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ARIA Sells a Licence for DJs to Format Shift Music
lucas writes "The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) has set up a new licence to let DJs format shift their music to use at gigs.
DJs will need to pay a licence fee to copy music they already own legally from one format to another for ease of use, and as a back-up in case originals get lost or stolen.
Criminal penalties for DJs involved in "music piracy" are up to sixty thousand dollars and 5 years imprisonment. There are also on-the-spot fines of over one thousand dollars."
Copyright.. copy right.
The owner has the exclusive right to make copies and sells "licenses" which permit you to make copies for specific purposes.
Why is this surprising?
How we know is more important than what we know.
The AIRA declared all Australians to be DJs, and that converting from optical media to an electronic signal in a player (and then from the electronic signal to an audible one) were conversions requiring a license. Botany Bay is to be used to house all juveniles who fail to pay the double licenses.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Beam me up scotty, no intellegent life here...
we have this... or... wait... My bad. I guess nothing another organization can do can actually make RIAA look any better.
With the number of DJs here, I would not expect all of them to even know of this rule or for the ARIA to suddenly take all "offenders" to court. Don't feed the hands that bite you!
-Aly.
Sounds like a fair deal, presuming DJs are free to charge a similar fee back for all that previously free advertising of ARIA's recording artists. Without their music played in venues, their sales plummet and music loses mind-share as a passtime to other forms of entertainment such as the Internet, video games, cinema tickets, etc.
You either:
1. Buy (and subsequently own) the music on the physical media. Then you are legally allowed to do whatever you want with it, including selling.
or
2. Buy a license to listen to the music. Then you can media-shift all you want, as you are licensing the music. You never have to rebuy it either, if your disk breaks, just download the music, you already have a license.
This thievery has to stop. It is insane.
Imagine a world where the people weren't such meek sheep.
This is NOT Ok. A DJ (or more likely the venue he performs at) already pays royalties for publicly performing canned music. This new rule specifically covers for example ripping a CD to mp3 to be used with computer based DJing software. Doing that is solely for convenience of the DJ and does not make anonyone more money. Except now of course for the ARIA.
There is a "time shifting" exception that allows you to make a recording of tv recordings for your own purposes.
There is also a "format shifting" making it legal to rip a cd and place the music on your portable player.
The problem with these exceptions are that they are for non commercial uses. it is fine for YOU as a citizen to do it for yourself but not as a PUBLIC performance which has always been a separate part of the law. If you are getting paid to do it in public you have always been required to pay a licence like this, perhaps the only difference is the industry body is now doing this. It seems just another way of clearing this public use of music which you would have ether gone to the record company itself or another agent to do this.
Ignoring for a moment that you're trying to use common sense to figure out copyright law and that is always a big fat waste of time, you're probably not away that only last year did it become legal to tape something off TV in Australia.
For almost every case, Copyright in Australia is worse for the consumer than it is in the US. Almost.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Read the relevant condition more carefully. It doesn't have anything to do with actually playing the songs publically, just literally copying them from a collection of CDs to the editing computer. If the DJ instead kept swapping the CDs out of his computer, he wouldn't have to pay this fee (oh, and did not make any backups of his music either).
From TFA:
From the FAQ on the ARIA website:
And regarding fair use, it does exist for private persons:
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Although the silver lining is that Australian Police and Courts generally dont give a shit about personal and small time piracy.
They go after the big fish: the ones which cause actual damage.
In 2006, the government passed a law making format shift legal. In particular, it would be legal to copy from a CD to an iPod.
It turns out this is only for "private, domestic use", which wouldn't apply to DJs on commercial premises.
Format shifting fact sheet
Wow, a license just to copy to your iPod. Sounds like marijuana tax stamps to me.
Oh, come on now. This is just as much a load of crap as the RIAA going after barbershops that keep a radio turned up!
This licensing is aimed at DJ's copying stuff off their ipods and using it for PUBLIC PERFORMANCES. if this was just making backups of stuff they already had a license for to play publicly or for personal use, then you might actually have a point.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Wait wait wait, how the hell does that work? Let's say a DJ works on a laptop as opposed to spinning vinyl or CDs... He buys a CD, rips it to MP3 and loads it into his software. Even if he's paying ASCAP fees for the use of the music (or whatever the equivalent organization is in Australia), he gets fined $60k unless he pays a SEPARATE fee for the ability to work from MP3s instead of the original CDs? My mind just exploded. As long as he's paying his ASCAP (or whatever) fees, who gives a shit whether he's working off a CD or an MP3?
