps damages at a 1/6,000 to 1/240,000 of the DMCA rates.
There are two things not quite correct here. First, the money you pay the copyright owner under a compulsory license is not damages. It is royalties.
Second, it is not capped. Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work.
If I take that $0.124 compulsory license and my cover of your song sells 5 million copies I'm going to owe you 5 million x $0.124 = $620 000. I suppose as a practical matter it is capped because there are only so many people and most aren't going to by more than one song. The best selling song so far is Bing Cosby's version of Irvine Berlin's "White Christmas" with 50 million sold, so $6 200 000 if that had been under a mechanical license at today's rates.
For statutory damages the number of copies involved only matters in so far as the court might take it into account in deciding where along that $200 - $150 000 range the award should fall.
If I made and sold for example 10 000 unauthorized copies of your work and you found out about 5 000 of them and sued me, asking for statutory damages and won, and then later you found out about that other 5 000 and wanted damages for those to you would be out of luck. The statutory damages award from your first suit covers all my infringement of that work up to the time of that suit.
> First, the money you pay the copyright owner under a compulsory license is not damages. It is royalties.
The rates for compulsory licensing cap your compensation and thus provide a reasonable cap on your compensatory damages.
> Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work.
The most infamous cases were lawsuits against individuals for their individual per-work downloads, or per-work uploads regardless of the number of copies distributed [1][2]. From the perspective of the individual who is unlikely to create more than a handful of copies per work they intend to consume, per-work is largely indistinguishable from per-copy. So, if they made a single copy of a work, which is the most likely case, they are liable for 750$ per-work, yet if musical recordings were subject to the same statutory compulsory licensing as musical compositions, they would only be liable for 0.124$ per copy, a nearly 6000x difference between compensatory and statutory damages for their single copy of a work.
Of course, it could be reasonable to have statutory damages as a punitive measure to dissuade copyright infringement, but the Supreme Court has ruled that punitive damages in excess of a 10:1 ratio with compensatory damages is almost certainly unconstitutional in a lawsuit [3]. That is not binding on Congress with respect to law, but it is certainly troubling that we have decided that music copyright infringement is so heinous as to demand a nearly 600x greater punitive damage ratio compared to what is already at the limits of what is considered constitutional when no specific ratio is specified.
As a former film student I can say from experience that licensing rights can be expensive. And how expensive depends on the usage. E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema.
Want to play any popular music in your cinema film? The license can easily cost 25.000 € (for film students that is typically more than the budget).
Smaller labels make better prices tho and sometimes the artist lets you use it for free (if it is their choice to make).
> E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema.
Not a criticism, just an addendum for anyone interested:
In the US, almost every bar/restaurant/venue is an ASCAP licensee, and it is relatively cheap (around $10/year/occupant for all forms of media), so a venue that wants to play live or recorded music, television broadcasts, etc., and seats 100 people would pay about $1000/year.
It's a very good price, and one of the main reasons that at any concert hall or arena, you will hear even huge artists playing covers without having to get them pre-approved.
>Our lowest annual fee is just over $1 per day, less than the price of a cup of coffee.
$1 * 365 is more than the $10 you claimed. 36 seats is a medium sized resteraunt. Also using the song search it has none of the music I listen to so it seems useless.
Edit: I was able to find 1 song. If YouTube could offer such a license I would prefer that since they have a larger catalog of music.
If some legislator or public interest lawyer would like to fix some of the DMCA shortcomings or abuses, I think Rick Beato would be a good poster child for legitimate fair use.
Beato does high-quality, knowledgeable videos that make IMHO legitimate educational use of short audio clips, interleaved with discussion. No one can listen to a Beato video to get the experience of the full song, and the Beato video plausibly promotes people wanting to listen to the full song.
Another good example of what should clearly count as fair use is the 3BSkyen channel on youtube[0]. The guy does analyses of animated media and has a habit of turning 5 minutes of media into an hour or more of analysis. He cuts and rewinds and replays stuff constantly. No one in their right mind is going to watch a 3BSkyen video instead of the original. There is no competition between them.
And yet for a lot of IP he can't show the media he's reacting to because it'll immediately and automatically get claimed.
One answer to this madness is to starve the beast: never buy any music or any content from an established company. Torrent everything. It may not work at all, but at least you can tell yourself you're not helping the bastards.
Few people are buying anything in this world where streaming is the norm and the labels make money by cutting deals with the distribution platforms.
The solution for me, in this specific case, would be for Beato to act against YouTube and take his channel elsewhere. He has enough followers to be able to start his own Peertube server, find a few sponsors and keep going forever.
Neither the GP or this comment are viable in the real world.
Businesses/creators need continued distribution, see Nike as an example of what happens when you "take your audience elsewhere to monetize them better/more."
1. People buy the other option (in Nike's case they kept going to footlocker and buying other shoes rather than only buying Nike DTC, in Beato's case they would continue to go to YouTube to discover new guitar content)
2. The business can't get new customers because no one is on the new platform (Nike DTC/Peertube)
It's viable for a split second (covid, "stick it to Youtube cause they suck") then people just go back to living their lives.
> in Beato's case they would continue to go to YouTube to discover new guitar content
He's in a unique market position though because he's got industry respect. Joe Bloggs in his bedroom can't compete with "guitar content" because Dave Gilmore, Pat Matheney and Glynn Johns aren't all going to sit with him for a 2 hour long interview.
People are lazy. If you add even a small complication for people to consume content, then it doesn’t matter how much respect that content creator has, people will just follow someone else instead.
Google knows this; which is why they can screw over content creators on their platform.
Oh yeah, it would still be very difficult for him to move his audience off of YouTube. I was trying to pick up on the idea that he would be replaced by someone else. I think it's more likely just a lose/lose scenario for everyone.
Same problem applies: That’s another site to read. Another app to download. Another product to discover.
I nearly didn’t even open the link because I didn’t want to learn something new before I’d had my morning cup of earl grey. Chances are the average consumer wouldn’t bother — assuming they even discover about this to begin with.
"Hey everyone, I'm Rick Beato. I am tired of dealing with YouTube constantly threatening my livelihood, so now I will be focused on my own channel. I will be posting here as well for whatever they let me, but to get full videos just download the GrayJay app (link in description) and look for my channel (link also in description)."
That's all it would take to get a few hundred thousand people to download it, and you'd know that the those who are going through the effort are higher-value subscribers, so it would be even easier to bring better sponsors.
I really don't like arguments based on "I am lazy to do that, therefore everyone is". It's at best defeatist cowardice and at worst a malicious way to support the status quo.
You're assuming a ~5% conversion rate and usage/payment in perpetuity. Those are just unrealistic assumptions, based on my experience in this space.
Everything breaks.
- Channel makes no money because sponsors don't pay (as much, it's a power law) for 200k subs (being charitable with your 5%. in reality it would be < 50k)
- Guest don't come because the channel is small and they don't get distribution for their projects
- Platform X doesn't pay out as well as YouTube, so you lose more revenue
- The channel can't function because there isn't enough revenue to run the business. Can't hire lawyers when Z Record Label sues you on Platform X.
- Other channels on larger platforms take the space that you filled. The market is not static. Slash starts his own YouTube channel, which has more credibility, and David Gilmour goes on that one instead. See the celebrity podcast/YouTube space for arguments that prominent celebrities don't become creators when the market signals there is money/opportunity available.
- When subscribers churn, there is no one new on the platform to replace them. Churn in this case means they no longer use the app I made them go to, or they no longer subscribe to or pay me. Creator payment churn is MUCH higher than any typical B2B or B2C churn.
Being a creator is like standing up a business on a set of toothpicks. Even if you are Rick Beato (which is why he is so upset)
I am not saying to completely drop YT. I am saying (a) to run both and keep promoting the alternative and (b) coordinate with other creators to do the same.
I guess (a) with what money and (b) with what time. Unless you are Taylor Swift, people wont watch the exact same content on a different platform just becasue you told them to when it exists on the one they like.
More importantly (c) why?
