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Trent Reznor: YouTube Is Built On the Back Of Stolen Content (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Singer and record producer Trent Reznor has become the latest artist to attack Google's video service YouTube. "I find YouTube's business to be very disingenuous. It is built on the backs of free, stolen content and that's how they got that big," said Reznor in an interview with Billboard. Reznor was not speaking purely as an artist, however. He is also chief creative officer at Apple Music, the streaming service launched by Apple in 2015, which is one of the key rivals to YouTube in the digital music world. "I think any free-tiered service is not fair. It's making their numbers and getting them a big IPO and it is built on the back of my work and that of my peers. That's how I feel about it. Strongly," said Reznor, widening his criticism to other rivals like Spotify in the process.
Well that's news to everyone
Never mind all of the car reviews, device reviews, musical gear reviews, prank shoes, and tutorials people watch on there............no, it's all about "his" stolen music.
Tori Amos said it best:
Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Radio isn't fair?
Log in or piss off.
especially until they hit critical mass. Now YouTube is the default platform in and people are generating content exclusively for it.
This is the sort of thing people on slashdot always say until someone rips of open source code without giving changes back...
Or until they have had their own work stolen and then it is somehow a different story.
Very true the UK in particular is owed hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation for stolen IP in the 19th century from the USA.
The studios steal from the creators via abusive contracts as much, if not MORE than YouTube steals from the musicians.
Despising one and not the other is hypocritical.
Part of the major problem is that the value of music has gone down and musicians dislike that. Music used to be a rare skill that was incredibly expensive to distribute. But distribution costs went down, they refused to lower the price, we found ways to use computers to enhance music (auto tune is just one of many such advancements), and the number of people that want to do it went up.
How many kids want to be rock stars? They depressed the market causing the prices to drop - it's simple supply and demand.
The profit went away but it wasn't YouTube's fault.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"I find YouTube's business to be very disingenuous. It is built on the backs of free, stolen content and that's how they got that big," said Reznor in an interview with Billboard. Reznor was not speaking purely as an artist, however. He is also chief creative officer at Apple Music, the streaming service launched by Apple in 2015, which is one of the key rivals to YouTube in the digital music world.
I find pretending to be on the side of artists against Google when you are drawing a paycheck from one of their biggest competitors to be "very disingenuous".
Of course I don't find Apple Music to be much of a rival at all to YouTube so this may be much sound and fury signifying nothing. Apple pretending to respect the intellectual property of others is a bit rich.
I think Apple music service is losing customer to google and one of their mouthpieces is poo-poo'ing the rival, hoping that people will change opinion and come back. Boiler plate marketing ploy when you are losing market share. He is no one to me and will continue to be no one. So, why bother reading what he says?
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The more I know people, the more I love animals
Trent Reznor is in the business of making cat videos? That's news to me.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Made a breakthrough album in his free time while working as a studio engineer. Made some more important records. Legendary live performer. Made a couple of film soundtracks. Ran his own label. Had bust-ups with his labels. Told Australian fans to steal his album Year Zero because the prices in the shops were too high. Released an album under Creative Commons NC and made money off the deluxe editions. Released another project under "pay something or don't, up to you". Released an album for free online. Makes remix stems available to all and hosts a site for community remixes. He's probably one of the most qualified people out there to talk about music production and distribution. And Slashdotters are going to ignore that because they don't like what he's saying.
...said competing content provider.
In my opinion, Youtube shows that people would create content without all of this artificial scarcity bullshit.
Copying isn't theft
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Was that before or after Apple thrust their mighty hand up his sockpuppet butthole?
I like Trent and I like a lot of the things he's done, but that doesn't mean he is always right about everything.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
He's not qualified to say that copying is theft because it isn't factually true.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
And Apple Music is different from other streaming services exactly how?
Apparently it's run by a relic who can't see where the future of music is going, that 1789 Copyright is obsolete in 2016, and who can't distinguish between the words "stolen" and "replicated".
It's my understanding that Pandora, Spotify, and Google Play are all run by people who are pushing the edge of what they can do legally, every single day. That gives them a direction towards the future.
So much for the days of hoisting the Jolly Roger at Apple!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
He wrote one of Johnny Cash's best songs.
