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180 Artists, Labels Including Taylor Swift Take On YouTube, Join Copyright Plea (cnn.com)
Chloe Melas, reporting for CNN: Taylor Swift, U2, Kings of Leon and Paul McCartney are some of the 180 recording artists and labels petitioning Congress to reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.) In an open letter to Congress, they write that the current online copyright law has allowed YouTube and other sites to "generate huge profits by creating ease of use for consumers to carry almost every recorded song in history in their pocket via a smartphone, while songwriters' and artists' earnings continue to diminish." The letter, which is being published in The Hill and Politico this week, goes on to call for "sensible reform." "We ask you to enact sensible reform that balances the interests of creators with the interests of the companies who exploit music for their financial enrichment. It's only then that consumers will truly benefit." YouTube's parent company, Google, declined to comment Tuesday, but in a statement in April said, "Any claim that the DMCA safe harbors are responsible for a 'value gap' for music on YouTube is simply false." This comes days after musician Trent Reznor said YouTube is built on the back of stolen content.
what needs to be done is stiffer penalties for DMCA takedown abuses.
"It's only then that consumers will truly benefit"
I'd say the consumers are benefiting just fine as it is. The content is available, it's easy to access, and costs next to nothing. If you add DRM, more advertisements, easier exploitation of laws like the DMCA, you're just going to drive people to alternative sites or back to torrenting. It's that simple.
Is it really about the money for rockstars like U2 and Paul McCartney? Or is it about control? If copyright law hadn't become the monstrosity it is today most of these musician's works would have been in the public domain. Can't have that now can we?
There may be less money in this stuff for the creators, but it's my understanding that there are more creators and more content being created than ever before.
So why does the less money part matter to the public and all of the creators who aren't expecting to buy a yacht or two with their earnings? In the "old world", most of those folks wouldn't be able to buy a yacht anyway, and their creations wouldn't be seen or heard by more than six people -- now they can perform for the world.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
But not what they want. YouTube's system is too easy to abuse by large players to shut down legitimate content.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
wants more money.
fuck you bitch
[citation needed]
Taylor Swift annual income $80 million
U2 annual income $78 million
Kings of Leon annual income $58 million
POOR FUCKING THEM. BOOHOO. I feel so sorry for them. Honestly I do.
no they want DMCA 2 where you can't even copy a song from a cd that you own to idevice with out reburying the full CD for the idevice .
Unfortunately for them, they're trying to put the genie back in the bottle. It won't work. The advance of technology is what enabled me to carry around access to virtually every song there is, not something caused by the absence of artificial legal barriers. Barriers which, I might add, will not enable the recording artists and companies to perpetuate the old model indefinitely - it'll just move it back to the illegal realm, at best, at which point they'll get no money.
Also, increasingly, places like YouTube, along with streaming services, are where people discover new music. I don't listen to radio anymore, so the majority of the new bands I discover come from the suggestions that pop up, or the random songs I let be slotted in based on what I've been listening to. This may not be great for someone like Taylor Swift or Bono who are already famous, but for smaller bands, it's kind of a big deal.
Youtube has two uses: Legitimate and Illegitimate.
If Youtube is violating DMCA, shame on them and file a suit.
If they're not violating the DMCA, you want congress to give you a law forcing YouTube to pay more for your legally provided content because you weren't able to do do using contract negotiations? YouTube is very popular, but is NOT a monopoly. This article and the artists are ridiculous.
Bye!
"We ask you to enact sensible reform that balances the interests of creators with the interests of the companies who exploit music for their financial enrichment. It's only then that consumers will truly benefit."
Yes, only when the interests of consumers are completely ignored, will consumers truly benefit.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
DMCA 2 needs court over site
and no auto take down system that hurts the small time people and let's the big boys like fox get the profit from a video they took pasted in to family guy and let the auto take down shut down the video they ripped off.
...because Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney are obviously not already rewarded well enough for just having written a few songs.
I'm happy with artists/publishers being in total control over new songs, just as long as they also agree to laws that make the music revert to public domain after a reasonable time, say 10 years, not the 100 or so years that a few years ago Sony managed to convince the courts was necessary, which is patently ridiculous.
I mean, poor industry:
http://turntabling.net/wp-cont...
take down every video by the artists in the suit from YT. Just leave a video with a statement explaining that artists didn't want them anymore. Watch those same artists whine about the removal and fan revolt in 3,2,1...
http://www.mtv.com/news/971500...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
How many songs have been recorded since the beginning of time?
Well, then the artists should get the shit people are listening to up on youtube legitimately. Vevo does not count.
The problem with that though is what happens to music that shouldn't have been up there in the first place is based on what the record companies say. And they own the rights to this music, not the artists. If the record company says they want it removed, it'll be removed, if they say they want ads and have it be monetized, then that's what'll happen.
If these guys have a problem with the music not being removed, they should file their complaints with their labels. Now, this is not a defense of the auto-take down system Youtube has, as it often incorrectly flags things that shouldn't be and leaves the original author with little recourse, but that's a different discussion.
