Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit
reuters.com
reuters.com
Shortly after our music locker service debuted, we got sued by all the major labels. I spent 4 months writing tools to pull all the discovery data for their lawsuits.
When it was apparent our court case was going south, the major music publishers sued us as well (lead by Harry Fox Agency). I spent another 4 months pulling discovery data for those lawsuits.
When those court cases trended badly for us, we got sued by every 2 bit operation that owned a partial percentage of the country-based rights to a song (ie, one company may of owned 4% the rights of a song in the United States and 10% in Mexico and 9.3% in Ireland, with another company owning 1.3%, 40%, .5% respectively). I spent another 4 months pulling discovery data for those lawsuits.
Finally, after we where acquired by Vivendi Universal and they took on our liabilities, I spent almost a year writing tools for them to pay these partial percentages. Have you ever had to split 1 cent via check between 3 parties? It's not fun.
Moral of this boring story is Spotify better win this fast and clean or they are in a world of pain; I can never get those 2 years of my life back.
From the OP:
> Wixen also alleged that Spotify outsourced its work to a third party, licensing and royalty services provider the Harry Fox Agency, which was “ill-equipped to obtain all the necessary mechanical licenses”.
If there's any justice, if they lose at all in court Spotify will be suing Harry Fox for damages too.
Not to mention that SoundExchange makes zero effort to track down rightsholders, seemingly because they get to keep any left over royalties they collect, and IIRC these extra royalties may also be partially distributed to top artists regardless of whoever a particular leftover royalty dollar should be allocated.
Couple of weeks ago been talking to a coworker and said him that _sometimes_ people end up in uncomfortable situations. Family, children, debt, divorce, medical, elderly parents and so on - he said, that's not possible, because people _should_ plan their lives.
People believe in the witchdoctor's raindance because the alternative is to believe your entire life is at the mercy of the random chance of weather and could be destroyed at any moment. Which is true, but hard to deal with mentally.
JWT is based on whether positive or negative outcomes were "deserved" and the extent to which randomness exists.
In contrast, FAE touches on what you believe motivated an individual to act, and whether it was innate or circumstantial.
[1] Perhaps the first wave is interesting, but the third or fourth time is probably a little repetitive.
I believe Alanis took mp3.com stock as payment.
That was a different time.
The Beam-it software was pretty cool.
Things like Shatner taking Priceline stock to be their spokesperson played into the dot-com mania narrative of the time, but now that's seen as a shrewd business move. 50 Cent had a $60-100 million exit with Vitamin Water and Lebron had a $30 million exit with Beats.
Were these these each each country's performing rights societies then? I am confused on why these are partial percentages. I would have though that they would be 100% owned in each country. Does the performing right society divide up 1 pie amongst all its affiliates in each of the countries.
Do you have any idea what the final amount Vivendi paid out to straighten everything out? I am guessing they had good idea of that before the acquisition, so I am guessing it was still a good investment for them.
It could be a record label, recording studio or even a song writer that holds a partial percentage of the proceeds from a composition, performance, or recording, and the actual percentage owned could vary by country.
So in Norway, Sony, Mom&Pop Music and your uncle Joe could hold various rights on a song, and in Sweden hold entirely different rights. Based on various revshares, contracts and agreements the amount paid out to each entity could vary as well - in my case sometimes they even varied on the platform it was played on, who played the song, etc.
It's very complicated and there are a ton of edge cases. These edge cases is where a lot of the partial percentages and confusing ownerships come from. And it doesn't help that there's a lot of music out there for which the metadata is really bad. The majors have complicated systems to figure this out (not sophisticated-complicated, more like 1-million lines of business logic complicated), mainly because they have to.
What can happen is, that a rights holders music is played in another country so that this countries collecting society has to transfer the money to the respective collecting society in his country. The collecting society then splits up the money for that song among all rights holders (labels, composers, songwriters, etc.). That's where small percentages and sub-cent calculations come from.