Instead of building up someone else's business/platform for free (and put yourself in the same position as you already are). This is why people sell a product. Online courses, have their own app, tequila, merch, live shows, signature guitars, etc. As a creator, you don't go to another platform; you have to own something. Unless it's a purely moral argument, in which case, I can respect that, but it's not a good business decision.
I understand he is big in the niche space. I also am into guitars. But comparing Rick to Taylor is like comparing HackerNews to Facebook. Her money/power/audience is at least 4 orders of magnitude more than what he has.
Which is why her saying "Only listen to my version" works, where as he would not. 5m subs is just too small.
You can run a Peertube instance costs for less than $100/month, distribution included. And that's if you insist on running your own.
> with what time.
People publish to multiple platforms already. Adding another one is the least of the concerns.
> Unless it's a purely moral argument, in which case, I can respect that, but it's not a good business decision.
I for one can only respect someone if their decision puts their principles before their business. That's what "Skin in the Game" is all about. Beato can make all the fuss he wants against BMG, but I have no sympathy for him if his actions only goes as far as his dependency on YouTube/Google allows him to go.
> I for one can only respect someone if their decision puts their principles before their business. That's what "Skin in the Game" is all about. Beato can make all the fuss he wants against BMG, but I have no sympathy for him if his actions only goes as far as his dependency on YouTube/Google allows him to go.
I view Beato's stance as rational: he's picking one battle over the other rather than engaging on multiple fronts at once. He's only one man. He has limited social capital, and the conversion rate favors him spending that capital in a sphere of influence that resonates with his audience, fans, and industry contacts and associations. He knows where his bread is buttered, and due to his success and notoriety he may get away with biting the hand that feeds him, but he's a caged tiger as much as he's a cage-bird.
Beato wants to effect change in a specific way. To broaden the scale and scope of his grievance, he would dilute his own impact. I trust that Beato has given these issues some thought as a working artist, as he has a vested interest in helping himself, but he can already negotiate preferred rates because of his built-in audience and pull. His desired relief would benefit all artists working in America, not just Beato himself. To be drawn into a battle on two fronts would be a tactical error. He's wise to focus on the battle he has a chance of turning the tide of. Others have already engaged on the front you advocate for, and those others are better situated to engage there.
This is Beato's fight, as he drew the battle lines. He can't be sidelined so easily by bystanders, like us in the comment section, because us folks don't have skin in the game like Beato does.
I’m not being defeatist. I’m literally just pointing out the reality of consumer trends.
There is oodles of research into this topic. It isn’t something I’ve just made up.
It’s why analytics exist to explore website user journeys and then promoting the most important calls to action in prominent places.
It’s why physical store fronts put the doors at the front of the shop rather than on the side (side note: a friend of mine does own a shop and when he had to have the front door closed for repair, he saw a sharp decline in random walk-ins because people didn’t want to use the side door).
It’s why Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn etc remaining dominant platforms in their respective domains despite almost universal dislike for those platforms.
It’s why supermarkets put their product with the highest margin in the centre of the shelves and the lower margin items at the top and bottom.
It’s why being on page 2 of Googles search results are as good as not being in Google at all.
I’d actually love it if your idealistic view were true in practice. I don’t want to depend on GitHub, LinkedIn, YouTube. But that’s where the masses are so I need to use it too.
I already ditched WhatsApp for Signal, but after several years without WhatsApp, I still haven’t converted all my family. So I miss out on sooo much conversations because of my ideals.
What you’re advocating simply doesn’t match the reality of how people shop for content. Be that free stuff on social platforms, nor purchasing physical products in stores. It’s not defeatist to say consumers are lazy. It’s just a sad fact of life. And ignoring that fact doesn’t magically make it untrue.
You are confusing "optimal" with "feasible" and you are ignoring the fact it can be more profitable to serve a niche (people with a minimum of ethical standards) than to be just yet-another participant in the commodity marketplace.
That already happens. Content creators have merchandise, patron exclusives, fan clubs and so on and so forth.
The problem isn’t that other revenue streams don’t exist. It’s that they’re still dependent on the whims of YouTube to get their brand out.
And unfortunately, these other revenue streams are only more profitable than YouTube for the smallest percentage of video content creators (baring those who specialise in adult content, but that’s a whole other domain of content creation ;) ).
YouTube already was built on the "distributed" premise. That You can "broadcast yourself" as the slogan says, you use the platform to make your own presence, users can subscribe to you specifically and the platform merely connects the audience and the video makers. No longer are you beholden to the old ways of cable TV producer filters and gatekeepers. You just find and manage your own audience and the platform gets out of the way.
So when grayjay says "Follow Creators, Not Platforms" I'm pretty sure that the minute that regular people on the street know about the existence of "grayjay", they will become essentially also a platform that enshittifies in the same way (cf. https://xkcd.com/927/).
> They can't put themselves between and the consumer.
Of course they can. If they smell money and sell, they can change it to whatever they want. It's just a client for now.
It's like arguing for Skype back then based on tech aspects. It's P2P! Yes, P2P until it wasn't.
Youtube wasnt distribute in tech, but was in marketing and if you were there around 2007-10, you remember it was much less social-media-ified and felt more direct and raw. Subscribe and get notified. Just a platform.
The only way to avoid that same path is by remaining obscure and small.
I guess every new generation of tech enthusiasts has to get burned to get sufficiently disillusioned.
If during the switch you got people to download Grayjay, they will be living their lives like they were, except that some of their subscriptions won't be on YouTube anymore.
Given that xe has "a great lawyer", the logical choice for M. Beato is to move to Nebula, if anywhere. That said, xyr lawyer is getting this rejected on fair use grounds again and again.
The beef is less with YouTube and far more with Universal Music Group. After all, it's not as if YouTube has upheld the copyright claims.
The proper outcome is for Universal Music Group to stop the insanity, trying this same thing (reportedly) hundreds of times against the same person across years of that person's video catalogue, and getting the same adverse result every time. (So much for the marketers's claims that "AI" systems learn. (-:)
Unfortunately, there's no obvious pressure point, other than some sort of public boycott of UMG, for making this happen. UMG's lawyers have no financial incentive to stop making claims, and are using robotic tools. YouTube would open a huge can of worms by (say) blanket rejecting copyright claims from UMG, and Google has no incentive for causing this sort of trouble with UMG for itself again. M. Beato doesn't have much in the way of levers to pull, and there's the matter of several other well-known YouTubers reporting (in response to this, but also before) that they continually have to deal with the same thing, which a Beato-only fix would not address.
What does Youtube have to do with it? This appears to be a story about Universal Music Group. Stop featuring their artists, and tell anyone on that label to move to a different label if they want to be featured on the channel.
Who gets to process the copyright strike and tell creators they need to remove the content in order to not have consequences? YouTube.
Who gets to close down the channel even before any lawsuit against a copyright allegation is conducted? YouTube.
Beato is fighting BMG because he sees YouTube as the hand that feeds him, but he could get rid of all the BMG annoyances if he was brave enough to own his distribution channel.
YouTube could be subjected to a class action in theory not in practice, because the terms of the site are so loose you can get ejected with no recourse and lose wages, while indemnifying them.
UMG however has not any relationship with the author so they actually can be sued. If they hate their subcontractor YouTube for it, that's their problem.
They're the legal entity on behalf of which blocking is done, after all.
Youtube has those policies in place in order to comply with copyright law, yes? In the long run, I would expect smaller platforms to adopt similar policies as they grow, in order to achieve compliance with copyright law.
> Youtube has those policies in place in order to comply with copyright law
A lot of it is just CYA and enforcement theater. YouTube could pretty much have one dedicated account manager for someone with the subscriber count of Beato who would work as a first-line of defense against frivolous/bogus copyright claims.
> I would expect smaller platforms to adopt similar policies as they grow
But then the content creators who take ownership of their social media presence will by definition be a lot closer to those making these types of decisions, and they will be able to say "I don't think I am infringing on anything, if you really disagree you will have to go to court".
>YouTube could pretty much have one dedicated account manager for someone with the subscriber count of Beato who would work as a first-line of defense against frivolous/bogus copyright claims.
Are there any Youtube alternatives which actually do this, though?