Apple thrives on the top-down "you are the consumer, we are the producer" business model. I can't say I'm particularly shocked to see an apple exec whining about youtube (although I must say, I'm disappointed that it the exec in question is Trent Reznor). To say that Youtube is "built" on content piracy is extremely disingenuous. Yes, it obviously happens there, but if someone were to remove all of the pirated content from Youtube, only a very small percentage of users would even care.
These are the words of a company that would like to see user-generated content made illegal, on the basis that a small percentage of users occasionally use it for piracy. Youtube is a tremendous example of "substantial non-infringing use".
Actually, Johnny Cash covered one of Trents songs and made it something more than the usual self indulgent whine.
I think the biggest issue is the expansion of 'IP'. Culture builds on what comes before it, it always has and always will. However in 'modern' times we (or more specifically companies) keep trying to lock culture away behind walls of laws about 'IP'. Culture however will do as culture always does and build on what has come before, laws be damned. I have news for the companies as well: Culture will win in the end.
Though I personally find Trent's comments funny since Youtube's copyright claim system is so badly abused that certain youtuber's, like Jim Sterling, can get companies to fight over the IP shown in brief snippests (most of which is review or satire and so technically protected) within their videos. Look up Jim's 'Copyright Deadlock' video as an example. Or heck look into E3 videos based on the Twitch streams. ItmeJP commented that his Youtube videos got multiple claims within minutes of being uploaded even though the video stream was provided to commentators for use.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Everybody is capable of making music.
How is everybody capable of avoiding accidental infringement while doing so? If you write a song, and the song is substantially similar to one of the millions of songs in the BMI and ASCAP repertories, and the owner of copyright in one of those older songs shows in court that you have heard or reasonably should have heard the older song, then your song infringes copyright in the older song. The key case for accidental infringement is Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.
Apple's entire resurgence is based off MP3 piracy. Before they made their first smartphone, they made billions off their iPod sales, which were 100% filled with pirated MP3s. Nobody was paying 10k to fill an iPod. Nobody.
Then when they made their first billion, they started a music service and started charging for music and decried piracy, the very thing that made their entire corporate existence possible.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
But ripping a piece of open source code without giving changes back is taking it away without sharing what you've added. In that instance, what you did amounts to nothing without what you built it on, but you're claiming the whole thing as yours.
Having your own work 'stolen' is plagiarism and has really nothing to do with copyright.
It's all about claiming credit for work you didn't do, and not being sociable.
Radio is exactly comparable to other free tier (i.e. ad-supported) services. We're talking Pandora, Spotify, and most Internet radio stations
Pandora yes, Spotify not so much. There's a big legal difference between Pandora and Spotify, analogous to like the difference between radio and a jukebox, or between broadcast TV and video on demand. Pandora lets the user choose a musical style, such as the style associated with a particular recording artist, and then builds a huge playlist around that style that satisfies the "performance complement" requirement of the statutory license for public performance of sound recordings through an electronic transmission. This requirement limits how many songs from a particular artist or album may be played per hour and limits the control that the user has over the playlist so that does not substitute for a purchase. Complying with the "performance complement" allows Pandora to pay a lower rate and not have to negotiate with individual record labels. Spotify has to pay more in royalties because it gives the user far more control over the playlist.
The Accountants have been running things at Apple for decades now. Any entity as successful as Apple has been draws in 'business' types like a picnic attracts ants.
"We haven't had that spirit here since 1969"
I bought albums from Atari Teen Age Riot and Eat Static because I saw their new tracks on YT.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I find YouTube's business to be very disingenuous.
Yeah? And what about your how to destroy angels album? You never really took the time to explain this was a new band, rather, you springboarded your talented wife on the shoulders of Nine Inch Nails to limitless failure. Mariqueen Maandig is a talentless millennial styled rocker, meaning shes just another mumford and suns "ho ho hey hey oooh ooh" regurgutation of 40 year old folk music, freeze dried and repackaged as some living fucking anachronism of the bygone era of hair flowers and legitimate lyricists as singers. She will never be Roger Whittaker, she will never be the Almond brothers, and your bullshit contribution of rehashed samples from the downward spiral only served to highlight the fact that you lied to us.