Return copyright back to its original concept of a short time period, and take it away from being seen as a long-term revenue generator by greedy media companies.
"Taylor Swift, U2, Kings of Leon and Paul McCartney are some of the 180 recording artists and labels petitioning Congress to reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.) In an open letter to Congress, they write that the current online copyright law has allowed YouTube and other sites to "generate huge profits by creating ease of use for consumers to carry almost every recorded song in history in their pocket via a smartphone, while songwriters' and artists' earnings continue to diminish."
Net worth:
Taylor Swift: $200 million
Bono: $600 million
Paul McCartney: $660 million
If they're really just doing it for the poor little indie artists that are being "taken advantage of" then perhaps they could between them drop a cool $1 billion toward those artists - and with their piles of cash they'd never even notice.
-Styopa
but its hard to imagine 180 recording artists snored through 40 years of being bankrupted by the RIAA, MPAA, and Ticketmaster only to suddenly give a shit when www.youtube.com started returning their names in search queries. These arent artists, theyre brands owned by their respective copyright holders. And those copyright holders --the RIAA and MPAA -- have decided to use their purchased products to shill congress. its really no different than, say, an automaker driving to Washington in a hybrid SUV that will never see production, only to beg for a bailout
Good people go to bed earlier.
Youtube is a user-generated content site. It's impossible to police all user-generated content without adding massive costs--just running the site at a given capacity is a drop in the bucket compared to policing the site at that capacity. Perhaps this is why the content creators aren't doing so themselves. Any open platform granting individual access on such a large scale--the entire Internet itself, for example--will have these problems; we can see this in peer-to-peer applications such as Limewire or Gnutella, which require no central authority, and will probe the Internet or use a shipped, pre-discovered list of known Gnutella peers to discover *other* peers.
On the other side, people are now unwilling to pay high mark-ups for music. They're consuming through streaming services, which are shipping more music at decreased revenues. The cost of distribution itself is lower, and the IP holders pay almost no cost--not to press CDs, not to ship the product, not to handle logistics. They handle production and licensing, and the per-customer costs are offloaded and *minimal*. That means scaling, which used to be expensive, is now free; and licensing fees are pure revenue. It also means a huge revenue stream is now facing market pressure driving prices down, converting lower costs into lower prices rather than massive profits.
Everyone hates not being billionaires.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I would never have know and bought ATR, Et Static or The Prodigy new albums. Just don't have the time like I use to, to be in touch with "music". I went to YT, looked up old tracks and lo and behold there were new albums on the side panel. Whipped out the CC and bought them at where the artists wanted me to buy their album.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
"Don't take away money from artists just like me/How else can I afford another solid-gold Humvee?"
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
It was the radio once...essentially the end of music as we knew it.
Cassette players and recorders were the doom of all revenue for recording artists and labels.
A bit later lycos MP3 search killed all the artists and dried up all the cash flow streams.
Napster came. The great satan of music. The record labels lost more money and more artists went hungry...Napster stole food from their baby's mouths it was awful.
Then was Kazaa, Bearshare, Morpheus and a slew of gnutella apps - these truly put the nail in the coffin of countless poor studios.
Everyone moved on to torrents and then there was The Pirate Bay and ISO hunt. After these came about there were no more artists in the world because there was no money it.
So really I don;t even know who is complaining about youtube, a sharing platform. After all, all the artists moved on to working for a living (read performing) and there were no more record labels or studios left as they all ran out of business because of evil file sharers.
Let them sue YouYube. Let them sue the next platform that HELPS THEM spread their work and by popularity HELPS THEM secure more lucrative deals that end up HELPING THEM become richer.
Ignorant twats.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
No. That's not what they want. They don't want youtube to make money off ads/advertising on music that is copyrighted and should've been taken down.
YouTube already gives a share of ad revenue to the artists. The ContentID systems aren't perfect, but if someone uploads a video of, say, a cute girl dancing to popular tune, the plumbing is already there to auto-detect the tune, associate it with the artists, and share ad revenue. Taking down the video would be lose-lose.
Google could probably make it easier for artists to engage with this system, could possibly make ContentID better, and could certainly give the artist a bigger share. However, I'm baffled why anyone would think it appropriate to take down the video, except in the narrow case where the YouTube video is nothing but the album cover (adds no value) and the artists has an official video on YouTube. But any video that adds any value at all, even lyrics on screen, can only bring in more views, and thus more ad revenue, for the artist.
This all sounds like either a negotiating ploy for a bigger cut from Google, or a hopeless attempt to force listeners to listen via some other system they can charge more for (good luck with the latter, as YouTube ad the streaming companies are just the modern version of radio, and the voters actually care about this, unlike most stuff on /.).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
...which is plenty good for the vast majority of people.
I'll agree to stronger copyright enforcement if you'll agree that the duration of copyright protection should go back to 14 years. Until then, STFU. If you're going to steal from the public domain, I'm going to steal from you.
Side note: I wonder if this could be defeated by representing it as a world's-smallest-violin-worthy plea from the 1%? Seriously, look at who signed this, and look at their net worths.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Here's a reasonable solution: YouTube gives the artist all the ad revenue they earned on ads for a particular video between the time it was (illegally) posted and YouTube received a takedown notice.