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
That is you don't really own the music, you just buy the right to use it from the CD. Not that it makes any sense and why should they pay twice or more because they want to change format to something more convenient than fucking CDs? Retarded. But then I don't buy music so not much of a problem for me.
It surely seems like you don't buy a song from ITunes, and you don't buy a movie from Blockbuster, etc. At the very least they should stop using the term buy.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
A recording industry association can't arbitrarily define themselves what's legal and what isn't under copyright law. They are bound by copyright law as much as everybody else.
Format shifting is not a public performance. Therefore, it should be covered under standard copyright law and not require separate licensing.
Public performance of the music can, of course, be subject to licensing fees. But the recording industry shouldn't be able to set licensing fees based on which media or equipment the DJ happens to use.
Are the record labels so scared of promotion that they want to kill it? That they want nothing to do with it?
Yes, copyright infringement is illegal, but paying to shift formats (from disc to any more portable format) should fall under fair use. And DJs already pay royalties to be allowed to play the music. So why should they have to pay twice?
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The ARIA can impose fees on the public performance. But format shifting isn't public performance, it's something that's done prior to public performance, and separately.
even if he is capt'n obvious, his point is correct.
Generally, if you don't like the power that copyright owners have over us then don't give them so much bloody power.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I misinterpreted your post as meaning this was a payment for the public performance itself. Silly. You're right that a professional DJ's format shifting is not done in the capacity of a private individual.
However, the DJ must have either permission from the rights holder to use the original material in the first place, or the right to do so by law. ARIA's case seems pretty contrived.
I wonder what ARIA's position in on music purchased in digital format that doesn't involve an original physical copy.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
About the same time they stop calling it "theft".
How we know is more important than what we know.
That comes under License Extensions for Time Delta Shifting, Recursive Shifting and Spanish Inquisition Sketch Shifting, all of which must be paid for individually. Remember, every time you scratch a record without paying, an angel gets its wings and legs ripped off.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What are professional DJ's supposed to do?
As a rule, when speaking of bigger names, not only do the record labels definitely give them the
music for free, actually they beg them to play it. Now suddenly the same DJ's who were GIVEN
all of these songs from the record labels, the producers or specialized promotion companies for free
would have to pay for the use of them?
A while back, a little known organization in the UK named the PPL managed to get similar laws enacted
To my knowledge, no one has ever gotten busted for not complying with their arcane rules
which border on extortion pure and simple, and are impossible to comply with.
What's happening pure and simple is that many of the people who make up the voting boards of these
entities are totally overwhelmed by technology they just do not understand, and are passing measures
which they believe in earnest are going to help stem the tides of something they feel they can still control.
As someone posted above, paying such tax is only helping legitimize something which is patently
unfair at best, and not ever going to be a solution to anything other than yet another desperate attempt
at trying to put the proverbial cat back in the box, when the box itself has all but disappeared.
Let's not even go into details on who is going to get the money collected (probably pop artists
whose songs never get played once in the clubs, but who have enough airplay stats to register
on the radar of performing rights societies... LOL)
Who thought the dying throes of an entire industry were going to be that much fun?
Z.
Maybe I'm just stoned, but I read the article heading as:
RIAA Sells a License for DJs to Format Shit Music
Which seems to make more sense.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
Performance fees for dance music in Australian nightclubs are changing from $0.07/patron to $1.05/patron, a 1500% increase!
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
I know I'm trying to be logical when it comes to the various recording industries, but...
If I got this right, the DJ has to buy, and pay royalties towards music purchased in format X, and potentially the venue also must pay royalties. So music X is bought and paid for, correct?
Now if the DJ decided to shift X into Y he must pay AGAIN, noticing that X was already completely paid up and legit.
I don't see where this is different from me doing the same, even if my use is not commercial. The main similarity, of course, is that X is completely legal, legit, and paid for. What the difference from me playing the CD containing a song, and me playing an mp3 of the same song, ripped from the same album. Where does the industry lose money? Is there something in the process of encoding and ripping that takes back all the money I paid in the first place?
Off topic, but relevant: WTF is up with the new comment boxes and format? The comments make me feel like I'm using a ghetto version of Reddit, and the actual page format is just UGLY. The huge gray buttons are... well... And the new way of displaying threads is more moronic than the last version...
