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.
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.
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.
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 $1000/year.
It's a very good price, and one of the main reasons that at any concert hall or arena, you will hear even huge artists playing covers without having to get them pre-approved.
> The most ridiculous part of music copyrights is that the DMCA explicitly encodes statutory damages of at least 750$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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/
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
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. (-:
Deleted Comment
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.
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
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).
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.
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 - $150 000 range the award should fall.
If I made and sold for example 10 000 unauthorized copies of your work and you found out about 5 000 of them and sued me, asking for statutory damages and won, and then later you found out about that other 5 000 and wanted damages for those to you would be out of luck. The statutory damages award from your first suit covers all my infringement of that work up to the time of that suit.
The rates for compulsory licensing cap your compensation and thus provide a reasonable cap on your compensatory damages.
> Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work.
The most infamous cases were lawsuits against individuals for their individual per-work downloads, or per-work uploads regardless of the number of copies distributed [1][2]. From the perspective of the individual who is unlikely to create more than a handful of copies per work they intend to consume, per-work is largely indistinguishable from per-copy. So, if they made a single copy of a work, which is the most likely case, they are liable for 750$ 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
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.
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
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.
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.
* 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.
Subscribing to Spotify is feeding the beast. And so is not blocking ads on YT.
Piracy isn't going to starve the bastards. Piracy is helping the bastards, by giving them reason or pretext.
We didn't get there because of piracy.
Dead Comment
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.
But mayor record labels can go die in a ditch.
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.
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.
Also, podcasters rarely pay for licensed music. There is a ton of high quality royalty free “sound alikes” these days.
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.