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ASCAP Declares War On Free Culture, EFF
Andorin writes "According to Drew Wilson at ZeroPaid and Cory Doctorow, the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), a US organization that aims to collect royalties for its members for the use of their copyrighted works, has begun soliciting donations to fight key organizations of the free culture movement, such as Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. According to a letter received by ASCAP member Mike Rugnetta, 'Many forces including Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation and technology companies with deep pockets are mobilizing to promote "Copyleft" in order to undermine our "Copyright." They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.' (Part 1 and part 2 of the letter.) The collecting agency is asking that its professional members donate to its Legislative Fund for the Arts, which appears to be a lobbying campaign meant to convince Congress that artists should not have the choice of licensing their works under a copyleft license."
Let them attack everything. Hell. I say let them even win. Once people can't do anything with any of the stuff they own they will wither get smart and take matters into their own hands, or allow themselves to to be screwed.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Don't get me wrong.. this is really bad because they probably have a good chance of succeeding. As absurd as this is, essentially making it illegal to give the stuff you produce away for free, the media industry has a metric ass tonne of money and influence, and most importantly your average guy on the street is not going to understand or care.
I am just happy to finally see what I would describe as inevitable happen. And I totally don't blame the media industry. It a logical approach:
problem: something is costing us money
solutions: make it illegal
Should be interesting to see how this all unfolds.
Can't say that I blame them... it's their industry and they're advocating for it - big surprise. That's how the system works: Both sides fight it out based on how important it is to them and the courts decide. If I'm a shareholder, I want them doing everything they can to make the value of my stock go up. That's why the courts are supposed to be there to make sure they're playing by the rules. It's the courts that screw us.
What else would you expect from extortionists, that they play fair?
ASCAP is asking its members to send donations to help out in a project against the free culture movement. They realize that no single organization alone can finance this 'war', and are trying to spread out the effort among their companies. They are using exactly the same strategy here that open source software like Linux uses - have large corporations that benefit from the project being successful all contribute to it, and allow the entire world to benefit from the result. If they lose, we win. If they win, they will have shown us that we can also win.
In a way this is great news. As long as people are ready to answer them with a good message, this will give great publicity. However, it's really important to point to new things that are produced by the free as in freedom movement. Out of copyright stuff and especially illegally copied stuff isn't stuff we have any right to claim and doesn't show the value of the new approach. Find good artists on Jamendo. Create your own stuff. Talk about how most new things in computing come out of the F/OSS movement.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Why is it so hard for them to understand that at one time, music was about artistic expression?
If nobody could ever make one penny from their music, I guarantee you that music would not die.
It seems that the ASCAP should be going after the RIAA so that artists can actually make money on music recordings again. Forget about free. People are willing to pay for music, but even when they do, how much do the artists actually get anyway? Not much, if anything.
Wow,
So not only do they want copyrights to last forever, but now they also want to take the copyright away from the creator of the content, because obviously the creator isn't capable of understanding what 'value' their property has if they want to release it under a copyleft license?
That continues to baffle me. Apparently you can't make money off of copylefted music, so where did all this acclaimed money come from? If they can have deep pockets as copyleft organizations, then why doesn't ASCAP become one themselves?
What a bunch of asshats.
I want to see the proper letter, with letterhead, contact details etc. At the moment this looks like it can be fake.
If it's not fake then these people are insane and by not wanting to allow people to choose another type of licence, they are taking away rights that they do want for themselves (to choose their own licence).
Assuming for the moment the letter is real:
It's not about music. And in case of music, if it's 15 years old or more, I have no problem with copying without paying for it. It should have paid the author, if not, tough luck, that's life.
The long copyright duration (essentially unlimited) also means companies and individuals who don't allow free copying after say 15 years, are hogging our past. Want to see a film again for nostalgia, or some music? (That you probably paid for already, via cable networks, records) Then you have to pay for it again. It's a great business model, getting paid for nostalgia etc. [ Note: Cleaning up very old records etc. and making those available should be rewarded, but for most music there's very little cost, lots of profit, and still lots of whining. ]
And is there a list of these donating members so I can boycott their products...?
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
... to advance our agenda in Washington..."