At least that's how it works in germany. The GEMA (german collecting society for composers and such) collects money for songs being played in germany. The rights holder may not be a member of the GEMA and as such the money will be transfered to the collecting society of the member. At least that's my understanding.
See https://www.gema.de/en/musikurheber/become-a-member/informat... for distribution on authors/composers/publishers.
Never again.
This person was probably writing scripts/tools to grab data from email servers, databases, code, etc.
Thus, I'd re-write the lede of this story to:
Music streaming company Spotify was sued by Wixen Music
Publishing Inc last week for allegedly using thousands of
songs... without [the right kind of] license and
[associated kind of notification and] compensation to the
music publisher.
[2] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/spotify-dont-compa...
My guess is that ultimately streaming rights will end up as their own category, separate from performance, mechanical or sync rights.
What about Youtube? It seems most / all music is on YT, what licence do they use? Streaming services seem a lot like YT.
There are endless uploads to YouTube with a static title slide accompanied by a popular song. I see them constantly when searching for genuine music videos from my adolescence. Infringement seems pretty clear in these particular cases.
This is obviously distinct from Spotify’s streaming business, of course. I’m only attempting to address this specific subtopic.
Great example, but you don't always have to split everything up 100 different ways, either.
There is commercial music in almost every genre owned entirely by the songwriter/composer/artist.
Covers are a compulsory license, so there is no way to disallow a cover from being posted if the license fees are paid.
Perhaps, more importantly, it's easier for Spotify to enforce this, than a CD-making company.
Would I pay a streaming service $10 a month for 10 tracks, that I can only listen to on their service, but which I get unlimited plays of so long as I subscribe to their service? Hell no.
Would I purchase an album of 10 songs, that are mine into perpetuity to listen to, make reasonable copies of, fair use of, etc, for $10? Yes.
Would I pay a streaming company for on demand access to a broad catalog of songs? Yes.
But note how my consumption and value varies.
The thing is, streaming services are, fundamentally, gainining 'per listen' value, and that model is reflected into how they're paying rightsholders. That is, the more I listen to a track, the more value it collects for the owner.
A purchasing model is how many purchases. Listens are not really correlated to that (at least, not to the price). That is, one user may listen to the purchased album 100 times, the other may listen to one song 100 times, and one user may listen to the album 1000 times. All paid the same, all generated the rightsholders the same.
As such, I think treating streaming as a storage medium would be...poorly thought out. Not least of all because at that point you could make a strong case that the streaming service should be paying every rightsholder for every subscriber; they are, after all, -storing- that music for the new subscriber; nevermind if the subscriber ever listens to it or not.
I permanently have the right to listen to a CD I own as many times as I want.
With Spotify, as far as I'm aware, they can yank any part of the catalog without anything owed to me as a listener. If I wake up tomorrow and the only thing available is John Cage's 4'33", I have no recourse. Spotify isn't offering me storage space.
Otherwise, you could just legally extract the bits downloaded onto your computer and keep the music files you have just streamed from Spotify or any equivalent service.
I think the reality is that over 20 years after the development of Real Player, we still don't have a good legal framework to discuss streaming.
I would think Spotify would need both types of licenses, or disable offline play for songs they don't/won't license.
"This mixtape thing will never take off"
The idea that there is a difference between broadcasting and copying, and that computers can emulate that difference is a pipe dream; nonetheless shared by most music labels.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
(TL;DR: 'colour' captures those path-dependent aspects of a thing, like where did it came from and why someone is doing something with it. A song legally bought and one illegally acquired may be bit-for-bit identical, but they have different colours.)
Let's get some new words then.
We need to be explicit.
> The former scenario could see you, for instance, buying a CD because you liked a song you heard on the radio; that is probably not as likely with Spotify.
That depends on whether you want to support the record label/artist, and find CDs as/more convenient as/than streaming.
The trouble is that CDs are really less convenient, and therefore less valuable.
Copyright holders should react to the declining value of physical media by creating better distribution platforms. Unfortunately, they have failed miserably, and now resort to disproportional copyright enforcement and DRM, which pushes the value of their product even farther down.
