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YouTube Is Guilty Of Criminal Racketeering, Grammy Winner Says (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader cites a TorrentFreak report (edited and condensed): YouTube is guilty of criminal racketeering. That's the headline-grabbing claim of Grammy award winning musician Maria Schneider, who claims that the Google-owned site is abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to siphon money away from musicians into its own pockets. Over the years, Google has transformed into the new bad guy and the pressure is mounting in a way never witnessed before. The U.S. Copyright Office's request for comments into the efficacy of the DMCA's safe harbor provisions has resulted in a wave of condemnation for both Google search and the company's YouTube platform, with everyone from the major record labels to the MPAA and back again attacking the technology giant. Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider really ups the ante by stating that YouTube is guilty of the same criminal acts that Megaupload is currently accused of. "YouTube is guilty of criminal racketeering," Schneider wrote in an open letter to the platform. "YouTube has thoroughly twisted, contorted, and abused the original meaning of the outdated DMCA 'safe harbor' to create a massive income redistribution scheme, where income is continually transferred from the pockets of musicians and creators of all types, and siphoned directly into their own pockets."Digital Music News has more information.
Well you see... I have no idea who Maria Schneider is other than she doesn't know what racketeering means.
Did Youtube demand money from her in exchange for fire, theft, and kneecap insurance?
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Copyright law is broken and doesn't work correctly anymore.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider really ups the ante by stating that YouTube is guilty of the same criminal acts that Megaupload is currently accused of. "YouTube is guilty of criminal racketeering," Schneider wrote in an open letter to the platform. "YouTube has thoroughly twisted, contorted, and abused the original meaning of the outdated DMCA 'safe harbor' to create a massive income redistribution scheme, where income is continually transferred from the pockets of musicians and creators of all types, and siphoned directly into their own pockets."
Pardon me for not shedding any tears, as the RIAA/MPAA members have upped the ante by thoroughly twisting, contorting, and abusing the original meaning of the Copyright Clause of the Constitution, turning into *real* theft from society.
Did Youtube demand money from her in exchange for fire, theft, and kneecap insurance?
I hope so.
Maria Schneider's complaint boils down to this: Google/YouTube makes a lot of money. If they didn't exist, all that money would go to musicians, therefore, Google/YouTube should be required to hand over all their money to the musicians.
Ignoring the basic fact that she is wrong and her complaint is absurd, she has somehow managed to not notice that nobody has screwed and cheated musicians more than the record companies. The actual losses suffered by musicians as a result of YouTube or any other "piracy" are microscopic compared to the real money that they have lost at the hands of the record companies.
The funniest part is, if Google actually deleted all of the "infringing" content, Maria Schneider and the RIAA Mafia wouldn't be very happy about it.
Time for a history lesson:
In 2013, a number of German publishers successfully lobbied for the passage of a very restrictive copyright law, intended to limit the amount of publisher content that could be shown by third parties (e.g., search engines), so that publishers could collect licensing fees from Google and others.
After the passage of the law, Google decided to avoid potential liability by removing publisher content snippets from search results, in compliance with the law. As a result, German publishers said they lost significant traffic and asked for the return of their “snippets” without a demand for licensing fees.
How does this affect me? Why is this important to anyone except Maria Schneider? I'll get modded down to -1 for asking this because Slashdot users don't like answering important questions. But this needs to be asked, and I challenge any of you to give me a real answer rather than insulting me. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone here is up to the challenge.
No, you are getting modded down to -1 because you ask the exact same question over and over again regardless of the topic, indicating that you are more interested in trolling than getting an actual answer to your question. The only reason I am responding and quoting you is so people can see and recognize your pathetic attempts at begging for attention.
Please people, stop responding to this guy.
The crux is that they only allow it's use to musicians who have agreed to license their content to them...
I don't know how you got the idea that there was some form of licensing going on. YouTube is not reproducing the works covered by ContentID, so they don't require a license for the works.
...as they don't publish any rules.
You mean these rules?
Google scans every video uploaded to YouTube against its ContentID system. That's a few hundred hours of video per minute. This is also not the only way to enforce ownership rights on YouTube. Google is under no legal obligation to provide their ContentID service. It is the copyright owner's job to enforce their rights. Google cannot do that for them without an explicit agreement, and they have no obligation to make any such agreement with anyone. It is not part of the "Safe Harbor" exclusions, and it would not remotely make sense if that were so, since the point of those exclusions was to prevent service providers from having to police their networks.
that "Safe Harbor" law requires technical measures to be made available to everybody.
No, it requires that the service provider "accommodates and does not interfere with standard technical measures". They are not obligated to provide any such methods.
No matter how much content owners would like for the onus for copyright policing to be on service providers, it is not the case and will never be the case.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Maria Schneider does not belong to a label. She broke with her label well over a decade ago for the reasons you allude to, and she now pays for her own CDs through ArtistShare, a crowd funding site mainly for musicians. www.mariaschneider.com You are right that labels siphon money and abuse musicians, and especially now with the internet by basically giving their artists music away practically for free in exchange for shares in Spotify and the like.
And... since I'm not registered on this board or something, I guess I'm down as "Anonymous Coward". OK well, - I'm Kate, Maria Schneider's sister. There! Not anonymous!
So, let's keep the Safe Harbor and add severe penalties for baseless claims. Perhaps something combining monetary damages and a time-out period during which that entity cannot make further claims.
No.
What she wants is for Google to, at THEIR cost, provide protection for HER content.
Remember, this is content that, due to copyright extension, will almost certainly NEVER enter the public domain which was originally part of
the social contract that was copyright. The government agreed to provide legal protections for works, in return for those works
entering the public domain after a reasonable time - a balanced agreement. That agreement has been continuously twisted by the copyright
owners, who see it as the job of everyone else to protect their works, and they should keep the money and the works for ever (in effect).
So no, she is just pushing the cart another inch forward, bending the social contract even further, and trying to claim that it is Googles job
to enforce HER copyrights - which it clearly is not.
If she wants her works protected on youtube its easy, employ someone to find content that is in violation, employ lawyers to write up the
required legal papers, and go for it. There is exactly nothing stopping her from doing this.
If she wants Google to do the work for her, then agree to Googles terms to provider her with this service.
What she is trying to do is the same as wanting a radio manufacturer to be legally responsible for checking that the local barbershop
isnt 'performing her works without a commercial license' because they turn that radio on, at the radio makers cost. ie: laughable.
This is just another attempt at copyright extension people, and the public, who are being shafted already (thank you Disney, etal), should be
rather angry at that. NO other industry has had such generous governmental and legal support for so long.
Or perhaps she would rather keep her works for herself, and we just revoke copyright, as she does not want to keep up her side of the contract?
I thought not..