Nothing like stating the obvious...
But actually the "letter" sounds a little too goofy..
"We all know what will happen next..."?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
These morons want to prevent ME from releasing MY OWN SONGS under the Creative Commons?
It's idiot moves like this that led to do exactly that. Here: http://theexperiments.com/ All my band's music for free under the Creative Commons.
They can pry the Creative Commons from my cold dead fingers.
Man, don't you love letters like that? They are asking for money, but they don't list a single, specific point of how the law needs to change, or what specific philosophical claims for which they are in disagreement with EFF, CC, et. al.
They are asking you to write a check, but they haven't explained, AT ALL, what the money is going to be used for. They use very vague and nebulous statements that add up to nothing. What do they actually want to do?
Free culture movement?? They either don't understand what those organizations fight for or they know and are completely twisting everything around.
Organizations like the EFF are fighting for the consumer to be free to use what they PAID FOR in ways not dictated by multi-million dollar organizations. I have no interest in "stealing" copyrighted content, nor selling or giving it away to others. But when I pay for music, video, text, pictures, or whatever, I should be able to use it on any device I own, for as long as I like, in a manner that I choose. Most consumers are not anti-pay, or anti-copyright, or anti-arts. We just want to be able to obtain quality, reasonably priced media, and enjoy it on our stuff without some company dictating which program we must use, or which operating system, or which device.
And if creators of content want to release things under Creative Commons, or Copyleft, or Public Domain, or whatever, that has NOTHING to do with fighting against commercial companies wanting to make a profit on their materials. They should have that choice, and it should have the protection of law, just like traditional copyrights. What do they propose? To FORCE people to not license content how they choose? What's next? Legislation to block donations to the Red Cross because it might compete with big business? Amazing...
Even if they win and oulawed 'copyleft', forcing everyone to use 'copyright', its still MY work, and i can choose to give it away if i want..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Rather than clinging to the old model, and try to intimidate people into using it, the industry needs to change figure alternative ways to get revenue for content.
Will it ultimately result in less money for the same amount of art (music/video/writing)? Probably, but in a day and age with our technology does it really make sense that publishers get billions of dollars (not going to the artists) for burning cd's and posting videos?
Last I checked, the Creative Commons licenses were applied to the music by the people who created the music... you know, the ones who actually have ownership of the music per current copyright laws.
Clearly ASCAP's problem is that they assume they should own everything and receive all the money from whatever automatic and inescapable royalties they can bribe Congress into assigning to them instead of to the actual musicians. Musicians being allowed to let other people play their music for free are cutting into their profits.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Yes, its terrible, its just like those "Free Software" people rampantly pirating Windows all over the place. Oh wait. The Free Software people are a group of individuals least likely to pirate Windows. Something is wrong here.
Entities like ACAT can only blame themselves for the massive push back by the public regarding copyright. If copyright holders and managers had not gone out of there way to bri.. cough, give certain political entities rather large financial enticements to change copyright law so as the public are denied access to their own cultural heritage for an ever extended period of time then the push back by joe average they are experiencing now would not be happening, to put it simply, they (copyright holders) broke the original deal and now the public are saying stuff you. What I find amusing is that "all culture derives from prior works". For example I don't see bands paying chuck berries estate money for ripping of his guitar riffs but at the same time copyright lawyers are blocking all avenues or derivative works by the public even if it is satire.
If I choose to release my work under a free license, what is it to them?
A (potentially) lost revenue stream.
As someone who got targeted by ASCAP for merely having links on my website to radio stations (story is here on slashdot), I hope that they're beaten senseless by EFF, etc. These are the same people who strongarmed the girl scouts into paying royalties for songs they sang around the campfire. Yes, it's true.
The collecting agency is asking that its professional members donate to its Legislative Fund for the Arts, which appears to be a lobbying campaign meant to convince Congress that artists should not have the choice of licensing their works under a copyleft license.
I'd like to see what their legal argument would be. Basically they're lobbying to make a particular kind of legal contract they disagree with illegal.