Who taught the monkey to play with code?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Or something similar, at least:
http://www.djlicence.org.uk/faq.html
"I only use original CDs in my performance, do I need these licences?
No, these licences are for copying or dubbing music tracks to pc or mp3 player.
These licences also DO NOT allow you to copy from CD to CD-R.
To understand more about which licences apply where download the NADJ Licensing Grid."
These days you have to be prepared in case you show up and the venue has either vinyl turntables, or a digital setup. They could say that they have turntables, and they turn out to not have needles or better yet - they haven't been used in years and end up not working. Of course, with this you would have to buy your music twice, and 12" electronica vinyl records have 1-3 songs for $12-25 EACH. How much can one pay for one song they will actually play?!
I know a guy named Sig.
Remember too that the 'time-shifting' exception was only recently legislated - less than two years if memory serves correctly. Prior to that time recording TV shows on a VCR/PVR, even for private viewing, was technically illegal.
I'm not certain that format shifting is formally recognised as a legitimate exception to the copyright law (maybe it is, I don't know) but even if it isn't nobody is going to be jailed for that, just as nobody was jailed for using their VCR to record Neighbours.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
started charging record companies for "promoting their music in public venue's". TV stations charge record companies why can't DJ's.
I was about to say a similar thing and noticed your comment. A lot of DJ's now use laptops/ipods meaning they can now use music sourced from anywhere and I guess the record companies are seeing potential revenue streams going down the drain, not to mention the fact that a couple of torrent downloads could provide a DJ with several days worth of digital music for free.
It surely seems like you don't buy a song from ITunes, and you don't buy a movie from Blockbuster, etc. At the very least they should stop using the term buy.
They don't call it "buying" - They call it "stealing". If the recording industry had its way, we'd have to fork over $16 for a "license" in the form of a shiny plastic disc (non-transferrable and corporeally-bound, of course - Don't go thinking that just because you "license" their content you have some silly rights to either resell it or to keep using it in the event you lose/break your plastic disc). Then we'd pay separate format-shift licenses for converting the contents of that disc to a stream of bits; then for converting those bits to 16- or 24-bit words (perhaps on a "per-bit" basis, just for fairness to the industry); then for converting those words to analog signals sent to the speakers (this may require a separate broadcasting license, as it leaves the vicinity of the CD player itself); then for converting those analog levels to waves of sound pressure; then finally for converting those waves of sound pressure into neural impulses in the cochlea.
You greedy pirate bastards think you can just have all that for free, just because you plunked down $16 for a plastic disc? What, you want Cary Sherman's kids to have to go to public school???
WTF is Shift Music, and how does one format it?
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Copyright and patent laws, put as simple as possible avoiding the insane logic, are there so software and entertainment companies can throw themselves to the ground, whine and cry about anything they don't like, like the little babies they are.
Look, it's THEM. They just shuffled the letters around a bit. So don't act so surprised, I guess they ran a bit out of dead people and children to sue in the US (as a side effect of the living ones starting to call their bluff).
Licence
This is a third bite at the cherry - you pay for the music, then you pay again for the performing rights licence, then now you pay a third time for the right to transfer the music you paid for into a format where you can play it to the public (which you paid for the right to do)
-=DaveHowe=-
Pretty soon the RIAA will have a direct debit into out bank accounts and they'll be driving around with loudspeakers to make 100% sure we're all eligible to pay.
No sig today...
What's with the intrusive new ugly "Reply to this" and "Parent" buttons here?
Horrible. Is there any way to go back to the old appearance?
Why was this marked as a troll? It's a perfectly valid point.
Most nightclub owners will tell law-enforcement or ARIA's solicitors, with a completely straight face, that there is no illegal activity inside their clubs.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
"Nice collection of music you got there... pity if something should 'happen' to it... you oughta pay us some 'protection'..."
Having to pay for the "right" to make a backup of something they send out on flawed, easily destroyed media? Uhm... no. Consumers have the right to protect their own investment from destruction.
So where's the problem?
And if there's a few less peroxide-haired record changers around who are no longer bragging about what wonderful "musicians" they are, then that's even better...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The real problem is that DJ's don't have a massive lobby group like the record labels and radio station conglomerate.