I don't think it actually makes a difference whether Youtube hires the lawyer, or whether Beato hires the lawyer. It comes out of Youtube ad revenues either way. It's better for Beato to be the one to choose who he wants to represent him.
Except that YouTube wouldn't have to hire a lawyer to do any of that. A single Jr account manager from Google should be able to have a dashboard that can reject/overrule bogus claims, and send an automatic response to the copyright trolls telling them where to go if they want to escalate this and get real lawyers involved.
I'm surprised at the presumption anyone is paying for music downloads. If true - shocking.
Good reminder about democracy though. If you just make it about "I'm in power because I voted who's in power (or maybe I will next time)", once every 4 years with your non-lobbyist tiny say, you're actually anti-democracy. Democracy is, and has always been, long before universal access to the ballot box, reliable and consistent resistance to the cunts at the top.
There are many smaller bands that sell their stuff more or less directly, e.g. via bandcamp or directly via small independent record labels. Buy their stuff, it helps them to survive.
Labels would make a fortune if they just set up an online license request store. Any track in various lengths for various prices. Once you pay, you're granted a license. Could take a few minutes for a podcaster to search a song, buy a license for the right length, and you're done. Have a URL that displays a license and instruct creators to put that at the bottom of their video/audio description. Then, any bots can scan for the license URL, verify its key as valid, and move on if the license is valid.
Charge affordable prices (e.g., $1 per second) and make it easy to use. This would take very little time at all and even if it's dirty, the catalog data and mp3s should exist for most stuff. Add a "this track can't be licensed" when data is missing and offer a "let me know" signup.
I have a friend who is a music supervisor. Navigating the web of rights and relationships necessary to license music is as much art as science. Sometimes it’s as straightforward as you describe (minus the convenient online platform), but from his telling, it more often involves a lot of begging, pleading, and favor trading.
Also, podcasters rarely pay for licensed music. There is a ton of high quality royalty free “sound alikes” these days.
That defeats the whole point of this issue. These uses are fair use, they shouldn't have to license anything. You can't teach music without playing it, Youtube is just allowing rights holders to make claims without any evidence or punishment for being wrong.
Fair use is the problem. It's too ambiguous and as a result lawyers can play the games they're playing. My solution is dirt simple, keeps everybody happy, and quits wasting time pretending we're living in 1998.
It’s all brinkmanship: if you can’t unilaterally control it, the instinct is to destroy it.
I work in tech, but thanks to some stubborn drive for creation my parents instilled in me, I also make music. And honestly, compared to music, even the advertising industry feels cutting-edge. Music is still operating with one foot stuck decades in the past.
I read a review by an IPR lawyer long ago who said since music performing rights encouraged artists to record more tunes, in 75 years we'd be drowning in free, and should pay now for the future benefit of growing the size of the free pool in perpetuity.
Not surprisingly the same review recommended extending copyright lifetimes not reducing them. Strange.
Pirate the music and if you want to support the artist to concerts/gigs and buy merch. These labels are inserted themselves between the fans and the artists w/o any benefit but for themselves.
Unless you’re a big artist most tours break even at best, but more often lose money. That loss is sometimes supported by the label investing some money because tours can be a good way to market music and find new audiences. A lot of venues also take big commissions on merch, squeezing the profitability on that part of the business.
Unfortunately for a lot of smaller artists the economics of touring are not great. 1000 tickets at $25 does not equal $25000 in the artist’s pocket.
The artist will maybe get 70% of those ticket sales (the promoter gets a significant cut) and the artist needs to pay her touring costs out of her share. If you’re an artist going on tour with a four piece band, and tour manager/instrument tech then your daily costs are going to be thousands of dollars.
Everyone needs to be paid from that split and all the travel, accommodation and food costs need to be paid, and sometimes the cost of local support acts is paid from the artist’s share.
The agent who secured the booking gets a percentage, and the manager who looks after the artist’s career gets a percentage. After commissions, $25000 in ticket sales might mean the artist only sees $10000 - before she has paid the costs of the tour. With at least six people to be paid (four musicians and the tour manager plus the artist) and accommodated, fed and moved around, that $10000 really doesn’t go very far.
If it’s a band the economics are no different really - all the band members need to make a living while they are on the road.
And of course if that’s 300 tickets at $20 rather than 1000 at $25 none of these costs scale down, the musicians aren’t going to take less, hotel rooms aren’t going to drop in price.
Pirating the music and going to see the ban play live might actually mean the label says “live brings us no uptick on our recordings, so we are not going to invest in tour support for this artist”.
Of course there's the other big elephant in the room: AI music. Not being copyrightable, I've already seen a few YouTubers use it to avoid copyright strikes.
This is so true, the system is broken beyond belief. I want to write a rant here but let’s just say the article is right on all counts.
It’s obvious tech companies as always bowed to one party and listened to them, and didn’t incorporate the user in this. (And to the few that do : thank you)
This is because whatever Google tech is checking for this stuff is too simple right? Or, maybe it's too aggressive because of music industry contracts?
Starsky Carr did a filter sweep while reviewing a synthesizer, and with that got his account shutdown because it was auto-copyright strike. He appealed and luckily it was reversed, but I'm sure others with smaller audiences wouldn't be so lucky.
I kinda feel like the solution is to stop promoting artist that sign with labels? Like the label doesn’t want you to use the music. the artist chose the label to protect their right's
also, it does seem a little whiny on Beato’s part. He’s not wrong that allowing the music on his channel is probably a net positive for the artist and the label but at the same time he’s benefiting from the music. if he wasn’t then he would be fine with removing it
The music in question would be the music of the artist he's interviewing at the time, the absurdity is that you can interview the creator but not show what they've created.
The absurdity is that someone else then the creator can hold the copyright.
In Germany there is a distinction between the selling rights and the creator rights and a company can never be the creator nor can you sell the creator rights.
Good luck with that if you're a new artist looking at a deal. The label will just say "No" and move on.
Artists need exceptional leverage to negotiate a licensing deal instead of a buy out with a reversion option. Most new artists don't have that.
While HN is stuck on its usual obsession with copyright, the reality is the entire ecosystem is bad.
Labels and distributors have the best of all possible worlds. They used to invest in artist development. Now they don't. Most spend very little on promotion, except for household name headliners who are guaranteed earners. Some demand 360 deals where they get a share of all income - sales, plays, touring, and so on.
They're giant corporations run by MBAs whose existence is entirely parasitic.
Why can't an artist or band just make songs and upload them to the platforms directly? And do live shows. What extra does a label give? As you said, they used to invest in artist development and were indispensable for producing the physical media at scale and distributing it to physical record stores everywhere, including internationally. Today all this is much simpler to manage.
I know you aren't the same person as above but the person above wrote
> they used to invest in artist development. Now they don't. Most spend very little on promotion
You seem to be claiming they are providing value.
It they aren't providing any value then artists should not sign up. If the are providing value then it's up to the artist whether or not that value is worth it.
It's worth nothing that we don't live in the 1980s anymore. Radio play, opening for Nickleback, selling merch - all of this matters much less than having a dedicated Internet following. We have lots of examples of musicians in the modern era eschewing radio play entirely, only for radios to beg for licensing rights to play their music. Or successful artists who started their own label or bought-back the rights to their masters. The times have changed quite significantly.
The other thing people seem to forget is that many of the original labels were talent agencies. The reason they promote anyone at all is to try and recoup the investment of supporting all of them. You don't have to empathize with record labels, but modern artists can absolutely "scale" without someone artificially inflating their popularity.
> if he wasn’t then he would be fine with removing it
Mmm... what? He talks about music. It would be hard to do lectures about paintings, or architecture, without showing anything. How can he demonstrate what he's talking about if he can't play even a very short excerpt of the piece he's commenting?
> But feature a barely audible 8 1/2-second clip of music underneath audio dialogue, and you could have your entire podcast career evaporate overnight.
Genuine question - is it really this severe? Or is this an exaggeration?
