Facebook Offers Hundreds of Millions of Dollars for Music Rights (bloomberg.com)
Facebook is offering major record labels and music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars so the users of its social network can legally include songs in videos they upload, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. From the report: The posting and viewing of video on Facebook has exploded in recent years, and many of the videos feature music to which Facebook doesn't have the rights. Under current law, rights holders must ask Facebook to take down videos with infringing material. Music owners have been negotiating with Facebook for months in search of a solution, and Facebook has promised to build a system to identify and tag music that infringes copyrights. Yet such a setup will take as long as two years to complete, which is too long for both sides to wait, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing details that aren't public. Facebook is eager to make a deal now so that it no longer frustrates users, by taking down their videos; partners, by hosting infringing material; or advertisers, with the prospect of legal headaches. The latest discussions will ensure Facebook members can upload video with songs just as it's rolling out Watch, a new hub for video, and funding the production of original series. Facebook is attempting to attract billions of dollars in additional advertising revenue and challenge YouTube as the largest site for advertising-supported video on the web.
Sheesh, what a poser.
If I were one of the major media companies I would let sites like Facebook use it for free if they would run some scanning software that detects the use of copyrighted works I own and puts a button that people can click to buy the song on Amazon, iTunes, or a number of other different marketplaces. There have been a lot of times where I've randomly heard some piece of music that was embedded in a video or somewhere else and was interested in listening to more of it and potentially buying it. I would imagine that there are a lot of people who might make impulse purchases like that for a $.99 song if you make it really easy for them to purchase it.
I don't understand all of these companies in a rush to try to put a stop to people who want to do free marketing for them.
Money Money Money
Makes you funny
In this world ours
There -really- needs to be a licensing regime where popular commercial music can be used on user's videos, and for the creator of the music and the creator of the video to share the ad revenue. On my videos I do not use commercial music (I license royalty free music, which is like finding a needle in a haystack in terms of finding a good match for your piece) so that I may monetize the videos, but every once in a while I would love to use a piece of pop music or a film score in a video. It would be great if I can just do it, and then the artist / publisher gets a cut depending on the length used.
Right now if a video has a copyrighted song in it, the publisher can either claim the whole video, or take it down. It's all or nothing. I don't believe there is a revenue sharing option, which would make everyone happy and allow for an explosion of creativity.
Yt iz duh 1 cauzeeng al deez problem. Git rid of yt and problum stop.
Or the person creating the video for upload could use royalty free music, give credit where credit is due, and sidestep the whole copyright issue.
How about we just implement an equivalent fine for false take down notices as users face for willful infringement? If media companies can't just spam every video with background music as infringing without risking monetary damage they might simmer down a bit.
About 2 years ago I uploaded a video to Facebook, and it was immediately flagged as containing audio that may be infringing and was removed. I'm surprised to hear that this is new since they apparently had this ability years ago.
DACA......is CACA
Stop using Facebook and provide them no revenue stream selling your information.
What will the artists receive from this agreement?
I'm guessing it won't be much, if anything.
I only like 20% of my friends taste in music anyway, just like I want a separate network for business stuff (LinkedIn) I'd rather have a separate social network for exchanging music. LastFM sort of filled this niche for a tiny bit but never focused on the network enough for me, I tried tastebuds.fm while single about 6 months ago and it was closer to what I was looking for interims of sharing music, but a little too heavily dating focused to be useful now.
... they need to pay Google to do this:
I took a video, 6 years ago, of a couple dancing after their wedding and put it up on YouTube and Sony sent me a take down notice!
All they did is use an algorithm similar to the app, What's That Song?"
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Then the author of that video failed to adhere to industry-standard set dressing practices. See Ringgold v. BET, 126 F.3d 70 (2d Cir. 1997).
Money solves all problems. What about the micropayments? Will they do a FBbitcoin solution?
This is more centralization of data and ownership. OTOH, Facebook doesn't want to implement the DCMA toolkit that abuses their subscribers, forces royalty payments and costs a lot to run. The solution is obvious: Literally, eliminate the middleman. To be useful, Facebook will have to go into music distribution. The best plan is buying new tracks and providing Tidal-like streaming to paying subscribers.
larger companies often want a deal and exchange of money.
Provided they even reply in the first place. Other comments to this story, such as this comment, report that record labels (which control master rights) and music publishers (which control sync rights) have a habit of ignoring licensing inquiries entirely.
Copyright should contain compulsory licensing, at least in regards to fan fiction, cover songs, and other derivative works.
Perhaps the bottom half of the point scale is for asset flips and other comparably bad material.