Realize, at least in the U.S. that something like 80%-90% of albums rights are held by four conglomerate corporations. Likewise, probably about 80%-90% of radio stations are owned by 4-5 major conglomerates.
DJ's are thousands of independent joe-average people, many working part time on the side.
> We have to buy the albums but are never given a license. We have albums stolen, broken, etc. at a much higher rate. But have to replace said albums at the full price (even though we already have a license).
> We have to pay performance licensing for the right to play songs in public. (FYI, weddings are a private event and different rules apply.)
> We receive few guarantees and protections. While a specific grant in the DCMA allows for radio stations to make ephereal recordings. DJ's are not given that protection. For one simple reason...they didn't have a mega-association with millions of dollars to lobby (bribe) Congress. Yes there are some DJ associations, but the industry doesn't really lend itself to such a conglomerate as labels & radio does.
> Advantage of digital recordings. Our masters are safe from theft. Instead of having to lug 4 80lb suitcases of CDs to bring all our stock. We can lug one 5 lbs external hard drive.
It's disgusting...
Oh, by the way, if you are a musical artist and you want me to respect your copyrights. Get the law changed to protect DJs and web radio.
Cause I quit recognizing your copyrights as soon as the laws stopped. If your an artist...don't gripe to me about the violation of your rights. Cause us DJs have had our rights violated repeatedly.
Copyright is a two way system. If you want it honored, you have to honor the users as well. If you're going to claim people are only buying a "license". Then give them a real license and let them register their license. Otherwise, more and more people are going to cease recognizing your copyrights.
I no longer do. Anyone who wants copies of any of my CDs are welcome to make them. I've got a burner in the basement. Having lost several hundred dollars to copyright law abuse, I've cease recognizing your right. While you may have the law on your side.
Most people don't care about legality, rather, they care about right & wrong. (There are plenty of laws on the books that are 'legal' but far from moral.) And most people only feel a moral contractual obligation to another party if that party is acting in good faith. (Which the conglomerate copyright holders are NOT doing.)
The ones that need to change the system are the artists!
Probably along the lines of the royalty rates charged to web radio on behalf of artists* - likely more than the average light-duty DJ makes. They'll base the prices on the top club and wedding DJs and expect the small time DJs to be able to cough it up.
* NOTE - Artists were completely robbed on web radio royalty. RIAA was granted by Congress a card of opportunity to steal all the royalties of artists. Artists were never given the right to negotiate. Soundexchange collects royalties from all the web radio stations, which mainly play independent artists not on RIAA's labels. But those independent artists seldom get enough plays to ever receive royalties. But for web radio stations have to pay for ALL broadcasts. So SoundExchange gets to sit on all the proceeds, and never pay out cash.
I love how XIAA's always say...
"Have to pay a fair rate/pay their share."
Which translates into "Paying whatever the !@#$% we want. Even if it's more than all their profits.
My wife and I had vaguely looked into relocating to Australia, as it seemed to embody a lot of what the US was once proud to stand for. From all the news we've been hearing from there, though, it seems like they're following the bad example we're setting. Am I misreading things, or is Australia really rushing to become another nanny state of infinite laws?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'm a DJ so I will quickly toss in my two cents. It is the responsibility of the venue to pay the ascap fees for the public performance of music in said venue.
Then are they allowed to force licensing for every step of the public performance preparation?
License to place a CD in a CD drive
License to play a CD from a combo CD/DVD drive?
License to move the file from one directory to another?
License to use a solid state storage medium in a performance?
License to alter the volume level of a performance based on listener preference?
How about a license for playing music above a certain volume at a performance?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The RIAA would never do that. It infringes on the turf of ASCAP and BMI.
What a bunch of crap. Inetersting though to see that the Aussies are just as much a bunch of greedy motherfuckers as their North American counterparts. Don't they read global news sources? Don't they see what's happening to the recording industry here because of shit like this?
Sadly it is the same here in Belgium (for a couple of years already now). SABAM is extorting local DJ's for a fee of I believe 250 euros for this.
And why? Only because the law here says they can do it, you can only create public performances off of legitimately bought products, not derivatives.
It's just all very much twisted and fucked up, I am still awaiting the first rise of DJ's who aggressively campaign against this extortion (or media coverage of this malfunctioning copyright system). But pretty much to no avail.