It gets even crazier when compared to other IP law:
Engineer makes an invention: Write 30-Page patent application. Multi-year patenting process with USPTO, pay 1000s of $ if DIY, 10x that if using an IP law firm. Multiply by 4x if going international. With luck, patent gets issued 3 years later. It protects you for 25 years, but only if you have deep pockets for an IP lawsuit in case someone does copy you -- and with uncertain outcome.
Artist releases a song: automatically enjoys 100+ years of protection, even for minor samples, hooks, melodic elements. Lawsuits are easily won as long as you can prove you are the copyright holder.
I have my theories about how we ended up in this state of affairs but no jurist with a sliver of common sense can seriously claim that this is fine.
I think it's worth mentioning that with a patent, nobody else is allowed to use the patented idea. This holds even if they have never heard of you before, and were entirely unaware your patent (or your version of the patented concept) existed. You are granted a monopoly.
With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours. Someone unaware of your work cannot infringe your copyright. You do not have a monopoly on anything, you are just protected against someone deriving their work from yours directly.
This difference probably factors into how easy it is to win a lawsuit: for a copyright infringement, you need to show they made a copy. You wouldn't be bringing suit in the first place if there were substantial doubt in that area. It also factors into how easy it should be to get a patent vs a copyright: a patent closes off much, much, MUCH more idea-space than a copyright.
> With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours.
That is patently false for music - a songwriter's claim today that they never heard a slightly similar hook from 40 years ago generally doesn't hold in court.
The burden of proof of infringement is on the plaintiff in either case.
If you have an obscure patent nobody has ever heard of, you can win the suit by showing that the defendant had the same idea you did - you don't need to show their work derives from yours.
If you have an obscure song nobody has ever heard (or even an unpublished one!) you are going to have a difficult time proving infringement for a similar riff.
Perhaps you're most familiar with litigation around very famous songs, like the Under Pressure / Ice Ice famous case? In those cultural-saturation cases the court may make the assumption that the later party could have been exposed to the work of the earlier one, but that is not the case universally.
They got George Harrison for a different song that had a similar melody. Don’t think it was identical, though would have to investigate.
Harrison's song was "My Sweet Lord", the song allegedly infringed was "He's So Fine" by some girl group in the 1950s or 1960s. It shouldn't be hard to hear either one. My recollection is that the songs did some pretty much alike.
The group is The Chiffons and according to John Lennon, Harrison “walked right into it — he knew what he was doing.”
The melody, not the song lyrics.
It's clearer than you think. Did Dua Lipa hear an obscure Florida reggae band's tune that isn't available on any major platform to listen to any more? It took some time, but eventually the court agreed she'd never heard the song she supposedly copied:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitating_%28song%29
I think they mean that they can for instance use the song non-professionally.
There is no legal distinction between violating copyright "professionally" or not.
How is that different from a patent then? I don't think anyone would sue you for patent infringement against your hobby project. IP only typically becomes an issue when you want to make some money from your work, and then someone claims that it's actually their work, and thus should be their money.
> I don't think anyone would sue you for patent infringement against your hobby project.
You are mistaken.
> With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours.
John C. Fogerty famously got sued by John C. Fogerty for sounding too similar to John C. Fogerty.
https://blogs.law.gwu.edu/mcir/case/fantasy-v-fogerty/
Also, patents are for frankly more important things. It's a much bigger deal if life-saving medicine or a more efficient car are locked out for 100 years than Winnie the Pooh wearing pants.
Copyright and patents are very different things. Lumping them under the disingenuous umbrella term "IP" only serves to muddle the waters and create FUD. They are not property rights.
It's best to criticize each precisely and surgically. Know the terms, know the rules, the exceptions, etc. Know the history, know the original purpose of these laws. That kind of broader knowledge in broader society is what can help. The big corps are interested in having a vague blurry idea around "IP" that just makes you scared and think "wouldn't download a car" and has a chilling effect of thinking that all "that stuff" is electrified and better not touch it, and that it's just natural that there's "intellectual property" and it's just minor details whether it's copyright or patents or trademarks or whatever else. Property rights are ancient. By associating copyright with that, they make it seem that it's also just as fundamental and civilization-grounding as private property, when most of intellectual history had no such concept. Derivative works, tweaking ideas, splicing them in new ways was just normal.
A related disingenuous propaganda term is "content consumption", again creating the association between e.g. reading a book or listening to a song on the one hand and eating food, or using up soap or fuel on the other.
See also:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-intellectual-property-is-...
https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/LT...
https://conversableeconomist.com/2013/03/29/is-intellectual-...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
What? Copyright and patents are exactly the same thing. Making "you copied me!" actionable at a court of law, by statute, when before that there was no such legal fiction of "intellectual property" or any other exclusive rights to reproduce a thing.
Copyright and patents are absolutely not the same thing at all.
A patent makes it illegal to use a particular idea, by any means. It is a limited-time universal monopoly on a set of specific "claims" (the selected applications of the idea). It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you or not.
A copyright is a prohibition on someone copying you, with certain exceptions where they are allowed to do so ("fair use" or "fair dealing"). Copyrights also, in the USA, bring certain protections against people attempting to use a work in a way you did not intend even where they are not duplicating it.
A trademark is a prohibition on someone causing confusion by copying something you use to identify yourself, or by using/referencing it (without copying) in a context you don't wish.
A trade secret is a criminal prohibition on someone intentionally causing another to divulge certain information that you contractually banned them from divulging.
A security classification is a ban on certain ideas/information being shared with parties that a government agency did not wish them shared with, or used in certain contexts. This is not a protection available to individuals, only to governments.
A license is an intentional weakening of one or more of the above types of protection, potentially with attached civil penalties in the event the bounds of the license are exceeded. It can thus, when accepted, limit behaviour beyond what would normally be allowed by one of the IP types above.
All six of these IP types protect against Person B doing something that is in some way related to an activity Person A did earlier, but they are really quite different in what they cover and how. I don't agree at all they're the same thing.
Also the purpose is important too, to know how to move forward when the tech landscape shifts.
Patents are there to incentivize making it public how inventions work. Inventors would tend to keep their inventions as trade secrets, in fear that someone else will reap all the profits. This would slow the compounding effect of later inventions building upon previous ones. Therefore, patents give exclusivity to the inventor for a set period. In exchange, during this period competitors and others become aware of how the new tech works and hence they can prepare for the time when the patent expires, and then a host of derivative tech can appear. It has been perverted to an absurd parody where the vast majority of patents are not intented for actual use, never get licensed and simply provide cannon fodder and deterrent stockpiles in the lawyer wars between companies. The patents are so broad and vague that legally speaking tech companies are constantly tramping on each other's ground, resulting in a kind of stalemate truce where they agree not to sue, because the other would countersue.
Copyright is there to incentivize creative authorship and its dissemination to the public. By giving exclusive rights, the author can pull a revenue stream, making cultural/artisitic/intellectual creation more viable and hence spurring intellectual and cultural activity in society. The goal is to make authors incentivized to create. Not to drive up the stock prices of mega-publishers and music labels.
Trademarks are there to avoid confusion for buyers as to the identity of a seller or by falsely implying endorsement.
What's common to these is that they are overwhelmingly there to help broader social interests, a common good, in accordance with the enlightenment, somewhat romantic ideals of the optimist zeitgeist of the time when the concepts were defined. They involve restricting individual rights, such as free speech (you can't recite this or that poem in public). That restriction was done reluctantly, to serve higher purposes, like a thriving intellectual exchange and technological progress on a societal scale. It was not about trying to make things as cushy and profitable for huge conglomerates as possible.
>A patent makes it illegal to use a particular idea, by any means. It is a limited-time universal monopoly on a set of specific "claims" (the selected applications of the idea). It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you or not.
Just FYI, as a layman with no opinion on whether they are "the same thing" in this context, this paragraph sounds self-contradictory. It sounds like you're describing copying somebody's idea, and then you say "It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you", so I ended up confused as to your meaning.
Let's say I come up with the idea of using a fan to blow a balloon into the air. I get a patent with the claim "a device made buoyant in air and propelled by forced wind".
Someone else comes up with the idea of blowing a dust bunny into the air with their breath.
