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Safe Harbor Cost the US Music Industry Up To $1B in Lost Royalties Per Year, Study Finds (musicweek.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: For the first time, researchers have quantified the "value gap" and its impact on the US recorded music industry. A study published yesterday (March 29) by Washington, DC-based economy think tank the Phoenix Centre For Advanced Legal And Economic Public Policy Studies attempted to calculate how much revenue the recording industry loses from the distortions caused by the safe harbor provisions. Entitled Safe Harbors And The Evolution of Music Retailing, the study was conducted by T. Randolph Beard, George S. Ford and Michael Stern who applied "accepted economic modelling techniques" to simulate revenue effects from royalty rate changes on YouTube. It showed that if YouTube were to pay the recorded music industry market rates, similar to what other streaming services pay, its economic contributions to the sector would be significantly bigger. The premises used by the Phoenix Centre economists was that, according to the music recording industry, YouTube evades paying market rates for the use of copyrighted content by exploiting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provisions, which allow to post creative content online in good faith and remove it if rights holders so require. Using 2015 data, the Phoenix Centre found that "a plausible royalty rate increase could produce increased royalty revenues in the US of $650 million to over one billion dollars a year."
Lack of Good Music Costs Them $2 Billion Per Year
And the record companies, as usual, are claiming the "loss" of something they never had in the first place.
>Looking back, was there anything your record label did that you couldn't have done yourself? The song was featured in a flim that had a wide release in many theaters. Our record label paid the recording costs -- it was done by some really good engineers and mixed by Tom Lord-Alge. I'm a decent engineer myself (ahem, self promo) but there's no way I could achieve that kind of sonic quality. And the promotion we received was worth a LOT. I could never afford that kind of promotion. >As for the losers on youtube ripping you off, it sucks that you're a little guy. The big guys have the resources to search and get YouTube to take that stuff down. You can track down and stop some guy in Cyprus from using your music, but he'll just go rip off some other small artists, he's not going away. I'm not saying you should accept the futility of it and do nothing, but that you may have to accept that what you have to do for yourself probably won't change things in the grand scheme.
I hope you'll acknowledge the impact the safe harbor provision has on little guys like me. Our label was a little guy too and has since folded as a functioning record label. I've filed a lot of DMCA notices. I can't put a song up on youtube without some bot scraping the audio and offering MP3 files for download. It's whack-a-mole from hell. If there was no safe harbor provision, I could sue a company (e.g., Youtube) that lets the cypriot asshole post my music and profit from it. Then, they might be motivated to help me profit from my music instead of criminals. I'm pretty sure you'd still get your music affordably. Removal of the safe harbor provision would not prevent you from making playlists of your favorite songs on youtube. I'd still put my music on youtube. It'd have no impact whatsoever on iTunes or Spotify or Rhapsody, etc. Safe harbor provision sucks IMHO.