I think the music industry, in contrast to its Hollywood sibling, has very much succeeded in offering DRM-free content from a wide range of stores, shops and platforms. Physical media like CDs aren't relevant to this development.
Of course a subscription-based streaming service like Spotify can't operate without DRM. It's the whole point of the service: If you stop being a subscriber you lose access to the content.
I want to enjoy music without ever sacrificing my security or privacy to DRM.
Just because the music industry is in a significantly better position than others does not make it good enough.
Feel free to do so. Of course it will be an uphill battle and a very complicated process, but I guess that applies to competing with any kind of major service, regardless of its category.
> I want to enjoy music without ever sacrificing my security or privacy to DRM.
Again, you can. Buy music from the shop of your choice - it's yours. No DRM, no strings attached.
> Just because the music industry is in a significantly better position than others does not make it good enough.
I still don't understand what you're missing.
They won't "hack" the online radio to download (rip) the stream. Even if it's just a click away via countless stream downloading services found via any web search engine.
DRM raises that technical bar by a few notches, but it doesn't really work for non-interactive content, because there are again countless sites that offer non-DRMed access. (So DRM works for games, because it takes a while to crack them.)
It really doesn't.
> For the vast majority of the internet users, it does.
The significant majority of internet users have been carefully conditioned with propaganda to be afraid of file sharing and other more convenient options.
The idea that it works just enough to be valuable is what these media corporations are constantly telling themselves, and each other. They have managed to cultivate a culture where that is almost true, so they continue to believe it.
What they are too afraid to believe is that DRM devalues their product more than it controls customers' spending. If that isn't true now (I am quite certain it is), it will be soon.
> you get buying the CD on iTunes or something
As far as iTunes goes, it does not provide lossless DRM-free content at a competitive price, and is especially worthless to me, since it does not even run in Linux, and is painful to use in Windows.
There aren't many competitors either, because media corporations are holding back innovation and competition by demanding fees and DRM.
There shouldn't be a law that anyone can break without affecting anyone else.
1. Clearly on-demand streaming implies broadcasting. 2. Presumably I could turn a broadcast into an on-demand radio stream by setting up a radio station which loops through all songs. Then I get into my rocket ship and travel away from Earth at near lightspeed and return, arriving exactly when the song I want to hear on-demand is being broadcasted. It's possible to approach zero latency for this method, depending on whether I stay in my rocket ship all the time and how fast I travel.
That's the trouble with words.
The words imply that one thing is the other, but that just doesn't work out in reality.
Having the option to distribute music for free has been good, for sure
Setting the expectation that music should be near enough free, less so
You could argue this is one of those public good situations universal income is designed to address, but it certainly hasn't yet.
I don’t see that an artificial value placed on music, rather than the previous real value set on its distribution, is necessarily a good thing.
If you made a graph with the x axis being percentile and the y axis being the amount of money made, on the far right side of the x axis there would be a huge spike where a tiny fraction are making a fortune. (I think) I'd prefer the spike to be smoothed out.
What's interesting is that Apple/Google/Pandora/Spotify could test this. Adjust the distribution curve and then see how demand for music services changes over the years. With more artists able to live as pros, would music as a whole be more in demand? I'd venture that music as a whole would be more in demand due to increasing the number of (quality) trials in the musical search space. And if you flatten it out too much, you would reduce the motivation to continue to try to "hit it big", so you're looking to optimize the distribution curve.
A related point is the FOSS-style model of "give away music for free, make money on tours/advertising/movie soundtracks" biases the search towards music that works well in live performance/in advertising/in a film. So we are missing huge parts of the search space.
At any rate, rich, world-famous artists are the least harmed by changes in the music industry.
I'd ask how much FOSS software is running on your machine right now, and how you intend to pay for it...
I don’t have a problem with that, and as I said, I don’t think anything other than a brief moment in the history of art does either.
It's only good for the middleman.
Sure has helped most of the artists I know, who would never be lucky enough/know the right people to be among the chosen elite that got to participate in the record system.
