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It's the same deplorable ethics that Youtube used to rise to where they are today. It was probably the biggest copyright heist in history. Almost all of their traffic was to illegally uploaded music videos and they knew it. They put up so many procedural barriers to effective takedown that content owners gave up and accepted YouTube's licensing terms, because you'd rather make something than nothing.

(Of course, now that their place as a/the top video site is secured, and now that they've strong-armed everyone into licensing to YouTube, they've stepped up enforcement, so they can pretend to be good citizens. It's like a mobster turning around and using some of his ill-gotten gains for charity.)

Artists have historically made little money on the music itself, turning instead to franchising and concert tickets to really bring in the big bucks.

This isn't the best article for explaining it, but it's better than nothing. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/9-ways-musicians-act...

Why are songs on the radio played for free? Because copyright in music actually hardly matters. "Real fans" end up buying piles of merchandise or going to concerts anyway.

(Disclosure: I pay for Google Music. I don't pirate music, and don't advocate it. But it can hardly be construed as "hurting artists.")

How about hurting the record companies, who front most of the capital for artists, pay them salaries, etc.

> pay them salaries

You must not know much about how the recording industry works. The record companies "pay" artists by giving them lending them money, the payments for which are deducted from their royalty percentage (e.g. the record company take 90% of the cost of the CD, and the artist gets 10%, then the "loan payment" comes out of the artist's 10% royalty).

What you think of the terms between artists and labels is not really relevant to the matter at hand. No one is forced to sign with a big label. If you want someone's money, then you have to be willing to play by their rules. If the contract terms are too one-sided, then other labels would undercut the competition by offering better terms. This is what happens.

But again, totally irrelevant to YouTube's massive copyright heist. There's no justification for basing your business model on copyright infringement. No justification for having an asinine takedown system that doesn't change the fact that the top result will be yet another illegal copy of the video you just spent forever trying to get taken down.

It's incredibly obvious you have a dog in this fight and are incredibly biased. It's well known almost every recording artist gets screwed, and that it's easier to fight fans than their bosses. Take what you've written about startup youtube, and applied it to TODAY'S youtube, but flipped it to be 100000% anti-consumer, you'd be on the right track. Thanks to your record companies, I can no longer broadcast my gameplay if the game itself has coded-in music, because my video will get flagged as stolen content. If I'm recording a 3 hour video, and a friend walks in and his ringtone goes off and happens to be 4 secs of a song....I now have my entire video removed for content theft, though I've never done such a thing.

This all happened thanks to the Viacom lawsuit[1], which forced youtube to be the most pro-recording industry, and anti-consumer popular site ever. Now, an automated bot trolls everyone's videos for any knid of match, and if flagged the video is automatically taken down unless you file an appeal. In other words, guilty until proven innocent. Unless you are a record label, then it's innocent until proven guilty.

Did you miss the Family Guy fiasco[2], where they used a 7 year old video of Nintendo gameplay footage in the show, the bot saw it as "Fox Owned", and had it removed for copyright infringement.

The youtube era you describe was for a few months-years. We've been dealing with the bullshit youtube became EVER SINCE. Forgive me if the complaints of a record company insider (in whatever capacity you may be), falls on deaf ears.

This is reminiscent of Lars Ulrich complaining about Napster and the internet in general. Only even he admitted he was wrong about that.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-viacom-lawsuit-idUS...

[2] https://consumerist.com/2016/05/20/fox-swipes-youtube-clip-o...

I actually have exactly zero skin in this game. I'm no fan of current copyright law, with it's ridiculously long terms. I'm posting from a throwaway because trashing Google, one of the biggest employers in the US, is a career-limiting move.

> It's incredibly obvious you have a dog in this fight and are incredibly biased.

Because you disagree with him, apparently.

> What you think of the terms between artists and labels is not really relevant to the matter at hand.

The grandparent wasn't opinion, it was correction of an inaccurate statement of fact in the great-grandparent, to wit, the false claim that record companies pay artists salaries, such that you could "steal from record companies" by piracy and hurt their income (and jeopardize the artists "employment" and "salary") separately from directly hurting artists income. Artists aren't salaried employees, they are contractors who receive sales royalties from record companies. Therefore, the scenario presented in the great grandparent is contrary to fact.