Their idea, which has nothing at all to do with my idea and is certainly not a copy, infringes my claim because what they are doing matches what I've claimed as the core idea in my patent. They didn't "copy" me, for two reasons:
1. Their idea was had independently of mine, with its own creativity 2. Their idea is fundamentally not the same as mine, but because my enumerated claim is sufficiently broad to cover their concept too, it's still infringement
With a copyright, their additional creativity would have made their work not infringe. With a copyright, you can't claim anything broader than the work you actually produced.
> With a copyright, their additional creativity would have made their work not infringe.
But not generally. You can't sell a new Hogwarts-based book with Harry Potter characters. This is both due to copyright and trademarks. But already copyright blocks derivative works even if there's additional creativity with a new plot.
You can't sell a Harry Potter book, but you can sell any number of Magical School for Wizards books. They can use similar themes to Harry Potter, similar pacing, even similar artwork styles.
They just can't copy the characters, significant chunks of text, or images.
That's the difference between a copyright and a patent in a nutshell: you copyright an implementation of an idea, while you patent the idea itself.
I think you want them to be meaningfully different, for whatever reason, but at the end of the day, they both come down to "if I did the thing you already did, and that you laid claim to through some form of artificial statutory fabrication of rights, you can sue me".
Whether that means me exploiting having heard your song by playing your song myself, or exploiting your invention I examined by building it myself, they both come down to: statutory fabrication of fictitious "you can't do because they did already" rights, that at common law could have (rightly) only been achieved through keeping the thing a secret (e.g. still present to this day in say trading algorithms, and in software through the now ubiquitous SaaS model) and contacts (i.e. NDAs) flowing from that.
See my other reply parallel to yours. There's no principle of "I did it first, therefore it's my property!". For example, if that was so, you could report an invention and get a patent for it without disclosing exactly how you did the thing. After all you did do it first, so it should be off limits by the (non-existent) "I did it first" principle. Instead, patent law requires "sufficiency of disclosure", meaning that you MUST disclose enough information that another skilled person can recreate the invention from the specified information. You get the time-limited exclusivity in exchange for disclosing the method so that others can work on top of it, refine the technique etc, so when the time comes that the patent expires, there will be improved versions. It is explicitly there to inspire others to work on the thing afterwards, just with some time delay.
Blurring distinct laws and their nuanced purposes into some generic "I call dibs!" principle is exactly what the propaganda part is. Because that creates a kind blurry haze in people's minds that even fills gaps that none of the existing laws currently block out. So people will feel like "that just feels illegal, but I can't exactly say what it violates". A kind of FUD around doing all manners of free intellectual activity in society.
You basically replied to GP's eloquent and nuanced post with, "nah bro trust me, purple is actually blue!"
Congrats on proving your own point
And clothing designer...there is no copyright, suck it up.
Outwith the U.S.A. there is a thing called a design right that applies to that.
In the U.K., the design right took its initial form in 1787 and applied to printed patterns on fabrics; so it has been on point for clothing design for over 230 years. (-:
Indeed. Good example where value comes from. It's all the same crap, but since you've seen My Crap worn by Anne Hathaway a couple of times in ads at the airport, I can charge 10x price.
They get a certain amount of mileage out of trademark, though not the same level of protection to be sure
That's an interesting point that I'd never considered before. Thank you for sharing it.
Classic case of how democracy isn't, in practice, majority rule.
If you put this demented situation to a vote, it'd lose 9-to-1.
Frankly the whole concept of copyright is absolutely stupid though, the equivalent of escalating schoolyard "stop copying me!" to actionable at a court of law. But since when did something being absolutely frothing at the mouth retarded stop it being an entrenched part of the world we live in.
The most ridiculous part of music copyrights is that the DMCA explicitly encodes statutory damages of at least 750$ up to 30,000$, and up to 150,000$ for willful infringement per work [1].
Yet musical compositions are subject to compulsory mechanical copyright licenses at a fixed rate of 12.4 cents or 2.38 cents per minute, whichever is higher [2] for music covers [3] (i.e. same song, different singer/band or even same singer different time). Meaning you can make a cover without permission as long as you pay the copyright holder at the rates specified in the law.
So we already have cheap compulsory licensing for musical compositions which caps damages at a 1/6,000 to 1/240,000 of the DMCA rates. We should just have compulsory mechanical licensing for recordings as well.
If we really want to get crazy, we could even let copyright holders declare a compulsory licensing rate per work then multiply that by some number to get their intellectual property value and then charge them property tax on that intellectual property. So you can set a high compulsory licensing rate, but then you have to pay more property tax on your income generating property or vice versa. This allows valuable works to be protected to support the artists making them, while allowing less valuable works to be easily usable by whoever wants to.
[1] https://uwf.edu/go/legal-and-consumer-info/digital-millenium...
[2] https://copyright.gov/licensing/m200a.pdf
[3] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ73.pdf
> The most ridiculous part of music copyrights is that the DMCA explicitly encodes statutory damages of at least 750$ up to 30,000$, and up to 150,000$ for willful infringement per work
That's not from the DMCA. Those statutory damages were there long before the DMCA. (Also, they can be reduced to $200 in the case of innocent infringement). The DMCA did add some new statutory damages for violations of the new rights DMCA added to US copyright law, such as circumventing protection.
> So we already have cheap compulsory licensing for musical compositions which caps damages at a 1/6,000 to 1/240,000 of the DMCA rates.
There are two things not quite correct here. First, the money you pay the copyright owner under a compulsory license is not damages. It is royalties.
Second, it is not capped. Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work.
If I take that $0.124 compulsory license and my cover of your song sells 5 million copies I'm going to owe you 5 million x $0.124 = $620 000. I suppose as a practical matter it is capped because there are only so many people and most aren't going to by more than one song. The best selling song so far is Bing Cosby's version of Irvine Berlin's "White Christmas" with 50 million sold, so $6 200 000 if that had been under a mechanical license at today's rates.
For statutory damages the number of copies involved only matters in so far as the court might take it into account in deciding where along that $200 - $150 000 range the award should fall.
If I made and sold for example 10 000 unauthorized copies of your work and you found out about 5 000 of them and sued me, asking for statutory damages and won, and then later you found out about that other 5 000 and wanted damages for those to you would be out of luck. The statutory damages award from your first suit covers all my infringement of that work up to the time of that suit.
> First, the money you pay the copyright owner under a compulsory license is not damages. It is royalties.
The rates for compulsory licensing cap your compensation and thus provide a reasonable cap on your compensatory damages.
> Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work.
The most infamous cases were lawsuits against individuals for their individual per-work downloads, or per-work uploads regardless of the number of copies distributed [1][2]. From the perspective of the individual who is unlikely to create more than a handful of copies per work they intend to consume, per-work is largely indistinguishable from per-copy. So, if they made a single copy of a work, which is the most likely case, they are liable for 750$ per-work, yet if musical recordings were subject to the same statutory compulsory licensing as musical compositions, they would only be liable for 0.124$ per copy, a nearly 6000x difference between compensatory and statutory damages for their single copy of a work.
Of course, it could be reasonable to have statutory damages as a punitive measure to dissuade copyright infringement, but the Supreme Court has ruled that punitive damages in excess of a 10:1 ratio with compensatory damages is almost certainly unconstitutional in a lawsuit [3]. That is not binding on Congress with respect to law, but it is certainly troubling that we have decided that music copyright infringement is so heinous as to demand a nearly 600x greater punitive damage ratio compared to what is already at the limits of what is considered constitutional when no specific ratio is specified.
[1] https://www.dcba.org/mpage/vol210209art3
[2] https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages
As a former film student I can say from experience that licensing rights can be expensive. And how expensive depends on the usage. E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema.
Want to play any popular music in your cinema film? The license can easily cost 25.000 € (for film students that is typically more than the budget).
Smaller labels make better prices tho and sometimes the artist lets you use it for free (if it is their choice to make).
> E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema.
Not a criticism, just an addendum for anyone interested:
In the US, almost every bar/restaurant/venue is an ASCAP licensee, and it is relatively cheap (around $10/year/occupant for all forms of media), so a venue that wants to play live or recorded music, television broadcasts, etc., and seats 100 people would pay about $1000/year.