Streaming services and the internet means that 100000s of artists can have a following of maybe 1000 people each and still make ends meet doing what they love. They won't get filthy rich, but they'll make a living.
That could get complicated if labels and artists have clauses to be involved in any new rights management categories. Everyone might have to renegotiate from the bottom up.
Doesn't having an offline mode run counter to this claim? That's clearly reproducing it. It once lived as a copy on their servers, now it lives as a copy on their servers and on the subscriber's device.
I could see, however, the argument going this way: a true reproduction is permanent, such as when a user burns a copy of a CD and distributes it to a third party. In this case, there are now two copies in the world. With offline mode (I think) those files are only playable so long as the software checks in with the service to ensure the subscription is still active.
I agree with this. Even if it only lives an encrypted cache you are effectively doing a bit by bit reproduction when you offline sync. They do expire once the user hadn't logged in for some amount of time, I believe it's something like after 30 days of not logging in or refreshing a token.
Before streaming when someone bought a CD they bought just that copy you weren't permitted to make a copy of that CD at any time.
Even radio is on the receiving end reproduced bit by bit, copied multiple times and stored in some kind of memory, which could be analog or digital.
That is what copyright is about, the right to copy. In this case a mechanical license is at issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_license
See the two types of copyright in mechanical license, the composition and the recording.
This is exactly what is being alleged by Wixen. See the lawsuit @ https://www.scribd.com/document/368281292/Wixen-Music-Publis...
No thats exactly what copyright it about. Its called a mechanical license and it is a type of copyright. See:
https://www.bmi.com/licensing/entry/types_of_copyrights
And Specifically:
"Mechanical licenses apply to reproduction and distribution of musical works on records and CDs, in permanent digital downloads, and in some other digital uses."[1]
>"Even radio is on the receiving end reproduced bit by bit, copied multiple times and stored in some kind of memory, which could be analog or digital"
Copying bytes of a track into a buffer for transmission is not the same as storing a complete copy of the track on persistent storage i.e a downloaded copy done as part of an "offline sync."
Physically they are the same thing. A buffer could be large enough to hold a complete copy and all storage is persistent to greater or lesser degrees.
It sounds like you are claiming if you buffered a small track in a future non-voltile RAM suddenly it's a different license?
The legal difference is intent. What can the user do with the copy and does it feel like a copy.
A buffer is generally understood to mean transient storage, so no not the same at all.
I guess it depends on what you mean by permitted, was I legally allowed to copy the CD? Yes, was I also able to pick my favorite tracks and make a custom playlist CD? Also yes. You were also free to rip it to your computer and put it on your iPod. It's called Fair Use and since there was no DRM on a CD you were free to utilize your fair use rights.
That's not how Fair Use works. Fair Use is about making transformative works like "commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, and scholarship" (according to Wikipedia). Not copying entire songs for your personal use.
Fair Use covers more than transformative works. See, notably, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417, 455 (1984).
Though while audio ripping of the type descrived could have been considered general fair use much like space shifting was in Sony, it actually was covered under a separate statutory allowance to avoid ambiguity, as the Audio Home Recording Act; this was found to cover ripping mp3s specifically in RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F.3d 1072 (9th Cir. 1999), which specifically cited Sony’s Fair Use result.
Wixen allegedly represent Neil Young who is founder of a now defunct (I believe) digital music distribution service called Pono^ focused around lossless encoding.
To quote Neil himself (as CEO) when he had to shut the service down by Apple acquiring their store partner=. he said:
I had to put up with lots of criticism for the high cost of music
delivered in the way all music should be provided, at full
resolution and not hollowed out. I had no control over the pricing,
but I was the one that felt the criticism, because I was the face
of it. And I pretty much agreed with the criticism. Music should
not be priced this way.
Record companies believe they should charge a premium for high res
recordings and conversely, I believe all music should cost the
same, regardless of the technology used.