If you don't sell any copies, you usually don't owe the advance back; it's yours to keep and the label eats the cost. It's not a salary but it has a somewhat similar effect and I stand by my point. Nevertheless, I was wrong and I do stand corrected.

> it's yours to keep and the label eats the cost

Not quite. It's structured as a loan. As far as book-keeping goes, they write it off as a sunk cost, but you still owe them. The contracts usually tie you to them for a period of time (or something like X albums). If you make a single album and it flops, you are still tied to them. If they decide not to give you the money to make more albums your music career is basically over.

> Why are songs on the radio played for free?

Because conventional radio airplay acted as advertising. Wanted to listen to the song when you wanted to? You had two choices - sit by the radio with a cassette recorder, fingers posed over play and record, or buy the record.

> They put up so many procedural barriers to effective takedown that content owners gave up and accepted YouTube's licensing terms, because you'd rather make something than nothing.

Lol what? Have you not experienced the Content ID stuff taking down completely unrelated items and routing ad traffic revenue to the claiming company with little to no appeal process?

There are even groups out there fraudulently claiming to represent a particular copyright owner just to get some money flowing their way (and Google allows it apparently).

Lol what? Did you not read the next paragraph of my comment?

To be fair, based on the first paragraph you wrote, especially from a just-made throwaway, it's probably kind of hard to choke down just to get to the next par. I wrote a reply, most won't bother as it's another beaten horse.

Yes, anything that challenges Google's "Don't Be Evil" propaganda is hard for some to swallow. Thankfully, at least some of us don't fall for that kind of bullshit.

We're disagreeing about how Google/YouTube is bad, not fighting over whether it's bad or good. I'm saying that YouTube's Content ID system is overzealous, and you're claiming that it's underzealous.

They already cemented their place as top dog, got everyone to license their content, and now actually profits more when you watch the official versions.

> It's becoming more and more difficult to figure out who you are buying from

Definitely. One of the worst parts is that reviews calling out damaged or fake products don't have any way to look up which seller they bought from.

If you look at the Q&A, there's a question about whether the product is original Apple or not. And there are 5 answers to the question all on the same day saying the same thing. These must be fake accounts posting fake answers for such products.

How can you tell for sure that it's counterfeit? Just to be clear: I'm with you; this looks sketchy. I'm just wondering what particular signals you've picked up on.

I thought that when third parties sell on Amazon, they specify the catalog information that shows up there, such as "Apple Computers". Multiple different sellers can then list the same product for sale if they have it. Could there be a few legitimate people actually selling this along with some scammers, or is it entirely scammers?

Things I'm confused about: the product title seems to be misleading. I see "MagSafe" in there, but also "original Oem Apple MacBook Pro" (in caps). The product photo has an Apple logo on it, which is presumably trademarked. So if they sent me a generic adapter that wasn't Apple brand, then that would be false advertising. If they sent a device that wasn't really Apple, it would be counterfeiting.

What will you get when you buy it? I am tempted to buy one and see what happens.

At this point the biggest clue is that it is not sold by a well known Apple authorized reseller at the MSRP.

These counterfeit chargers look nearly identical to the originals, including all of Apple's branding. It is absolutely false advertising, infringement on Apple's trademarks, dangerous (these things cause fires), and a scam.

As much as I hate paying full price for these chargers, I would never buy one from anywhere other than an Apple store these days.

Edit: I really hope the MacBook going USB-C charging is a sign of a coming era of non-proprietary charging for Apple laptops. That said, there are obviously counterfeit issues with USB chargers as well, but there is at least more than one legitimate vendor to help with competition a bit.

How can you tell from the picture and listing that it's counterfeit? Is the picture of a real one? If not, you should be able to report it as not OEM.

If you read the article, it's actually Amazon and sellers who's being scammed by the buyers, who are purchasing iPhones, replacing them with blocks of clay, and claiming the refund for "fraud".

To be fair, I don't think bdrool is claiming the situations are analogous. He's just using the opportunity to point out other problems with Amazon's operations.

Yes, I realize that. I was not saying this is the exact same thing that is being discussed in the article.

However, it is similar in that Amazon should be exercising more control over their inventory and logistics, not to mention the case I am talking about is arguably much more egregious and much more within Amazon's control to fix. I think that makes it highly relevant as a comment to this story.