It's a very good price, and one of the main reasons that at any concert hall or arena, you will hear even huge artists playing covers without having to get them pre-approved.
>Our lowest annual fee is just over $1 per day, less than the price of a cup of coffee.
$1 * 365 is more than the $10 you claimed. 36 seats is a medium sized resteraunt. Also using the song search it has none of the music I listen to so it seems useless.
Edit: I was able to find 1 song. If YouTube could offer such a license I would prefer that since they have a larger catalog of music.
I guess they've upped their pricing a bit, or I made that up, I was going off memory from a podcast I listened to a while back (Planet Money maybe?).
If some legislator or public interest lawyer would like to fix some of the DMCA shortcomings or abuses, I think Rick Beato would be a good poster child for legitimate fair use.
Beato does high-quality, knowledgeable videos that make IMHO legitimate educational use of short audio clips, interleaved with discussion. No one can listen to a Beato video to get the experience of the full song, and the Beato video plausibly promotes people wanting to listen to the full song.
Another good example of what should clearly count as fair use is the 3BSkyen channel on youtube[0]. The guy does analyses of animated media and has a habit of turning 5 minutes of media into an hour or more of analysis. He cuts and rewinds and replays stuff constantly. No one in their right mind is going to watch a 3BSkyen video instead of the original. There is no competition between them.
And yet for a lot of IP he can't show the media he's reacting to because it'll immediately and automatically get claimed.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@3BSkyen
One answer to this madness is to starve the beast: never buy any music or any content from an established company. Torrent everything. It may not work at all, but at least you can tell yourself you're not helping the bastards.
Few people are buying anything in this world where streaming is the norm and the labels make money by cutting deals with the distribution platforms.
The solution for me, in this specific case, would be for Beato to act against YouTube and take his channel elsewhere. He has enough followers to be able to start his own Peertube server, find a few sponsors and keep going forever.
Neither the GP or this comment are viable in the real world.
Businesses/creators need continued distribution, see Nike as an example of what happens when you "take your audience elsewhere to monetize them better/more."
1. People buy the other option (in Nike's case they kept going to footlocker and buying other shoes rather than only buying Nike DTC, in Beato's case they would continue to go to YouTube to discover new guitar content)
2. The business can't get new customers because no one is on the new platform (Nike DTC/Peertube)
It's viable for a split second (covid, "stick it to Youtube cause they suck") then people just go back to living their lives.
> in Beato's case they would continue to go to YouTube to discover new guitar content
He's in a unique market position though because he's got industry respect. Joe Bloggs in his bedroom can't compete with "guitar content" because Dave Gilmore, Pat Matheney and Glynn Johns aren't all going to sit with him for a 2 hour long interview.
The GP is still correct.
People are lazy. If you add even a small complication for people to consume content, then it doesn’t matter how much respect that content creator has, people will just follow someone else instead.
Google knows this; which is why they can screw over content creators on their platform.
Oh yeah, it would still be very difficult for him to move his audience off of YouTube. I was trying to pick up on the idea that he would be replaced by someone else. I think it's more likely just a lose/lose scenario for everyone.
https://grayjay.app/ solves this quite well.
Same problem applies: That’s another site to read. Another app to download. Another product to discover.
I nearly didn’t even open the link because I didn’t want to learn something new before I’d had my morning cup of earl grey. Chances are the average consumer wouldn’t bother — assuming they even discover about this to begin with.
"Hey everyone, I'm Rick Beato. I am tired of dealing with YouTube constantly threatening my livelihood, so now I will be focused on my own channel. I will be posting here as well for whatever they let me, but to get full videos just download the GrayJay app (link in description) and look for my channel (link also in description)."
That's all it would take to get a few hundred thousand people to download it, and you'd know that the those who are going through the effort are higher-value subscribers, so it would be even easier to bring better sponsors.
I really don't like arguments based on "I am lazy to do that, therefore everyone is". It's at best defeatist cowardice and at worst a malicious way to support the status quo.
You're assuming a ~5% conversion rate and usage/payment in perpetuity. Those are just unrealistic assumptions, based on my experience in this space.
Everything breaks. - Channel makes no money because sponsors don't pay (as much, it's a power law) for 200k subs (being charitable with your 5%. in reality it would be < 50k)
- Guest don't come because the channel is small and they don't get distribution for their projects
- Platform X doesn't pay out as well as YouTube, so you lose more revenue
- The channel can't function because there isn't enough revenue to run the business. Can't hire lawyers when Z Record Label sues you on Platform X.
- Other channels on larger platforms take the space that you filled. The market is not static. Slash starts his own YouTube channel, which has more credibility, and David Gilmour goes on that one instead. See the celebrity podcast/YouTube space for arguments that prominent celebrities don't become creators when the market signals there is money/opportunity available.
- When subscribers churn, there is no one new on the platform to replace them. Churn in this case means they no longer use the app I made them go to, or they no longer subscribe to or pay me. Creator payment churn is MUCH higher than any typical B2B or B2C churn.
Being a creator is like standing up a business on a set of toothpicks. Even if you are Rick Beato (which is why he is so upset)
I am not saying to completely drop YT. I am saying (a) to run both and keep promoting the alternative and (b) coordinate with other creators to do the same.
I guess (a) with what money and (b) with what time. Unless you are Taylor Swift, people wont watch the exact same content on a different platform just becasue you told them to when it exists on the one they like.
More importantly (c) why?
Instead of building up someone else's business/platform for free (and put yourself in the same position as you already are). This is why people sell a product. Online courses, have their own app, tequila, merch, live shows, signature guitars, etc. As a creator, you don't go to another platform; you have to own something. Unless it's a purely moral argument, in which case, I can respect that, but it's not a good business decision.
I think you're underestimating the money and audience that Beato has. It's as close to Taylor Swift as anyone in the space is going to be.
I understand he is big in the niche space. I also am into guitars. But comparing Rick to Taylor is like comparing HackerNews to Facebook. Her money/power/audience is at least 4 orders of magnitude more than what he has.
Which is why her saying "Only listen to my version" works, where as he would not. 5m subs is just too small.
> with what money
You can run a Peertube instance costs for less than $100/month, distribution included. And that's if you insist on running your own.
> with what time.
People publish to multiple platforms already. Adding another one is the least of the concerns.
> Unless it's a purely moral argument, in which case, I can respect that, but it's not a good business decision.
I for one can only respect someone if their decision puts their principles before their business. That's what "Skin in the Game" is all about. Beato can make all the fuss he wants against BMG, but I have no sympathy for him if his actions only goes as far as his dependency on YouTube/Google allows him to go.
> I for one can only respect someone if their decision puts their principles before their business. That's what "Skin in the Game" is all about. Beato can make all the fuss he wants against BMG, but I have no sympathy for him if his actions only goes as far as his dependency on YouTube/Google allows him to go.
I view Beato's stance as rational: he's picking one battle over the other rather than engaging on multiple fronts at once. He's only one man. He has limited social capital, and the conversion rate favors him spending that capital in a sphere of influence that resonates with his audience, fans, and industry contacts and associations. He knows where his bread is buttered, and due to his success and notoriety he may get away with biting the hand that feeds him, but he's a caged tiger as much as he's a cage-bird.
Beato wants to effect change in a specific way. To broaden the scale and scope of his grievance, he would dilute his own impact. I trust that Beato has given these issues some thought as a working artist, as he has a vested interest in helping himself, but he can already negotiate preferred rates because of his built-in audience and pull. His desired relief would benefit all artists working in America, not just Beato himself. To be drawn into a battle on two fronts would be a tactical error. He's wise to focus on the battle he has a chance of turning the tide of. Others have already engaged on the front you advocate for, and those others are better situated to engage there.
This is Beato's fight, as he drew the battle lines. He can't be sidelined so easily by bystanders, like us in the comment section, because us folks don't have skin in the game like Beato does.
I’m not being defeatist. I’m literally just pointing out the reality of consumer trends.
There is oodles of research into this topic. It isn’t something I’ve just made up.
It’s why analytics exist to explore website user journeys and then promoting the most important calls to action in prominent places.
