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UK Police Busts Karaoke 'Gang' For Sharing Songs You Can't Buy (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The London Police have an Intellectual Property Crime Unit. They just issued a press release bragging about "dismantling" a "gang" running "commercial-scale copyright infringement." But if you look into the case, it turns out to just be three old guys who stream karaoke tracks that mostly aren't available from karaoke manufacturers. "This means that far from losing 'a significant amount of money,' music companies were actually deprived of little or nothing, since there were no legal copies that people could pay for." This "gang" didn't even sell any of the tracks they streamed — it seems to just be a hobby for some karaoke enthusiasts. "So why is Hodge calling what seems to be an extremely low-level operation 'commercial-scale?' It's probably because 'commercial scale' is a key legal concept that the recording industry has been trying to redefine to include activities that don't involve financial gain."
This shows again how copyright laws are a nuisance to the spreading of culture. (Although I could hear the argument of those who claim that karaoke soundtracks are not the richest cultural expression.)
When I emigrated, I wanted to bring some DVDs from home (Europe) to my new land (America), but then I couldn't play them on local equipment because of region-DRM, once again meant to protect "copyrights" for products THAT WERE NOT AVAILABLE anyways in America!
These laws must be rebalanced in order to allow dissemination of culture across country borders. Diversity enriches the whole community, whereas those laws are made to enrich just a few.
Yes, but you realize karaoke tracks are recorded to sound as much as possible like a recording someone else made famous, and the person who made it famous doesn't get a penny in royalties or license fees from a karaoke track.
Unless they also wrote the song.
The problem is, George Michael doesn't receive a penny. The company that made the George Michael recording doesn't receive a penny. And, the song was written in 1930 by lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg and composer Jay Gorney who are both long dead.
I am failing to see how it's a problem that George Michael doesn't receive a penny. He traded on someone else's effort. Sometimes, he will get money for it, sometimes not. He will get money when his performance is used, but not when the lyrics are used. This is how it should work.
Ignoring intellectual property laws that are this broken is absolutely reasonable.
The only way it's broken is that someone is getting paid for it, not that George Michael isn't. But it shouldn't come as a surprise; someone clearly holds the copyright.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They were written so that in return for a limited monopoly, the works would go to public domain. No longer limited, and no longer a public domain. So the owners of the rights no longer obey the copyright laws. So why should us geeks obey them?
The laws were written to recompense for lost revenue in a scenario where determining the losses were not possible, but this case the losses ARE possible to determine, and those losses pan out to PRECISELY zero. But the laws are applied with a lie that this was "commercial", when it clearly never was, and damages that never existed were magicked out of thin hope.
What, exactly, do you idiots not get about the problems of the copyright laws in general, and this case specifically?