With change at the top of Copyright Office, a battle brews over free content | Hacker News Reader

With change at the top of Copyright Office, a battle brews over free content

latimes.com

36 pointswalterbell28 comments

> "You don't make any money from recording music anymore," he said.

Historically, musicians got paid for making music, not for selling it. For thousands of years, musicians never got paid for recorded music, yet they survived. The real money maker is, and has always been, live performances and concerts. The multi-millionaire double platinum musician is a 20th century aberration.

Ever read "The Problem with Music"? http://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music

I'm not sure I get this argument. Of course artists would rather be paid for product than time, and of course they want the aberration to continue.

The world of tech would be pretty different if the "aberration" of stock options were eliminated, and everyone was paid only by the hour.

But it goes further than ISOs to actual product revenues - I would be pretty sad (and much less well off) if I could only charge by the hour for writing software vs collecting revenues for software I already wrote.

> For thousands of years, musicians never got paid for recorded music, yet they survived.

This argument is bullshit.

For thousands of years, customers never got recorded music, yet they survived.

Today though? They're awash in recorded music.

And it's not like no one is making money on recorded music. Numerous tech companies have made fortunes on top of music. YouTube alone is a multi-billion-dollar business and is packed with recorded music. I mean, look at the list of most-viewed videos; it's all recorded music:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_viewed_YouTube_vi...

The problem is not that musicians aren't making money on recorded music. The problem is the recorded music is being enjoyed by more customers than ever before, more money is being made off it than ever before, but a lot less of it makes it back to the actual artists than ever before.

A system that was symmetrical has been made asymmetrical. It was done on purpose by people who wanted to get rich, and then an entire generation was convinced it was good, and just, and inevitable.

> "The librarian wants free content, and the copyright office is there to protect creators of content. They are diametrically opposed ideologies"

Well, that's an insane viewpoint.

Creative Commons and free culture licenses exist to maintain both!

> "You don't make any money from recording music anymore," he said. "The streaming services have wiped out that revenue stream."

Ah. So your company has failed to keep pace with what your audience wants, and so is falling apart. Your answer is to use copyright like a sledgehammer, rather than trying to understand the current market.

> Ah. So your company has failed to keep pace with what your audience wants, and so is falling apart. Your answer is to use copyright like a sledgehammer, rather than trying to understand the current market.

"All we want is brand new, big-budget entertainment in our homes for nothing. Why doesn't Hollywood get that?" --Carl Carlson

I can't remember the last time I bought a physical album. I think it was about 10 years ago, when Metallica's Death Magnetic came out.

Everyone I know uses a streaming service to get music. No one I know buys or owns physical CD's, vinyl, etc. Because the music industry has failed to rise to the occasion, there are several services that have ascended to pop culture status while the traditional music industry is hemorrhaging.

The suits who sign the checks need to change the business model, but since they either can't or won't, they'll probably just die off on the vine, eventually.

music piracy is a direct result of the failure of the music industry to change with the times. if you offer a service that can compete with piracy, people stop pirating.

that's what turned me from game pirate to Steam paying customer with over 300+ titles in my library.

that's what turned me from TV pirate to Netflix subscriber.

p.s. I don't think anyone ever made money from recording music, even when album sales were good. record labels have always taken the lions share of profits. this has nothing to do with artists making money IMO.

> record labels have always taken the lion's share of profits

This is the problem I have with most of the whining about rates. Artist-driven equity, that I can get behind.

But don't pitch me on a solution where we're avoiding the fact that modern technology can replace traditional promotion/distribution channels far more efficiently.

Flattr and Patreon have taken steps to separating payment from distribution. Someone will eventually build a distribution channel that allows "second screens" to be used for payment. This is not unlike attribution for advertising that leads to a sale. Instead of attributing advertising, we can attribute the actual content being used to lead to a payment.

Why would someone "pay" for something they already "have"? Because payment is not for the last song, it's for the next song, to support what will be created by the artist. Sound strange? No, it's how Netflix and others fund content creation. Why can't fans do the same for their favored artist?

> if you offer a service that can compete with piracy, people stop pirating.

But it doesn't solve the problem, because the #1 feature of pirated music is that it doesn't cost anything. A free streaming service doesn't cost anything either--but just like piracy, it also doesn't pay the artist anything.

> p.s. I don't think anyone ever made money from recording music, even when album sales were good. record labels have always taken the lions share of profits. this has nothing to do with artists making money IMO.

You are wrong. Source: my brother has been a recording artist for 20 years.

Steam and Netflix do cost, but have verifiable impact in their industries. And they do pay their respective artists.

The streaming service doesn't have to be free. But it does have to have a decent user experience.