Lets say I setup a set of CDs for a performance. I've done all the steps to get a license. If I have equipment that buffers the audiostream before it is sent to the speakers, should that require an additional license?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
First of all the ARIA doesn't represent or pay royalties to most of the Electronica artists that club DJ's play. So why should the DJ's pay them royalties? The ARIA should have to prove that the DJ's are playing artists that they represent. I would recommend that all makers of Club style music register with and demand royalties from the ARIA. Secondly most of the club DJ's I know download/swap their music as MP3's anyway. They don't format shift and they don't buy music. As a maker of club music you want the DJ's to be playing your music, much like commercial music makers need radio. I agree that these fees should come under the public performance fees and be payable by the venue, as long as said fees are actually being distributed to the artists whose music is being played.
prescribing all Muslims from listening to music.
Then you can forbid any ARIA from entering your country UNDER PAIN OF DEATH!
I see these lawyers just swinging from tree limbs.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Imagine a world where the situation with other media was as insane as it currently is with movies/music.
Imagine pre-school teachers had to pay "broadcasting licenses" to read children's books to their pupils. And school libraries had to invest fortunes into multi-user licenses for their books and magazines ("because, hell, any student could read it!")
Imagine you had to pay a royalty fee everytime you quoted someone else's research paper ("What's that? You want to just be able to quote any research you want and expect to get away with it without million-dollar lawsuits? What kind of utopia are you living in?").
Why aren't stories like these happening when they seem so abundant in the music and movie industries? Because the funding behind scientific research and (arguably) other areas of publishing aren't in the hands of people who have long since stopped seeing any intrinsic merit in what they are doing and run things with the sole intent of squeezing as much money as possible out of it.
We can't blame the MAFIAA, ARIA, or their international counterparts -- these organisations are businesses. They're structured and run like businesses, and, sadly, they seem to be rather good at it. What needs to happen is this: music needs to stop being a business. We need to put a lot of the funding behind artists back into the hands of the public. Subventions for artists by the government (or, on a smaller scale, by local municipalities) is an important cultural stimulant in many countries, and it has the benefit of supporting more independent and emerging artists without focus on factors like "sellability" (i.e. how much money can be squeezed out of it). We have large-scale scientific funding*; why can't we have large-scale artistic funding for artists? Sure, music might not be as important (though I'd rate research for the sake of advancement of knowledge fairly close in importance to cultural evolution), but something needs to fundamentally be changed about the entertainment industry in most countries. We can't just sit and wait until the *AA implodes and another equally unsuitable system takes its place.
* N.B. I'm not USian, so the "we" here refers to all of North America/Australia/Europe
* sits back and watches the -1 Flamebait mods roll in... *
Of course I didn't RTFA.
Am I missing a level of posts, or have you been debating with yourself? I guess the good side is you're winning. Wait . . .
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
The article wasn't very clear, nor is ARIA's statement. There are several lingering questions:
1) Who do you pay? How do you know if a recording you have is represented by ARIA? They are one of many music industry groups. Looking at the album cover isn't guaranteed to work, the album may have been printed overseas. Artists switch labels and copyrights can be transferred or expire.
2) When does this apply? Either music published prior to this proclamation is exempt, or DJs have been spinning illegally for years and are liable for back-pay.
3) How is this policed? Does the Australian government really want to be responsible for examining the legality of every song on a DJ's hard drive? If ARIA gets aggressive about this all they'll do is get their music out of circulation, because compliance is too expensive and time-consuming.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
> The main similarity, of course, is that X is completely legal, legit, and paid for.
It's the same thing with stores. You open a CD or a DVD store. You buy your stuff legit, you sell them at reasonable prices, you pay your taxes. You think you are legit. But then, the local representatives of the Music And Film Industry Association (MAFIA) come to visit you and point out that you should pay a licence fee to them for *not* participating in the niche sport equipment business that they own in an esoteric level. The on-site demonstration that usually follows practically always convinces shopkeepers that they would rather pay the license fee than to be forced to enter the very tough baseball bat business.
However, the above method is not very efficient. Thugs are way too soft and too dumb to come up with new ways in innovative licensing. Hence the use of lawyers (they are smart) and politicians (they are tough). Costs a wee bit more, but your profits will skyrocket.
What the fuck is an "on the spot" fine? Does that mean some RIAA heavies just come in and demand money? That sounds like a job for law enforcement and the courts, not a private corporation.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.