Ooo, no - that's not a slippery slope at all. I'm sure lawyers all over the continent will sit still for that! I can't see how that would cause a problem ever!! *hah*
Hell, even the bad lawyers would fight having that for a precedent. Harder than the good guys I'd guess - tricky contracts are where a good bit of their bread and butter comes from. If the law began placing restrictions on what sorts of contracts you could make...well, that would have a lot of other interesting implications.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
ASCAP is already preventing coffee shops from hosting independent artists.
It means we are making a difference. If you fight a tyrant, expect the tyrant to fight back. Let's hope for a good fight and may our champion slay the beast in the end.
The letter is incredibly stupid, but I suspect they are not actually trying to make the Creative Commons license or GPL illegal. I think instead the writer thinks the term "copyleft" means "ignoring copyrights".
Of course they may want to make copyleft illegal: they would certainly love it if you could not copyright protect your work without having the means and infrastructure to sell it. But I think the chances of that are very slim because even the general public will understand that it is unfair.
Or they are actively trying to get the term "copyleft" redefined in public perception so that these organizations can no longer use it, similar to "hacker".
But my main guess is that the letter writer has no idea what the term "copyleft" means and they have instead made themselves look either evil or stupid or both.
"THE NEW ENEMY"
soundexchange -> broadcast (internet radio)
ascap -> performance
typed in too much of a hurry sorry. This stuff just really pisses me off about these kind of groups.
They are just being idiots about how they are going about fixing things. Bottom line? No one wants to pay for music anymore. Around half my income is derived from ascap. In the last ten years, seismic changes have occurred in television and film having nothing to do with the internet.
First, broadcasters stopped paying royalties for movie trailer music. Next, networks on cable stopped paying fees for music knowing that we would get paid on the backend through their endlessly repeating show schedule. By and large, they were right to a certain degree. Basically, they wanted us to get paid by the broadcasters but now the broadcasters don't seem to want to pay either
Now though, hulu has emerged and it is nothing short of a land grab. you only get paid a performance royalty if there are commercials in the show. Well guess what? Hulu does not pay out royalties even though there are millions of performances daily on their website.
And let's not forget the shady music supervisor that fills in his own name instead of yours in the cue sheets and then he gets the back end that you were supposed to get. It happens.
At some point you have to stop and ask yourself, what is the value of your work on a whole when everyone and there mother is hell bent on not paying you a dime.
Creating music for television or film is no joke. It takes a lot of time, energy and skill to learn how to craft a score to picture. Underscore is a lot different but still, lots of work. I mean, if everyone is cool with hearing the same loops from GarageBand and logic than really, what the hell do I know?
However, if you agree that while the world is not fair, just like licensing code, use of music needs a mechanism of payment that is fair.
I like creative commons, ascap is just misguided.
And finally, before anyone tells me to play live and find alternative revenue streams, licensing is the alternative revenue stream. I give all my music away because licensing makes it so I don't have to worry about actually selling anything.
Shame it's Patent Pending.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
...than there ever has been.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/file-sharing-has-weakened-copyrightand-helped-society.ars
---
Pluck the duck, who have we got to lose?
Yep. And look at artists like Helen Austin, Poko Lambro, Lizzie Hibbert and Kina Grannis promoting their material (through free content, usually live recordings). Plus hundreds of artists trying to get known.
For new artists, things like Creative Commons and YouTube are like playing in bars and other areas -- it is another avenue to gain fans and make extra music sales.
Sometimes I think groups such as ASCAP forget that copyright is about letting people copy things and defining how and when it should be done. It's goal is to encourage copying and development as a way of progressing science and art. The restrictions on copying is about convincing authors via the lure of money to develop something further.
But the restriction gets tighter and tighter... how is life-of-the-author plus 75 years (the term for individuals i.e. non-corporate authors) supposed to encourage an author to develop the something they created further? I'm pretty sure they can't create new material after they've died. Plus, progress often comes from combining other people's stuff together in new and novel ways, which copyright, an idea to promote progress, often blocks in its current form. Long ago copying was hard and temporarily limiting was no big deal to the public; today in the digital age, copying is so easy that it can happen by accident while sorting one's computer files.
