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Senate Passes Music Modernization Act With Unanimous Support (billboard.com)
After the House's unilateral support back in April, the Senate has unanimously voted to pass the Orrin G. Hatch Music Modernization Act, which is named in honor of the Republican senior senator from Utah -- a songwriter himself -- who will retire at the end of the year. Billboard explains the bill: The bill creates a blanket mechanical license and establishes a collective to administer it; reshapes how courts can determine rates, while making sure future performance rates hearings between performance rights organizations BMI and ASCAP and licensees rotate among all U.S. Southern District Court of New York Judges, instead of being assigned to the same two judges, Judge Denise Cote for ASCAP and Judge Louis Stanton for BMI, as its done now; creates a royalty for labels, artists and musicians to be paid by digital services for master recordings created prior to Feb. 15, 1972, while also eliminating a Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 carve out for "pre-existing digital services" like Sirius XM and Music Choice that allows for certain additional considerations not given to any other digital service when rates are set; and codifies a process for Sound Exchange to pay producers and engineers royalties for records on which they have worked.
Over on the music publishing side of the business, there was much happiness too. For example, ASCAP noted that the legislation reforms an "outdated music licensing system and give music creators an opportunity to obtain compensation that more accurately reflects the value of music in a free market." Billboard notes that the revised Senate version "will go back to the House where it needs approval due to all the changes made to the bill in order to get it passed in the Senate." Once the House approves, it will then head to President Trump's desk.
Over on the music publishing side of the business, there was much happiness too. For example, ASCAP noted that the legislation reforms an "outdated music licensing system and give music creators an opportunity to obtain compensation that more accurately reflects the value of music in a free market." Billboard notes that the revised Senate version "will go back to the House where it needs approval due to all the changes made to the bill in order to get it passed in the Senate." Once the House approves, it will then head to President Trump's desk.
To give more info, this bill is a renamed/modified version of the CLASSICS Act, which was mentioned on Slashdot back in May. It extends copyright for certain works to 144 years. It was also introduced to Congress by a Republican, lest one think that only Democrats are beholden to the MAFIAA (although the unanimous support is a dead giveaway.) Actually I'm surprised no Libertarians in Congress oppose these bills.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Here's the EFF's take on it. Apparently it's a combination of the Music Modernization Act (a mostly positive bill updating how compensation works for artists and rights-holders on streaming services), with the CLASSICS Act (another copyright extension and expansion thing).
a copyright extension...
oh, wait. i know why they didn't...
They did.
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"is why slashdotters are so upset about the copyright on Mickey Mouse"
Because Disney, seeing that the copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to expire paid for legislation to extend copyright to keep Mickey from becoming public domain.*
Narrow Corporate interests were held as more important than the general populace's interests by our elected leaders. In my mind, this is one of many events that show that corporate money should not be allowed in the political process.
*Yes, I know they did not directly go to congress and say "here is money, give me legislation". The net effect is the same.
That, and most of Disney's library comes from making musicals out of Hans Christian Anderson, the Thousand and One Nights, the Brothers Grimm, and other old stories.
Orin Hatch is commonly refered to as the Senator from Disney.
The music cartels have ensured they now ALL get a chunk EVERY time:
See there are several music cartels, and they fall into a segment groups.
RIAA collects royalties for "recordings". So whenever you bought a vinyl record, cassette, or CD. They collected royalties for the artists. Let's say you wanted to do a cover of a song and release it on your album. You pay RIAA. But believe it or not, that doesn't necessarily mean you can play that cover live...nope...that's a different cartel. Oh, but let's also add, that the royalties are paid to the copyright holders. Which were usually the record labels themselves, (which formed RIAA), and have spent a century ripping off artists by tacking on fraudulent expenses and failing to pay.
Performance and broadcast rights. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC collect the performance rights. This is what classic radio stations paid. They never paid RIAA ^^^ up above. It is also what most churches pay in order to display the words of the songs on projectors, or print them in hymnal books. It is also who you pay for music in your restaurant, elevator music, and I believe your "on hold" music. Oh, but get this...once again it goes to the copyright holder. And what goes to the artist, often goes to only a select few. Huh what? Well see these royalties go to those on record as having "written" the music/lyrics. So if the drummer wasn't involved in writing the song, he doesn't get paid.
***
When the advent of digital music and streaming came about it started to cause a bunch of issues for the cartels, as they kind of got into a turf war with each other and with artists. For example, record labels signed licensing deals with the like of iTunes. But while many artists only received 15% on an album sale, licensing deals were 50/50. But the record label cartels paid the artists as if they were sales.
Then you had the digital streaming radio. Were these broadcasts (hence under BMI/ASCAP/SESAC) or were these recordings (thus under RIAA). RIAA made an argument that buffering, and caching and the like constituted recording. Mind you, radio has done this with on-air delay for years. But RIAA didn't want to take on the broadcast radio, because gee, who would buy their albums if they never played them.
Thus was the DMCA and SoundExchange. Now here is the thing, SoundExchange required every online music broadcaster to pay them a royalty per play. But SoundExchange ONLY paid out based on certain number of plays, and those plays as a percentage as a whole. Now at the time 90% of the music played was by independents and micro-labels. But here's the thing, the big labels push a handful of artists and albums in any given season. Listen to yada yada radio, and count how many songs you ever hear. Probably 80% are the same 100 songs on a given station. Hence the popularity of college radio which might play a song from some obscure band once. So suddenly, these big stations start streaming. And their playlists do something interesting...
College radio and independent streamers.
1,000 independent artists, each play 10 times = 10,000 plays
Big Music
10,000 plays, of a 100 artists. Big Music artists show up as 100 plays each.
SoundExchange did a couple of things, a minimum number of plays/royalty amount to receive a payout. And a time to claim such. Otherwise, it just went to the cartel. So basically, they now collect the royalties for all the independent bands, but never pay them out. Talk about piracy? Or even more so akin to the East India Company - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They had succeeded once again in successfully !@#$% over the artists, the independents, college radio, and most consumers. But there were still dubious areas that the music cartels were fighting over. Hence this law, which basically ensures they ALL get a piece of the action everytime.
And once you understand all this, it's why you usually quit giving a !@#$% about all their hype on pira
Mickey mouse films, songs, books, comics, etc. are protected by copyright. Mickey Mouse the name and the "ears" logo are protected by trademark.