You should have titled the band, "how to castrate a legend." Angels is a passionless and apathetic ode to the foot-shuffling special snowflake ripoff artists that infest modern rock like a plague.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Exactly. Pirated music has always been a red herring. The real threat of the web has always been user generated content including silly cat videos.
The real threat of the Internet is cat videos.
The music industry still thinks they have a monopoly in mobile devices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Trent has been purchased by Apple, and they are just realizing value out of owning him.
Apple has declared war on 'free content on the internet' and are striving to make everything of significance cost money. They can't do this without tearing down every other business model, and as always at Apple (going all the way back to the Apple II clone/compatible makers who they ran out of business, and the multiple 'Windowing System' makers who they ran out of business, handing the platform ownership to deep-pockets Microsoft in the process) lawyers will be wielded against anybody who doesn't do things 'The Apple Way.'
People act like there isn't a reason some of us fucking hate Apple.
Let's ask Trent whose back his work is built on.
If he wants to be a credible voice for artists then he can't afford conflicts of interest. If Trent Reznor wants to resign his post with Apple and speak on his own behalf then I'll consider his position on the matter. Until then he's just playing the role of corporate stooge even if he actually believes what his is saying.
And Slashdotters are going to ignore that because they don't like what he's saying.
Slashdotters are going to ignore it because it's not relevant; what's on topic today is what he said in the Guardian, and that (at least in part) is bullshit. All his previous deeds, good or bad, don't make his claims that "youtube is built on the back of stolen content" or that "any free-tier service is not fair" true.
Before youtube, pretty much all video content that we watched came via tv and movie studios. With youtube, now anyone can be a tv presenter. When I want to fix something, the first thing I do is go on youtube and find a video of somebody showing me how to do it. When I want to buy something, I go on youtube and look for a video review, because nothing beats actually seeing something in action. People can write and preform songs in their bedroom and broadcast them to the world on youtube. I personally like to watch various nutters building and testing dangerous inventions in their backyard, stuff that you'd really never have seen pre-youtube. And on and on. We bandy about words like "disruptive" and "transformative" far too cheaply these days, but youtube actually deserves those adjectives. Sure, some copyright-infringing content may get put up there from time to time, but that certainly isn't central to what makes youtube great.
And as for "any free-tier service is not fair"; while I can see how that would seem the case from the artist/music industry perspective, it's disingenuous. Pre-internet, it cost money to produce, distribute and retail the physical records/tapes/CDs that music was disseminated on, and that was where the money was made. With the advent of the internet, the fact is that it costs virtually nothing to distribute a song or album to millions of people. This fact means that it simply does not make any sense to try and apply the pre-Internet business model to the post-Internet world. Change can seem unfair, but we all have to deal with it when reality imposes it on us. The music industry is adapting to the post-Internet world, and re-evaluating where and how the money is to be made, but artists and industry people that have been around long enough to remember the old days still find it hard to get their heads around it. They will adjust in time.
will you bite the hand that feeds you, Trent?
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Now, sometimes I whistle when I am alone, and run songs through my head silently, but music is for the most part a social action. We all hum the tunes we've heard, then augment and rearrange the notes. It is ALWAYS a matter of copying.
Business people insert themselves into the process and try to meter and measure everything. Ostensibly this is to facilitate a distribution network, because those darn expensive vaccum tubes in the recording studio don't make themselves, ya know.
The distribution cost and the barrier to enter the distribution network has flattened tremendously. Since everybody can make music, it's time to jettison a whole lot of the rent seekers trying to block our access to the infrastructure.
Digital copying is easy, sharing with friends is natural and human. The media industry is built on the principle of taking away our ability to copy and share, and on the idea that it is hard to do so. What would be rightfully ours under the original copyright laws is no longer ours, what we would have the right to do in the absence of copyright laws we no longer have the right to do. As for youtube, it is built on the hard work of those who invented the hardware and software technology to make it possible, and the efforts of many users. A little copyright infringment happens as 'collateral damage', and that is largely because copyright at present is so distant from what is natural, easy and straightforward. We could function without Trent's last album quite happily, but the ability to share information, events and enthusiasm is so much more important.
John_Chalisque
"I think any free-tiered service is not fair.... is built on the back of my work and that of my peers. That's how I feel about it. Strongly," said Reznor
That's hilarious, because I doubt Reznor or any of these other artists would bitch that MTV/VH1 was stealing from them, yet it does exactly the same as Youtube, presenting their music to the populace for free with ad revenue paying the bills.