It’s why physical store fronts put the doors at the front of the shop rather than on the side (side note: a friend of mine does own a shop and when he had to have the front door closed for repair, he saw a sharp decline in random walk-ins because people didn’t want to use the side door).
It’s why Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn etc remaining dominant platforms in their respective domains despite almost universal dislike for those platforms.
It’s why supermarkets put their product with the highest margin in the centre of the shelves and the lower margin items at the top and bottom.
It’s why being on page 2 of Googles search results are as good as not being in Google at all.
I’d actually love it if your idealistic view were true in practice. I don’t want to depend on GitHub, LinkedIn, YouTube. But that’s where the masses are so I need to use it too.
I already ditched WhatsApp for Signal, but after several years without WhatsApp, I still haven’t converted all my family. So I miss out on sooo much conversations because of my ideals.
What you’re advocating simply doesn’t match the reality of how people shop for content. Be that free stuff on social platforms, nor purchasing physical products in stores. It’s not defeatist to say consumers are lazy. It’s just a sad fact of life. And ignoring that fact doesn’t magically make it untrue.
You are confusing "optimal" with "feasible" and you are ignoring the fact it can be more profitable to serve a niche (people with a minimum of ethical standards) than to be just yet-another participant in the commodity marketplace.
That already happens. Content creators have merchandise, patron exclusives, fan clubs and so on and so forth.
The problem isn’t that other revenue streams don’t exist. It’s that they’re still dependent on the whims of YouTube to get their brand out.
And unfortunately, these other revenue streams are only more profitable than YouTube for the smallest percentage of video content creators (baring those who specialise in adult content, but that’s a whole other domain of content creation ;) ).
YouTube already was built on the "distributed" premise. That You can "broadcast yourself" as the slogan says, you use the platform to make your own presence, users can subscribe to you specifically and the platform merely connects the audience and the video makers. No longer are you beholden to the old ways of cable TV producer filters and gatekeepers. You just find and manage your own audience and the platform gets out of the way.
So when grayjay says "Follow Creators, Not Platforms" I'm pretty sure that the minute that regular people on the street know about the existence of "grayjay", they will become essentially also a platform that enshittifies in the same way (cf. https://xkcd.com/927/).
It's a common pattern. Be an aggregator first, then slowly introduce exclusives, and become a competitor that climbed up on the backs of the others. Somewhat similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
GrayJay is just a client for the different platforms, like a regular web browser. They can't put themselves between and the consumer.
> YouTube already was built on the "distributed" premise.
What a load of BS.
> They can't put themselves between and the consumer.
Of course they can. If they smell money and sell, they can change it to whatever they want. It's just a client for now.
It's like arguing for Skype back then based on tech aspects. It's P2P! Yes, P2P until it wasn't.
Youtube wasnt distribute in tech, but was in marketing and if you were there around 2007-10, you remember it was much less social-media-ified and felt more direct and raw. Subscribe and get notified. Just a platform.
The only way to avoid that same path is by remaining obscure and small.
I guess every new generation of tech enthusiasts has to get burned to get sufficiently disillusioned.
The code is open source and FOSS. They could try a bait-and-switch and they would see a dozen forks 30 minutes after the announcement.
Consumers don’t use protocols, they use branded software. Hence why Microsoft’s “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is/was so effective.
> then people just go back to living their lives.
If during the switch you got people to download Grayjay, they will be living their lives like they were, except that some of their subscriptions won't be on YouTube anymore.
Given that xe has "a great lawyer", the logical choice for M. Beato is to move to Nebula, if anywhere. That said, xyr lawyer is getting this rejected on fair use grounds again and again.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLHU0ZUbXX8&t=123s
The beef is less with YouTube and far more with Universal Music Group. After all, it's not as if YouTube has upheld the copyright claims.
The proper outcome is for Universal Music Group to stop the insanity, trying this same thing (reportedly) hundreds of times against the same person across years of that person's video catalogue, and getting the same adverse result every time. (So much for the marketers's claims that "AI" systems learn. (-:)
Unfortunately, there's no obvious pressure point, other than some sort of public boycott of UMG, for making this happen. UMG's lawyers have no financial incentive to stop making claims, and are using robotic tools. YouTube would open a huge can of worms by (say) blanket rejecting copyright claims from UMG, and Google has no incentive for causing this sort of trouble with UMG for itself again. M. Beato doesn't have much in the way of levers to pull, and there's the matter of several other well-known YouTubers reporting (in response to this, but also before) that they continually have to deal with the same thing, which a Beato-only fix would not address.
The only way to do that would be to sue them with a big badass class lawsuit.
This one is doable.
And then a tort for wasting everyone's time and ruining the media.
Not seeing how that one would come to pass though.
What does Youtube have to do with it? This appears to be a story about Universal Music Group. Stop featuring their artists, and tell anyone on that label to move to a different label if they want to be featured on the channel.
Who gets to "demonitize" the videos? YouTube.
Who gets to process the copyright strike and tell creators they need to remove the content in order to not have consequences? YouTube.
Who gets to close down the channel even before any lawsuit against a copyright allegation is conducted? YouTube.
Beato is fighting BMG because he sees YouTube as the hand that feeds him, but he could get rid of all the BMG annoyances if he was brave enough to own his distribution channel.
YouTube could be subjected to a class action in theory not in practice, because the terms of the site are so loose you can get ejected with no recourse and lose wages, while indemnifying them.
UMG however has not any relationship with the author so they actually can be sued. If they hate their subcontractor YouTube for it, that's their problem.
They're the legal entity on behalf of which blocking is done, after all.
Youtube has those policies in place in order to comply with copyright law, yes? In the long run, I would expect smaller platforms to adopt similar policies as they grow, in order to achieve compliance with copyright law.
> Youtube has those policies in place in order to comply with copyright law
A lot of it is just CYA and enforcement theater. YouTube could pretty much have one dedicated account manager for someone with the subscriber count of Beato who would work as a first-line of defense against frivolous/bogus copyright claims.
> I would expect smaller platforms to adopt similar policies as they grow
But then the content creators who take ownership of their social media presence will by definition be a lot closer to those making these types of decisions, and they will be able to say "I don't think I am infringing on anything, if you really disagree you will have to go to court".
>YouTube could pretty much have one dedicated account manager for someone with the subscriber count of Beato who would work as a first-line of defense against frivolous/bogus copyright claims.
Are there any Youtube alternatives which actually do this, though?
I don't think it actually makes a difference whether Youtube hires the lawyer, or whether Beato hires the lawyer. It comes out of Youtube ad revenues either way. It's better for Beato to be the one to choose who he wants to represent him.
Except that YouTube wouldn't have to hire a lawyer to do any of that. A single Jr account manager from Google should be able to have a dashboard that can reject/overrule bogus claims, and send an automatic response to the copyright trolls telling them where to go if they want to escalate this and get real lawyers involved.
> in this world where streaming is the norm
Subscribing to Spotify is feeding the beast. And so is not blocking ads on YT.
Absolutely, the least we can do is not participate.
We're partly in this police state mess of legislation and user-hostile technology because of the history of piracy.
Piracy isn't going to starve the bastards. Piracy is helping the bastards, by giving them reason or pretext.
For a very long time, piracy was the only way to get media online because the conglomerates refused to sell music and movies online.
We didn't get there because of piracy.
[flagged]
I just said how it helps them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm surprised at the presumption anyone is paying for music downloads. If true - shocking.
Good reminder about democracy though. If you just make it about "I'm in power because I voted who's in power (or maybe I will next time)", once every 4 years with your non-lobbyist tiny say, you're actually anti-democracy. Democracy is, and has always been, long before universal access to the ballot box, reliable and consistent resistance to the cunts at the top.
You must be working at an AI company.
+1 for Soulseek
It's still better than things like Spotify.
I listen to a lot of traditional Irish music and love to do things like shuffling a playlist of all the same tune by different performers.
To do that on Spotify I need to search the tune name, then create a new playlist and manually add them all.
With my local files I can just grep, even the metadata, and pipe it into a playlist for mpv to play instantly.