It's all computers and they know this info already.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I want to make sure I don't accidentally give them any money.
is to be paid anytime when you even so much as thinking of lyrics or melodies in your head. the only thing that's stopping them right now is their inability to read minds.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Here's the official list of dirty sellouts whom you should not pay.
Not really a whole lot on that list to miss... although I'm terribly disappointed to see Rush backing this kind of disingenuous horseshit. What happened to the spirit of radio, guys?
And thanks for your continuously superb journalism, CNN! Next time don't even fucking bother writing an article.
Paul: Let It Be.
Taylor: Shake It Off.
Bono: Walk On.
Kings of Leon: Spiral Staircase. (Sorry, couldn't find a good one for you guys.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No it doesn't. The DMCA 2 needs to be entirely written by consumers with absolutely no input from the content industry.
We tried it the other way with the first version and they weren't happy so it only makes sense to go for the opposite.
It's 192 kbps AAC (for 720p or higher videos), according to this: https://www.h3xed.com/web-and-... That's transparent or pretty damned close in common listening situations.
I just love how this one rhetorical trick gets used so often.
Obviously their reforms are sensible, but opposing them is nonsense and unreasonable.
As has been obvious for over a decade, consumers overwhelmingly want to be able to use recent technological breakthroughs so then can listening music easily and conveniently. Most are willing to pay for this and most probably want to support the artist.
The music labels have been fighting this tooth and nail pretty ever since it was possible to download music via the internet. This is slightly bizarre since part of the service they are supposed to be providing to society is to streamline the distribution of music (hence the RIAA curve, etc). Instead, perhaps due to somewhat sociopathic CEOs, they try to cripple distribution of music in order to create false scarcity which harms society and harms the artists and only benefits the labels.
The only reason a 3rd-party can make money from this is because the labels are totally failing at the task of distributing music in the best and easiest way possible. The answer is not to close off 3rd parties who are doing the job the record labels are supposed to be doing. The answer is for the record labels to do their damned job and distribute music in a reasonable way given current technologies. The tighter the labels grip, the more revenue will slip through their fingers. There is no way consumers are going back to buying a vinyl album and then a cassette and then a cd of the same music.
The actual cost for distributing music has plummeted to near zero. If the record labels are not going to take advantage of this and distribute music in a reasonable way then good for Google and for anyone else who steps up and removes the artificial scarcity and artificial inefficiency create by the music labels.
While we're at it let's shorten the length of time copyright stays in effect. That way these rock stars won't be lumping their recent music together with music that was made back in the 30s and 40s by people who have long been dead.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While it is indeed a legitimate complaint, the originators of this complain are all successful and wealthy artists. So it's difficult to swallow the "this is a cry for the little guy" line. Moreover, their primary complaint is their own albums being uploaded to Youtube without consent. While it's a legitimate complaint, whether or not we amend public law to help these artists is another debate.
Youtube, for their part, tries to do what it can to auto-detect content and share ad revenue. The problem is that Swift and the other mega-rich (and yes, all the ones on the list are rich) artists don't agree with how *much* they're being paid. That's not fairness, that's greed.
I also highly doubt the vast majority of the unlicensed-uploading-of-an-album you describe is done for relatively little-known, shoe-string budget artists. By very definition that if someone were well known and famous enough to reach tens of millions of viewers, they either are or will be very soon, pretty wealthy. A law forcing some type of draconian take-down system or god forbid one-sided ad-share rates would primarily and grossly benefit only large, established and *wealthy* artists.
Most "little guys" starting out love Youtube. It's a great way to promote themselves and reach a larger audience with the hopes that they'll reach critical mass to one day complain about not being paid enough.
Yes, I'm unable to find much information on what these artists actually want other than they're not happy with the fact that the DMCA protects hosts from the actions of their users. This implies that they actually just want to make the DMCA far, far worse.
The problem they're talking about where artists get fucked by labels is a problem with copyright and is trivially solved by making copyright non-transferable from the author. That way the music industry can still offer them contracts and help them produce and sell, but can never take ownership of their creation and fuck off and make all the profits on it without paying the artist a penny.
As such you'll have to colour me sceptical that the artists aren't just doing this on behalf of the music industry, because what they're suggesting will destroy the technology industry to the benefit of not the artists, but the very companies they're complaining about.
As such I will treat this list of artists as the list of artists I will not pay a penny to as what they're suggesting is anti-progress, anti-consumer, anti-technology, and pro-big music industry.
Their problem is more likely related to all those people loading up high resolution copies of an artists entire album, then labeling it with "I do not own this content, I am putting it here for educational purposes only".
Uh, Youtube already has a mechanism to stop that activity, it's called content ID and the labels can either block the upload or monetize it, most are choosing to monetize as it's free revenue from their perspective. The artists are complaining that they aren't being compensated because those views don't count as a song or album sale, but that's a contract issue between them and the label, not some fault of the DMCA.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.