Young is one of the most productive workers in the history of music and clearly a dedicated, business minded chap. I'd have a hard time believing he isn't involved in this in some way or perhaps the death of their client Tom Petty has liberated their ability to pursue anti consumer legal avenues for short term revenue generation.
= http://www.noise11.com/news/r-i-p-pono-neil-young-kills-off-...
The generally preferred method on HN is to begin the line with a > and optionally wrap the quote in * (asterisks) to make it italicized.
The problem with ">"-style quoting, is that the markup doesn't recognize them. Nor does it preserve the preceding newline. So if you are quoting anything more than a one-liner, you get a mess.
Even though that is considered one its main features, HN would definitely benefit from a markup for quotes.
like this, to get a line break
But italics is not great either, because the light-weight syntax with asterisks is really meant for a small bits of text. It gets brittle for long texts which might include asterisks, or other things that confuse the markup.
And Quote :
"The Settlement Agreement is procedurally and substantively unfair to Settlement Class Members because it prevents meaningful participation by rights holders and offers them an unfair dollar amount in light of Spotify’s ongoing, willful copyright infringement of their works," ...
"In reaction, Spotify has been questioning whether Wixen has really been authorized by its clients (including Andrew Bird, Kenny Rogers, and Jim Morrison's heirs) to take its aggressive actions. Songwriters have administrative agreements with Wixen allowing the publisher to negotiate licensing deals, but Spotify has pointed out these agreements are silent about litigation."
Disclaimer: IANAL, and with big artists, publishing deals can be very very different from boilerplate.
And, naturally, the damage amount is wildly unrelated to actual revenues - not quite the "one download on Napster == $250k" levels seen in copyright litigation against consumers, but still almost half of Spotify's likely revenue for 2017...
Maybe they didn't obtain performance licenses though?
I'm pretty sure every large company in the world is involved in multiple lawsuits at any point in time (both offensively and defensively).
Can anyone shed some light, e.g. who led this effort, what made it possible?
So you can probably build a fairly large catalogue from a relatively small number of deals, I'm guessing it follows a rough 80/20 pattern.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/spotify-hit-16-bil...
In general to have standing you need to show you have been directly harmed. The exclusive licensee of a song would be directly harmed if someone distributed it without paying for a license. So while Wixen may not have standing in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of the original artisits, they would have standing in their own action which they have now filed.
This number seems closer to reality. It may be Tom Petty, Neil Young, and the Doors, but they're not worth nearly 10% of Spotify's valuation, and that certainly wouldn't match a compensatory amount in revenue that Spotify failed to pay.
Are they aiming for some punitive measure? Or are they going to settle for 5% of this in the near future?
FYI - This is very likely not the metric they're after and so it's probably not helpful to frame against it. Valuation is a measure of the value of the company at any given time. In this case they're seeking damages for revenues that Spotify has made in the past as a result of alleged unlicensed content.
If you're trying to scope against Spotify's valuation, then likely you'd be looking at their earnings/profit, which as of reports since October 2017 is still negative. In other words, if there is indeed $1.6B to pay for unpaid royalties, then Spotify's already abysmal financials are going to look even worse.
Why not? Is there some plausible way to build a $19bn company that lets you listen to music without the works of major globally famous artists?
I am willing to agree with you intuitively that this suit is overstating damages as well, but it's definitely not a prima facie argument, you'll have to support that point of view with facts.
This way the lawyers get a nice 20% cut and Wyxen also gets a decent USD48m which is close to the USD42m that alehul mentioned above.
2.A recent proposed settlement involving rights holders and Spotify inthe class action lawsuit Ferricket al. v. Spotify USA Inc. et al.,No. 1:16-cv-8412(AJN) (S.D.N.Y.)(Dkt. # 167-3 (“Proposed Settlement”))does not adequately compensate Wixen or the songwriters it represents. Wixen has and, to the extent not yet effected, will opt out the Works from the Proposed Settlement.
From the actual lawsuit. https://www.scribd.com/document/368281292/Wixen-Music-Publis...