I used Youtube to watch a video from your latest album which then prompted me to go onto iTunes to purchase said album. I guess I'll go return that album since I came across your music in such an immoral fashion.
But he's not wrong that youtube was built mostly on copyrighted works. Once it was large enough, other content started making its way there, but the growth factor was copyrighted works compared to numerous other services available. Now the real question is whether that was largely fair use or was it full copies in violation of copyright? I'd say quite of bit of the former initially, but then more and more of the latter showed up as its popularity grew.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
1789 Copyright is obsolete in 2016
Today's copyright laws bear no resemblance whatever to early US copyright laws. It was originally enacted to protect writers from publishers. It lasted fourteen years, today's is the life of the artist plus ninety five years. Sheet music was covered but the songs themselves were not.
Free Martian Whores!
now doesn't that make you feel better? the pigs have won tonight now they can all sleep soundly and everything is all right
Silence is a state of mime.
This from the guy that told people at a concert to 'steal it', refering to music and telling the RIAA to fuck off? Yeah, Trent. You used to be cool.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
step 1: say something idiotic about how (internet villain of the week) is stealing from you when really they are driving fans and money to your door.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
I think a lot of what you said is true AND contributes to the reason that today there is such a dearth of good music to listen to, and keep and cherish and remember for more than a day or two...
It started with musicians and bands lifting from other artists of the past, and using it to build and move forward on.
You had Rock and Roll come from country and blues....Chuck Berry lifted his guitar sound and licks from his piano player (hence the strange reason so many of Chuck's songs are in piano keys)....groups like the Stones took Chucks work and with the older Delta bluesmen, and packaged it into something new. Zeppelin, took from the old blues guys and gave us heavy blues rock.
This patten continued and you got an evolution of music, until something about the yearly 90's I'd say....and this evoluton music, for whatever reason....stopped.
Something just changed...I know there are lots of factors, like the splintering of f few genres into hundreds of them. I think rap had something to do with it personally (you may like it, but I consider the words "rap" and "music" to be mutually exclusive terms, but that's just my opinion)....where you went from people actually singing and playing their own instruments...to just shouting, and sampling other musicians' music ...nothing really as original really as from in the past when they nicked or lifted licks from other musicians of the past.
It just isn't the same....and I think that loss of continuity just left future artists kind of lost. They don't have solid roots any more.
I do seem some trying t change that...reaching back to where the gap started and trying to grap a little of that and make it their own, but there is a long road to go before we ever see the type of music and musicians that are going to be able to put out music for the ages, that people will be listening to for the next 20-50 years after release.
I mean...I can still hear Beatles songs today, and anticipate I will far into the future (like we hear Mozart). Will anyone even know a Katy Perry song in 10 years from now? Will they know who Katy Perry was?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Social media is an echo chamber. You have to be lucky to get someone with a big enough following to share your content and then someone else and someone else after that. Once you are big enough then your success builds upon itself. Otherwise you are invisible in a sea of other people. Better work still gets drowned out. Then we add in the fact that instead of corporate types directly picking the creators that will be put forward instead they are controlling the algorithms that decide which content you are going to see. It's the same thing just done more indirectly.
Something just changed...I know there are lots of factors, like the splintering of f few genres into hundreds of them. I think rap had something to do with it personally (you may like it, but I consider the words "rap" and "music" to be mutually exclusive terms, but that's just my opinion)....where you went from people actually singing and playing their own instruments...to just shouting, and sampling other musicians' music
Yeah, what happened is that education was dismantled in America, and schools didn't have money for music programs. So rapping and beat boxing came out of not having any other outlet for musical talent. Whether rap is music is irrelevant, although some styles clearly are. Rap isn't the first musical style to feature people speaking the words rather than singing them.
If we want more new music, we're going to have to reinvest in music education.
I mean...I can still hear Beatles songs today, and anticipate I will far into the future (like we hear Mozart). Will anyone even know a Katy Perry song in 10 years from now? Will they know who Katy Perry was?
Yes. You will hear her in the supermarket. That is where old, bad music goes to linger on forever instead of dying. Her most popular songs will probably even be rearranged as muzak and played in elevators.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"