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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."
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.
I curse the ARIA with a plague of Rolf Harrises! And may they never guess what it is!
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)
Because certain types of copies are allowed. For instance, you're allowed to have a copy of a program on your hard drive and in RAM. You can have a copy sitting in a hard drive cache. The intent behind copyright is that you purchase it for a purpose (and likely the DJs had to purchase a more expensive version that allows public performance) and you can use it for that purpose.
I've always thought the music industry should have to pick. Either they can sell you a physical media with which you can do whatever you want (public performances or personal use) or sell you a license to use the music in a certain way (private use only, but you have the right to the music in any format you want for that purpose).
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.
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.
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
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
Because a DJ is ALREADY paying royalties to ARIA for the right to spin those songs at a gig. ARIA is proposing to make DJs pay an *additional* fee on top of what they're already paying in order to format shift their music for convenience (i.e. playing tunes as MP3s out of a laptop, or creating compilation CDs to reduce the number of CDs that need to be taken to a gig). This is wrong because it makes absolutely no difference to the listeners. They just hear music coming out of the speakers regardless of what format it's in on the DJ's side.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
They should also have to choose between legal and technological protection. If they want to use DRM to enforce policies that aren't based in copyright law (and there's no way for a piece of software to distinguish what's legal fair use), then I see no reason to grant them copyright protection. The purpose of copyright is to promote creation and enrich society. Fair use is a necessary part of that, as is the ability to use the work after the copyright period expires. They should not be allowed to renege on half of the bargain and expect the other half to continue to hold.
If they want DRM, fine. But pick one. They shouldn't be allowed to lock up our culture and expect legal assistance in doing so.
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.
What's wrong with my logic? I'm starting to suspect a troll here but I'll keep going just in case...
A DJ, as part of spinning songs for a crowd, is already paying royalties to ARIA for the right to play those songs in public. I want you to explain to me exactly why he should be required to pay additional royalties on top of what he is already paying for the right to play those songs out of a laptop or off a compilation CD instead of the original CD.
Bear in mind that copyright does not make it illegal to copy *any* music. It only makes it illegal to copy to music that you do not have a license to copy. DJs have that license because they pay royalties.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
About the same time they stop calling it "theft".
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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
Pressing a bunch of copies of a CD and selling them/giving them away is a completely different matter than format shifting music for your own personal convenience and not giving anything away except as part of a performance for which you are paying royalties.
You also failed to answer the question I specifically asked. Tell me why, in a fair and just world, should ARIA be allowed to charge extra for the convenience of format shifting when no sales are lost and no person hears the music except the DJ who purchased it and his audience who are covered by the peformance royalty that the DJ is paying. No copyright holder is in any way harmed by allowing DJs for format shift. Charging DJs an extra royalty harms the DJs by forcing them to haul their entire physical CD collection to gigs (and risk them getting lost, stolen, or damaged) instead of a hard drive or compilation CDs.
Your argument seems to be based on the "letter of the law." Tell me why that law should be interpreted in that way instead of in a way that allows DJs more convenience without harming copyright holders in any way.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Dude, in a fair and just world there wouldn't be copyright, period. If you frequent this site, you've probably seen me rant about this before.
We're not having a discussion about how great the world would be without copyright, we're having a discussion about what ARIA is doing in the real world.
In the real world the license granted by a copyright owner can be as strict or as lax as they like. It can authorize the public performance of a work but not the time shifting of a work. It can say that you're only allowed to play any song an album or just the acoustic ones.
Is this absurd? Yes.
Does this put too much power into the hands over the copyright owners? Yes.
That's the way the copyright system is.. fucked..
How we know is more important than what we know.
They do? In most countries, the venue pays. DJs just show up and play what they've got, without direct payment from them to the record companies.
The same goes for live music, on which royalties are payable too.
The way this is done is by fixed fee. The royalties agency determining what songs generally statistically get played and divides the revenue.
Of course that mean that lesser known artists get nothing and 90% of royalties paid goes to 10% of the artists. Nice.
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!