They used to be peer-to-peer, and they'd give "free" service to employees of certain big tech companies because they could take advantage of the upload bandwidth of the big tech offices.
They culled the P2P tech in 2014 and went to a standard server-client model.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
The overbearing copyright propaganda has given BitTorrent a bad name, even though it has so many other uses.
For example I understand the reason Facetime calls don't go phone-to-phone and instead go through a server is because of a patent [troll]. I'm curious to see how WebRTC fits into that.
P2P scales great at a slightly larger scale, especially with larger chunks of data.
As someone whose PhD touched this: it is actually ok because it stabilises towards using the most available paths.
As someone who set this up at an ISP: you can QoS the hell out of P2P and keep everyone happy. That's unless you tried blocking it and now find yourself in a stupid arms war, against folks with more free time than yourself.
There only issue I can think of is upload speed, which is improving for many, and would improve more prevalently if more average users had a clear need.
I think the BitTorrent company and/or community were studying this issue at some point and so they may have come up with alternative algorithms that prefer at least AS-locality or something.
As an extreme case, imagine that there are two seeds, one being another computer on your LAN and another being a host in Timor-Leste (which at one point in the 2000s reportedly had a single T1 connection for the entire country). It will be nicer for you and for the Timorese if you can somehow arrange to simply download the file from your LAN seed.
Here's one example of someone trying to improve this property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopBT
There is a pretty good write up here: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2009/10/03/why-up-is-slower-...
Not particularly. Symmetry is totally arbitrary. It's having the same amount down as before, while having more up that is the problem.
> and the large players in the existing system -will- have economic motivations for fighting any change.
That's the real problem. The solution is to give them an economic incentive to change. Average users wanting more bandwidth/symmetry is an effective way to do that.
Also, if you asked the average person if they want Spotify to be peer-to-peer + use more bandwidth vs centralized + use less bandwidth, do you think they are in a position to care much beyond the bandwidth difference? Especially on mobile devices?
I certainly would choose the latter. What do I care about making Spotify's operations cheaper at my own expense?
But P2P doesn't require more bandwidth. It requires more upload bandwidth, which is arbitrarily constrained.
> if you asked the average person if they want Spotify to be peer-to-peer + use more bandwidth vs centralized + use less bandwidth, do you think they are in a position to care much beyond the bandwidth difference? Especially on mobile devices?
Of course not. Spotify is already tailored to the current state of internet infrastructure, which heavily favors centralized content delivery.
Spotify can afford to foot the bill for their content delivery network. That is why it is no longer "better" for them to use peer to peer networking.
> What do I care about making Spotify's operations cheaper at my own expense?
For Spotify or Netflix, or any other site that already has a centralized CDN, there is no advantage.
For everything else, however, P2P is a great way to scale distribution, and the more we do to incentivize ISPs to increase upload speed, open ports, etc. the better.
Also, connecting doesn't work with NAT, carrier grade NAT and firewalls. They need a client-server model with a server that is accessible.
in every circumstance.
Just because ISPs love to skimp on upload speed does not mean that it is reasonable to do so.
Infrastructure is reactionary. If users need more upload speed, they will pay for it, and ISPs will update the infrastructure accordingly.
> Also, connecting doesn't work with NAT, carrier grade NAT and firewalls. They need a client-server model with a server that is accessible.
That's another arbitrary issue caused by overbearing ISPs. There is an awful lot that people would be able to do if they had reasonable control over their ports.
ISPs - especially the 6 massive incumbents - build the absolute minimum infrastructure they can get away with. That is simply their fiscal incentive. We shouldn't be afraid to give them new incentives.
If Taylor Swift lives until she is 80, her songs will be free in the year 2140 - maybe even later if someone like a composer lives longer. Isn't this just absurd?
In the US, money = speech.
Huge media corporations like Disney have deep pockets, and therefore have deep influence.
Increasing copyright length only benefits these corporations.
Is your argument that if I can't make money off my own creative work in 20 years, anyone should have the right to give it a shot after that, even if I'm still around?