Creative commons is about striking a balance between copyright and public domain-- to come to a place closer to what copyright originally was. ASCAP would now have me believe that an independent artist, who is not affiliated with them, choosing to utilize creative commons will somehow bankrupt them (or something similarly awful) and that this would... what? destroy culture? stop development? I don't know as they don't really explain why its bad-- just a vague 'trust us, it's bad for authors' answer. If they are really worried about their business, they need to evolve with the times or simply go under just like all other companies. They are no more special then any other company, nor should they be.
ASCAP say that the opposite side wants people to believe that music is free, and that they do not want to pay for it. First off, music is already free. The purpose of copyright is to barter away a tiny bit of its freedom for money to motivate creators to create. Second, I don't hear anyone saying that don't want to pay for music. I either hear people expressing they want a simple and affordable way to pay, or people expressing dismay over paying for the same thing the umpteenth time. Groups such as ASCAP are often against a simple affordable way of excepting people's money. It competes with their old dying way of doing business. Again, evolve or go under. They go and ask the government for help. The people are giving us less money, please force them to pay again. (Well, it's never gotten THAT simple.) When their market changes, they simply should not be going to the government and asking them to force the market to do something. It doesn't work. It never has... and it has the side-effect of creating headaches for everyone along the way.
*Sigh* My two cents,
David Romig, Jr.
Business owners are not there to 'fight the good fight' they are there to make money pure and simple. THIS should be the reason that our government gives in ignoring the ASCAP: the ASCAP is trying to inhibit small business owners from employing other small businesses (bands) to the benefit of both. Making arguments on the basis of the benefit to humanity or society isn't going to get us or the small business owner anywhere.
I give $20 a month to EFF. How about you?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Plus hundreds of artists trying to get known.
Yes, unlike Helen Austin, Poko Lambro, Lizzie Hibbert and Kina Grannis who are already household names. ;)
They claim that we don't want to pay for music. And at the same time, their begging for donations tells us that THEY don't want to pay to litigate.
Sometimes people give away things for free. It's great that as human beings we all have the opportunity to benefit from contributions that individuals or groups make. When something is given away for free, it drives those seeking to make a profit to create a better product at a more reasonable price - again great for the consumer. I'm a pretty hardcore capitalist, but I like the idea that there are free options to every facet of existance. Often, you get what you pay for - and you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find - you get what you need.
typical rightly... you know nothing of political or economic positions.
Communism is for abolishing markets all together and replacing them with public centralized command production systems that vary widely from full public ownership to private ownership and public command of what is produced and in what quantities.
Fascism is all about the corporation and industries. They remain privately held and decide what is produced and in what quantities. Fascism is all about the corporations being given special treatment. It is about passing laws to protect and existing corporation or business model from new upstarts.
Market economics is between these two extremes... Unfortunately, for the US we are far closer to the Fascist model than we should be.
MPEG-LA beat ASCAP to the punch.. ASCAP will just have to buy up a bunch of patents. That should cover their bases
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
They're songwriters. They want to something something night, something something light, something something else something feel so right.
If enough free culture is created, people eventually realize that they have enough good free stuff to never need to go back to overpriced, over-restricted material sold by over-priveleged monopolies ever again. That's their fear -- people who create and share their creations simply for the love of it. We can't have that! It's un-American! (Forgets how the US Constitution explicitly repudiated the eternal copyrights of Europe.)
There are already more free books and story sites on the web than any person could read in a lifetime. It used to be that the only way you could read out-of-copyright works was if someone reprinted it and sold it at a low enough price to not be undercut. Now you just download it and nobody profits from that download -- which is just WRONG to some people. And while you're reading your classic liteature, you're not paying for and consuming other overpriced content.
Are we better off for this? I would think so because we are a richer culture overall! How long, for example, before a radio station starts only playing out-of-copyright performances that you can play in your bar or restaurant without paying ASCAP, BMI, and all the rest of those money grubbers a single red cent? Would be great, provided that they can't kill it in the cradle. Let that happen and soon there may be music everywhere!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Go to their donation site and donate 0.01 on your credit card. This will drain their funds because the processing fees will be much larger than the donation (processing fees are a percentage plus a transaction amount). Transaction amounts vary from 0.10 to 0.25, so anything less than a dime definitely results in a net loss.