Ahh, I see where you're getting at. You could have made your position a little more clear. As a musician who owns a few copyrights of my own, I disagree that copyright shouldn't exist. Someone who creates a work should be allowed to have a say in how it can be distributed, and nobody should be allowed to make money off of somebody else's work without compensating them. I license my work under a Creative Commons license that allows it to be freely distributed, but if someone wants to make money off it they have to make their own licensing deal with me, which would involve compensating me. I believe that this is perfectly fair, and this could only happen with some sort of copyright law in place.
I do agree, however, that copyright law should be significantly overhauled. For starters, durations should be shortened (20 years or less), and copyright ownership should not be transferable.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I know a few DJs, and have often helped them set up for gigs...
Having to carry around trunks full of CDs, and having to flick through them manually to find the song you want is a huge pain in the backside. Also having to keep popping them in and out of the players is a pain... You have to carry a large selection, because listeners will request songs to be played, and you have no control over what they might want to hear.
The idea of taking a large hard drive containing thousands of songs that can be electronically searched makes a LOT of sense. Also having all the songs available at once lets you queue up a larger set of songs in advance, some DJs want to go and dance with some of the girls that show up!
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The law in Australia makes no distinction..
How we know is more important than what we know.
The analogy is flawed: they block off something I have the right do do.
To extend your analogy: suppose you own property next to mine and I have legal right-of-way. Now, you're not allowed to build a gate and not give me the key, since I have the right to pass over your property to mine. That is what DRM is trying to do: they 'guard' their property in a way that also blocks my legal rights (ie fair use copying, distribution after copyright ends).
Would Lord of the Rings, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, have been made if there had been no way to recoup the costs of production? Somebody has to pay for these things to get made, and people generally don't give away millions of dollars without a way to get it back. Without at least a temporary monopoly on their work so they can earn back the cost of making it, it wouldn't get made in the first place, that is how copyright benefits society. Copyright makes it financially viable to make art for society to enjoy.
On the other hand, copyrights need to expire to encourage people to keep creating new works all the time rather than being able to sit back and cash in on one work for the rest of their lives. Copyright expiration benefits society by allowing timeless works that have become part of our culture (i.e. anything that people still remember 20 years later) to enter the public domain.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Question though define making money off of your work? If I create a compilation CD and sell that does that count as making money? Yes. Any time you incorporate my work into a product that you are selling, you're making money off my work. What if I am a DJ, and the format you distribute your work under isn't compatible with my systems, So I change your copy to MP6 so that it plays better on my system, is this a change? While I am getting paid for your music if we remove your music I am still getting paid. If you're a DJ the venue you play at is playing an ASCAP fee and I'm getting my cut of that. I really couldn't care less how you get the tunes onto the dance floor as long as ASCAP knows you spun my tune so they can give me my cut. define distribute as well. is listening to music out loud at a park considered distribution? The music industry thinks so. I'd chalk that up under fair use.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
You said you thought people had a right to control how their work is distributed and that no-one has a right to profit from someone else's work without compensation.
Well the exact quote would be "should be allowed," not "has a right," but that's all semantics. I'm not a lawyer or debate major so I'm not used to having to phrase everything precisely lest my words be twisted so bear with me a bit. I do mean a temporary granted monopoly, not an unalienable right. I hope you'll see that I'm trying to argue to the spirit of the argument, not the semantics and that you'll do the same.
If things fall into the public domain then others can profit from the work without compensating the creator. So which is it? If a work is in the public domain, there's not much money to be made off it. Why would someone buy a copy of a public domain work when they can grab it off Project Gutenberg? How many people are getting rich selling copies of Shakespeare and Dickens? This is exactly how it should be IMHO. Shakespeare and Dickens are part of the fabric of our culture and people should be able to have access to them cheaply and easily.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
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?
Copyright law should be rewritten so it's "per user". In other words you pay for a song once, and that's it. If you want to move your CD over to an MP3 file, you can, as long as you keep the original CD as "proof of purchase". (And if you don't have the original, then you can be prosecuted.)
It's ridiculous that I have to buy the same song multiple times (first cassette, then CD, now Itunes download) just because I switch formats.