There are many smaller bands that sell their stuff more or less directly, e.g. via bandcamp or directly via small independent record labels. Buy their stuff, it helps them to survive.
But mayor record labels can go die in a ditch.
Labels would make a fortune if they just set up an online license request store. Any track in various lengths for various prices. Once you pay, you're granted a license. Could take a few minutes for a podcaster to search a song, buy a license for the right length, and you're done. Have a URL that displays a license and instruct creators to put that at the bottom of their video/audio description. Then, any bots can scan for the license URL, verify its key as valid, and move on if the license is valid.
Charge affordable prices (e.g., $1 per second) and make it easy to use. This would take very little time at all and even if it's dirty, the catalog data and mp3s should exist for most stuff. Add a "this track can't be licensed" when data is missing and offer a "let me know" signup.
I have a friend who is a music supervisor. Navigating the web of rights and relationships necessary to license music is as much art as science. Sometimes it’s as straightforward as you describe (minus the convenient online platform), but from his telling, it more often involves a lot of begging, pleading, and favor trading.
Also, podcasters rarely pay for licensed music. There is a ton of high quality royalty free “sound alikes” these days.
That defeats the whole point of this issue. These uses are fair use, they shouldn't have to license anything. You can't teach music without playing it, Youtube is just allowing rights holders to make claims without any evidence or punishment for being wrong.
Fair use is the problem. It's too ambiguous and as a result lawyers can play the games they're playing. My solution is dirt simple, keeps everybody happy, and quits wasting time pretending we're living in 1998.
It’s all brinkmanship: if you can’t unilaterally control it, the instinct is to destroy it.
I work in tech, but thanks to some stubborn drive for creation my parents instilled in me, I also make music. And honestly, compared to music, even the advertising industry feels cutting-edge. Music is still operating with one foot stuck decades in the past.
I watched Beato's video. I couldn't help thinking that making hundreds of false claims was harassment? Any lawyers around?
I don't understand why false DMCA claims don't result in legal consequences for the people or companies making them.
I read a review by an IPR lawyer long ago who said since music performing rights encouraged artists to record more tunes, in 75 years we'd be drowning in free, and should pay now for the future benefit of growing the size of the free pool in perpetuity.
Not surprisingly the same review recommended extending copyright lifetimes not reducing them. Strange.
Pirate the music and if you want to support the artist to concerts/gigs and buy merch. These labels are inserted themselves between the fans and the artists w/o any benefit but for themselves.
Unless you’re a big artist most tours break even at best, but more often lose money. That loss is sometimes supported by the label investing some money because tours can be a good way to market music and find new audiences. A lot of venues also take big commissions on merch, squeezing the profitability on that part of the business.
Unfortunately for a lot of smaller artists the economics of touring are not great. 1000 tickets at $25 does not equal $25000 in the artist’s pocket.
The artist will maybe get 70% of those ticket sales (the promoter gets a significant cut) and the artist needs to pay her touring costs out of her share. If you’re an artist going on tour with a four piece band, and tour manager/instrument tech then your daily costs are going to be thousands of dollars.
Everyone needs to be paid from that split and all the travel, accommodation and food costs need to be paid, and sometimes the cost of local support acts is paid from the artist’s share.
The agent who secured the booking gets a percentage, and the manager who looks after the artist’s career gets a percentage. After commissions, $25000 in ticket sales might mean the artist only sees $10000 - before she has paid the costs of the tour. With at least six people to be paid (four musicians and the tour manager plus the artist) and accommodated, fed and moved around, that $10000 really doesn’t go very far.
If it’s a band the economics are no different really - all the band members need to make a living while they are on the road.
And of course if that’s 300 tickets at $20 rather than 1000 at $25 none of these costs scale down, the musicians aren’t going to take less, hotel rooms aren’t going to drop in price.
Pirating the music and going to see the ban play live might actually mean the label says “live brings us no uptick on our recordings, so we are not going to invest in tour support for this artist”.
Well clearly the artists are seeing benefit, otherwise they wouldn't sign up for a label.
Of course there's the other big elephant in the room: AI music. Not being copyrightable, I've already seen a few YouTubers use it to avoid copyright strikes.
Until it accidentally hits filters, and then how can you prove the AI did it and did not incidentally plagiarize some original piece?
It's the opposite of a solution.
This is so true, the system is broken beyond belief. I want to write a rant here but let’s just say the article is right on all counts.
It’s obvious tech companies as always bowed to one party and listened to them, and didn’t incorporate the user in this. (And to the few that do : thank you)
This is because whatever Google tech is checking for this stuff is too simple right? Or, maybe it's too aggressive because of music industry contracts?
Starsky Carr did a filter sweep while reviewing a synthesizer, and with that got his account shutdown because it was auto-copyright strike. He appealed and luckily it was reversed, but I'm sure others with smaller audiences wouldn't be so lucky.
Maybe it's time for Beato and others to start boycotting music owned by UMG?
I kinda feel like the solution is to stop promoting artist that sign with labels? Like the label doesn’t want you to use the music. the artist chose the label to protect their right's
also, it does seem a little whiny on Beato’s part. He’s not wrong that allowing the music on his channel is probably a net positive for the artist and the label but at the same time he’s benefiting from the music. if he wasn’t then he would be fine with removing it
The music in question would be the music of the artist he's interviewing at the time, the absurdity is that you can interview the creator but not show what they've created.
The absurdity is that someone else then the creator can hold the copyright.
In Germany there is a distinction between the selling rights and the creator rights and a company can never be the creator nor can you sell the creator rights.
If the creator gave up their copyright then it's not absurd, it's law. This is why it's important for budding artists to keep their masters.
The law is absurd. It has no right to exist and runs counter to the laws of reality.
Good luck with that if you're a new artist looking at a deal. The label will just say "No" and move on.
Artists need exceptional leverage to negotiate a licensing deal instead of a buy out with a reversion option. Most new artists don't have that.
While HN is stuck on its usual obsession with copyright, the reality is the entire ecosystem is bad.
Labels and distributors have the best of all possible worlds. They used to invest in artist development. Now they don't. Most spend very little on promotion, except for household name headliners who are guaranteed earners. Some demand 360 deals where they get a share of all income - sales, plays, touring, and so on.
They're giant corporations run by MBAs whose existence is entirely parasitic.
Why can't an artist or band just make songs and upload them to the platforms directly? And do live shows. What extra does a label give? As you said, they used to invest in artist development and were indispensable for producing the physical media at scale and distributing it to physical record stores everywhere, including internationally. Today all this is much simpler to manage.
You can. You will not be seen unless a label or some big name promotes you.
Radio? Forget about it. Big concerts next to big agents? Nope.
Thing is, breaking through or even is ever harder.
I know you aren't the same person as above but the person above wrote
> they used to invest in artist development. Now they don't. Most spend very little on promotion
You seem to be claiming they are providing value.
It they aren't providing any value then artists should not sign up. If the are providing value then it's up to the artist whether or not that value is worth it.
Radio? who listens to radio now-a-days?
It's worth nothing that we don't live in the 1980s anymore. Radio play, opening for Nickleback, selling merch - all of this matters much less than having a dedicated Internet following. We have lots of examples of musicians in the modern era eschewing radio play entirely, only for radios to beg for licensing rights to play their music. Or successful artists who started their own label or bought-back the rights to their masters. The times have changed quite significantly.
The other thing people seem to forget is that many of the original labels were talent agencies. The reason they promote anyone at all is to try and recoup the investment of supporting all of them. You don't have to empathize with record labels, but modern artists can absolutely "scale" without someone artificially inflating their popularity.
> if he wasn’t then he would be fine with removing it
Mmm... what? He talks about music. It would be hard to do lectures about paintings, or architecture, without showing anything. How can he demonstrate what he's talking about if he can't play even a very short excerpt of the piece he's commenting?
Music compaines don't care if it hurts the artist. The have masses of licensed music and can afford the income damage caused by copyright strikes.
> But feature a barely audible 8 1/2-second clip of music underneath audio dialogue, and you could have your entire podcast career evaporate overnight.
Genuine question - is it really this severe? Or is this an exaggeration?