As for McCarthyism: There actually were communists working for the USSR trying to undermine western capitalistic values.
One of the "western capitalistic values" is freedom of speech and conscience. This, in particular, means that not believing in those values, and agitating other people to follow suit, is something for which you're not supposed to be harassed.
Until you actually do (or conspire to actually do) something harmful, you're supposed to be left alone.
The American Society of Prostitutes has begun soliciting donations to fight key organizations of the free love movement, such as Marriage, Girlfriends and Fuck Buddies. According to a letter received by ASOP member Lisa Rugnetta, 'Many forces including the Marriage, Girlfriends and Fuck Buddies with deep pockets are mobilizing to promote "Loveleft" in order to undermine our "Loveright." They say they are advocates of consumer love, but the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our services. Their mission is to spread the word that love should be free.'
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
No. 7: They favor the elimination of the songwriter and publisher rights for server, cache and buffer copies.
That one's a joke. Isn't it? Because no one can be fucking stupid enough to believe that they should have rights to ephemeral cached or buffered copies.
Right? Please tell me that was sarcasm.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
the soviet system has about as much to do with communism as fred phelps does to christianity
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Two years sounds good on paper until you write a super kick ass novel that XYZ Corp wants to turn into a movie. They'll write the scripts, shoot the film, create the special effects, print the reels, and at 12:01 AM exactly two years to the day the copyright was granted, ship the film out for a release date 2 Years + 5 days past the original copyright date. All perfectly legal since they did not, in any way, distribute your copyrighted work with anyone outside their company until after it had expired.
You, the author, will get absolutely nothing from this, XYZ Corp will rake in 60+ Million on opening weekend, over 150+ Million by summer's end, 200+ Million worldwide box office, and an additional 300+ Million after worldwide DVD sales are factored in.
A two year wait is nothing to an immortal legal entity with many of the same rights as an individual, two year copyrights are a joke. So are 90 years plus life of the author, anyone old enough to read this now will likely be dead before they can make any use of the ideas inspired by current copyrighted works. So much for progressing the useful sciences and arts!
A good compromise would be 25 years. Long enough to give an incentive for XYZ Corp to work with you, a popular novel being turned into a movie will be a money train for all involved and 25 years is a long time to gamble it will still be popular, while still being short enough that the inspiration to create new derivative works can be realized while you're still alive to do it; I've seen a few Star Wars fan-films that deserved the big-budget treatment and in a sane copyright world would have been allowed to.
[rant]
If I had the money I'd buy stock in "XYZ Corp", any large media company would work here, then sue their asses off for failure to maximize shareholder value through deliberate lobbying to extend the copyright term length. For example: When 20th Century Fox releases a Star Wars movie they earn 100+ Million in the box office; the worldwide box office, DVD, and broadcast rights will garner many times that value. Had Star Wars been allowed to pass into the public domain, which wasn't possible due to active lobbying by XYZ Corp, XYZ Corp could have also made its own Star Wars film and earn a comparable sum of money.
Yet through their successful lobbying of governments to extend copyright terms they have artificially impeded their ability to generate profit, an action which goes against the interests of shareholders. Consider the primary role of a corporation as defined by law, to legally maximize shareholder value to the exclusion of all other considerations. Maximizing copyright terms prevents the creation of a rich public domain, preventing the use of popular works that otherwise would have entered it. Through their actions to impede this process it negates their ability to create competing products using popular public domain franchises, in this case the creation of a competing Star Wars film, and creates a lost opportunity to maximize shareholder value.
[/rant]
I honestly think that all the recent attempts to reform copyright have been going about it the wrong way. Appealing to the loss of the public domain and the moral issues surrounding it, like the recent lawsuits to repeal the Micky Mouse Protection Act, wasn't going to work because the money side makes it look like we're trying to steal their stuff; even though they're ones who are stealing. You want to get copyright reduced to a sane time limit, you need to show that the actions of media companies to create ever longer copyrights impede the maximization of shareholder value.
All the flower power talk of morals and how it relates to the public domain will get you no where, show the courts that the actions of big media are hitting shareholders in the pocket book and we'll get the shorter terms we want!
Best analogy I've ever heard for both relationships.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256