The music industry specifically has this problem. The video and gaming industries watched what happened to music and learned a lot of lessons about what not to do.

For example, they didn't give up on DRM, and they funded a lot of their own services for online distribution (Steam, Hulu, etc.).

They also have been much more aggressive negotiating with 3rd parties. Netflix started developing their own content because it became clear that movie studios and TV producers would soon start pulling out, in favor of their own software platforms.

Vertical integration is the name of the game now. The ISPs are all buying content producers, the online stores are all developing original content, and the content producers are all selling out or doing partnership deals.

Tidal is an example of musicians trying to do the same thing, but they're so late to the party it might not matter.

> Creative Commons and free culture licenses exist to maintain both!

If a content creator has licensed her content under a free culture license, the job of the copyright office is to help her enforce that.

> So your company has failed to keep pace with what your audience wants, and so is falling apart. Your answer is to use copyright like a sledgehammer, rather than trying to understand the current market.

That would be a reasonable argument if the market set the price for streaming services. But to a significant extent it does not. For example, Pandora-style streaming is subject to mandatory licensing at prices set by the government.[1]

Imagine that the government sets the price for wheat (as it has several times in our history). If the government sets the price of wheat too low, due to pressure by say cereal manufacturers who use wheat as an input to their profit-making activities, should we condemn the farmer for complaining about it?

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-jay...

We'll probably condemn the government when no wheat gets grown. That has happened before, in many different countries. The problem the would-be professional musician has, is that amateur musicians never have to fuel up the tractor.

> That would be a reasonable argument if the market set the price for streaming services. But to a significant extent it does not.

It's been a minute, but didn't CDs and records usually get sold at the same price point?

Also, the article you linked is about songwriters, not performers (and happens to be co-written by one of its case studies for "I got paid far less than I think I should have" afaict).

I was under the impression that Spotify allocated revenue according to total listens on individual tracks, which seems fair enough.

CDs and records were not sold on a basis that's comparable to Pandora. You had to buy a CD or a record — you didn't pay a fee and get unlimited pieces of CDs and records for the rest of the month.

I think they're analogous. I bought a CD and could listen to it (but only it) an infinite number of times. So streaming is less time, but more variety.

And per above comment, I don't see people wanting to think about variable pricing (which a market would require) in a streaming context. $.05 to play your playlist this month, $.10 next month, $.02 the next, etc...

I don't take your point at all. You asked "Isn't the price point for CDs the same as streaming services?", I answered that what you're buying is so different that it's difficult to define a unit price for comparison, and in this response you essentially point out how different they are, being at opposite ends of two spectra. So all I can say is, yes, that's why it doesn't make sense to say they are the same price (from the artist's standpoint, even if you don't see a difference from where you are).

Wrong parse. My statement started with 'weren't CDs and records sold at the same price point as others of the same type' (e.g. CD 1 costs same as CD 2, etc).

Point being that flexible pricing for a fungible good over a streaming service is likely to be a non-starter in terms of market acceptance.

Oh, in that case, definitely not, at least in California where I lived in the '90s. I remember prices ranging from the single digits up to to the $20s.

Tried to look up an actual number, but got distracted. http://pitchfork.com/features/article/9628-how-much-is-music...

Seems you're correct though, it varied.

Spotify, because it lets you choose your song, is not eligible for compulsory licensing. But the compulsory license still anchors the market price. Content owners can't charge the "real" market rate for songs because streaming services and downloading services are to an extent fungible with each other.

How would one determine the real market rate for a song in the first place? In an ephemeral streaming context, a market seems like it would be nigh impossible to implement. "I bid $.02 for an hour of streaming music, only play me songs that are under that"?

The same way they do now when there is no compulsory license: the publisher negotiates the value of songs with the streaming service up front.

That doesn't sound particularly free. That sounds like monopolies dealing with each other.

There are dozens of publishers and dozens of streaming services.

Exclusives disagree with your assumptions ex: Taylor Swift is not on Spotify. Pandora really can't stream every single album and only includes ~1 million songs vs 20 million for Spotify.

For an interesting understanding of the state of copyright today, I recommend reading Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig.

I bought the kindle version but it's also available online at http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf

I think an understanding of the positives and negatives of copyright is important. Copyright is an important economic motivator and the basis for the creative industry's ability to generate revenue, but taken to extremes it stifles technological innovation and can lead to outright censorship.

Until very recently, only the positives were represented in government policy. It was as if it was impossible for too much copyright or too strict copyright enforcement to even exist.

What we are seeing is a rebalancing of the narrative, one that includes the opinions of more then just the entertainment industry. That's all.

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