That sounds pretty shitty to me. I'm all for copyright expiring, but I'd hate to lose the rights to my own work while I'm still living.
That sounds a lot more "shitty" to me than the alternative.
Patents cover independently developmed products and can cover fundamental methods or products. Inventions are often nearly developed by diffrent people. If the Wright Brothers didn't invent the airplane, someone else would have within ten years.
Someone else wouldn't have written To Kill a Mockingbird. Some other novel may have captured the same fame and critical praise, but that copyright doesn't stop that novel from exisiting.
I can get behind the "the information wants to be free, man" line when we're talking about overpriced textbooks and academic journals and bytecode for tractors, but when it comes to entertainment, I have a hard time caring. I don't think producers have a fundamental right to control recording, performance and distribution, as granted by the gub'mint, but I also don't think the consumers have a fundamental right to consume any cultural artifact for free.
But I do think that people should obey most laws, even ones they disagree with, until some ethereal line has been crossed, simply because it is the law, and I think "I want to be entertained for free" is way too low a bar, so I get kind of disgusted when pirates try to take a high-and-mighty stance.
The "an unjust law should be obeyed" rhetoric works... never.
If you can't find a way to make your entertainment profitable without legal protectionism, maybe you don't deserve too.
Look at how the interpretation of copyright as it pertains to sampling and mashing etc absolutely stifled innovation and continues to do so.
For visual art look at how ambiguous the law is around collage, which definitely stifles innovation.
Ignoring a few ancient parody/satire acts like Negativland, samples are made, used, cleared, and paid for with no serious negative consequences. Likewise remixes.
There's some extra paperwork, money changes hands, and on the whole everyone is happy.
What's been far more damaging is Spotify's insanely exploitative model, which sees its officers making millions while the artists who provide the content get pocket change - if that.
That's not just Spotify's model; it's music labels' model.
There will always be weasels and bottom feeders that seek to exploit but do you really believe copyright has somehow held back musical innovation? It was this copyright that enabled a business model that brought recorded music to the masses.
There will always be weasels and bottom feeders that seek to constrain every other individual in the world from extending an artistic work or idea, even generations after his or her death; but do you really believe copyright/patent law has somehow pushed forward innovation?
Do you really believe that an artist who makes good money licensing their music for use in TV or movies views copyright as "more of a detriment than its worth"? The only reason that revenue stream is possible is because of copyright and the sync royalties paid out on them.
>"...but do you really believe copyright/patent law has somehow pushed forward innovation?"
That's not the point I was making, my point was that it hasn't prevented musical innovation creatively. Not every instance of copyright usage is automatically detrimental to society.
Enforcement is not a requirement to possibility.
Quite a few people make money with copyleft works. Even so, it is difficult, because strongly enforced copyright, and propaganda have created a culture that tries desperately to require copyright.
> Not every instance of copyright usage is automatically detrimental to society.
Of course not! But many are:
I can't watch Netflix in 1080p using Linux because of DRM.
Security research is illegal because of DRM.
I can't start a P2P music streaming service like Spotify did, because I don't have the capitol to pay for licenses. Any innovation in this sector must be done by incumbents; who have already found success, and are more content with stability.
I can't upload a video with fair use copyrighted content to Youtube, because Google has been bullied to/shows off their "capability" to weed out copyrighted content. That also sets an unfeasible precedent for competitors; who will never have the resources to do anything similar.
s/I can't/Practically no one in the world is allowed to/
Something need not be 100% detrimental to be more detrimental than it is worth. Copyright is a clear example of that. It began somewhere near middle ground, but has since drifted extremely to the benefit of media corporations, and the detriment of everyone else.
It's not clear to me that streaming music has actually resulted in better music or a better listening experience. It's just resulted in more plays. This benefits Spotify and advertisers the most.
There is an awful lot of innovation being held back. You are likely unaware, since it is not you who wants to innovate, and you aren't experiencing those innovations.
Vinyl has made a massive comeback. Probably growing at a rate faster than Spotify at this point.