Either that or "greed" on the part of money-hungry companies desiring to sell the same song again-and-again-and-again.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
First, If I am on any side here, it is yours on this issue.
So you are right, but you are wrong if you are in their twisted world.
You say:
"No copyright holder is in any way harmed by allowing DJs for format shift."
Right, but not in their world. In their world a copyright holder is harmed because if he wasn't allowed to format shift legally, they could charge him more for doing so and so they are harmed by the format shifting. I say if we go this far, bring back legal payola. Give the DJ's back some of the power they have in the game.
You want your songs spun at parties I DJ? That's gonna cost you. The musical equivalent of shelf space perhaps?
(I am being daft here in this last bit for a reason.)
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
As someone who used to own decks and mix a bit myself I would like to make another point:
DJ are probably the single largest consumers of Music. I probably spent an average of £20 per week on vinyl alone, and this was then average 12 inch single cost £5. I have not bought any in years so do not know how much it costs now, I would imagine it has certainly gone up a bit. Without buying that much new music DJing becomes too dull. I managed to keep it up for a year or two never getting any money back as I was not famous (or that good) but then gave up.
Over that time I amassed quite a large volume of records that form a pile 1 metre deep. My friends often asked me how much they thought I had spent, and on the odd occasion someone would estimate how many records I had and work it out. At that point I usually stopped paying attention in case I had a heard attack.
I suppose the point I am trying to make is that very few DJ's actually make a profit from DJing. It is a hobby, or a loss leader that leads a small minority into a music career producing albums of their own. Even people who make it big and actually get signed to a label to produce their own music usually do it for the love or to keep up their image in clubland so they can sell their own music.
The people who really be hit by this are aspiring DJ's who need to produce mixtapes in order to get any sort of gig. They then hand the mix tapes out for free as a marketing tool and 90% of them go straight in the bin. Are they also expecting these people who are usually young and skint anyway to cough up £500. The irony is that the main people they intend to listen to the tapes / mp3s are the very same record executives and talent scouts who are lining their pocket with the fee the DJ paid to produce them.
If you want to turn your hobby into a career you are better of playing with computers or going outside and playing football, now thats where the real money is. Let the music industry choke to death through lack of new talent then we can reinvent it afterwards when all these stupid laws have been repealed. If you want to listen to music in the meantime, go to your local venue that has a jam session for the evening, maybe even try and take part yourself.
I dont read
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!
Is he selling those CDs? Then he's doing a "performance", which may or may not require a special performance license, but usually doesn't, in the US, at least. That may be slightly different since a DJ's performance isn't anything more than playback for a lot of them, but for those actually mixing the music, live or otherwise, it is most definitely their own artistic performance of the music.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Because sane copyright-laws have an exception where NORMAL copies that are needed for NORMAL usage of the work are exempt, as are temporary copies arising as a natural side-effect of the use.
To run a computer-program, for example, you MUST copy the bits from CD-rom to hard-disc, from hard-disc to RAM, from RAM to CPU, some parts of the program end up in CPU-cache. Parts of the artwork end up in RAM on the graphics-card. Temporary copies exist as electrical signals traveling towards screen and speakers, as soundwaves in the air and as photons of various frequencies between your screen and your eyes.
Similarily, just listening to a CD creates (more or less temporary) copies in wires, buffers, DACs and assorted cabling.
Even just reading a book creates short-lived copies. There's a continous stream of photons containing the page you're on traveling outwards in all directions from the page. Fragments of the work will stick more or less permanently in various neural structures in your head and so on.
Nevertheless, doing these things are not equivalent, in a practical sense, to COPYING the work. Rather they are nessecary and natural consequences of USING the work in the ordinary way.
As I said, in sane copyright-law, such copies are explicitly allowed. In Norway, for example, copying a CD to a different format like a mp3-player, or to a backup-tape is explicitly allowed.
disobey all UNJUST laws.
just say no.
it may be hard (or risky) but by ALLOWING yourselves to be abused, you will continue to be reamed again and again.
simply don't follow this. are they going to arrest all dj's? will this make the music business MORE endearing to the general population?
call their bluff. don't follow this. rebel.
you must.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.