I’m really not sure what amazing “innovation” is being held back. The vast majority of social music applications just create “value” by taking revenue from someone else, not by creating new value of any kind. Not really what I think of when I think innovation.
The CD was innovative. The iPod was innovative. Spotify was just the last man standing in a long line of music streaming applications that came after music piracy hit its peak. I never found it unique or innovative. They all offered the same damn thing. Most of Spotify’s growth came from spam on the Facebook newsfeed when that was still allowed.
The whole social <whatever> app is a bit of a farce. It’s mostly based on quasi-legal theft. If that’s what counts for innovation these days then I don’t want to innovate anymore.
They replaced everything in phases, because I remember all the URI:s to songs kept breaking in my playlists before they implemented auto-matching of your songs to new location once a specific album was rendered unavailable.
No affiliation to Spotify, just a long time user.
I have an enormous collection of lossless audio and noticed it using lots of bandwidth. The desktop versions insist on loading when the machine boots, and use subsantial amounts of bandwidth/memory at idle.
I've also long shunned the spotify "deskop apps" and stuck to the website because firefox can contain the damage a bit, and ublock origin can make a surprising difference in the cpu usage of spotify! The ads are crazy javascript sometimes, and I'm guessing the same crap is loaded into the desktop electron apps.
The issue here is not that Spotify is infringing copyright (so it’s nothing to do with BitTorrent etc) but rather that Wixen says that it has not been paid correctly for the mechanical exploitation of the copyrights it administers. This is complex for several reasons.
First of all: the recordings in question have without doubt been legitimately supplied to Spotify by the record labels of the artists in question.
Secondly - a record label controls only one of the two copyrights in a song - the recording copyright.
It is impossible to record a song without using the other fundamental copyright in music - which is the song itself. The literal words and music.
This is the copyright that the publisher controls - and which Wixen claims has not been properly accounted.
Third point: When the words-and-music copyright is reproduced by mechanical means for commercial gain the publisher is due a royalty - this royalty is known as “mechanicals”.
In the “old” music business when a label pressed a record they paid out the “mechanicals” to the publisher directly - for every record pressed they owed a set amount. So this was easy to track and it meant that the money flowed directly from label to publisher based on volume of records manufactured and sold.
Point number four: Spotify’s licensing regime is complex. They need to pay a royalty for the use of the sound recording. This generally goes direct to the label or artist if they self release often via their distributor).
The mechanical reproduction of the words-and-music copyright is much less straight forward in terms of how the money flows.
The reason for this is that songwriters and the performers of a song are not always the same person - though they may also be the same person. This is where publishers come into play. If I write a song, I may not be able to record and perform it sufficiently to generate good revenue from that work. So if I can persuade a high profile artist to perform and record it I will probably make much more money from my words and music. A publisher’s job is to maximise the commercial exploitation of my words and music. This can be done in several ways - first of all, they go and shop my song around to labels in the hope that an A&R at a label (basically someone a bit like a product manager in a tech company) will see a good fit between my song and an artist that they work with. The artist records the song and I generate money in two ways - first of all the mechanicals previously discussed, but also from “performance” royalties - which is where my song is performed live to an audience. So a prominent artist performs my song on a tour - the audience in the arena have paid good money for tickets, and the artist would not have any material without my song and other songs. This also needs to be compensated, and this is done through a “performance royalty” which is generally a split of Ickes revenues.
There are other revenue streams as well, and a publisher’s job is to manage and administer these revenues as effectively as possible.
Now: I mentioned Spotify has a complex licensing model. When you play a song through Spotify it is being mechanically reproduced (the data that makes the audio waveform is being transmitted from one machine to another) but the audio is also being performed by the Spotify application on your computer. So Spotify needs to pay out a mechanical royalty and a performance royalty.
It used to be that the mechanical royalty was paid out by the label - but as the label is no longer pressing discs the “replication” of the music has passed to Spotify, and so Spotify is liable.
In the “old” music business once you bought the record or CD the revenue flow ended: your CD player manufacturer was not continuing to benefit each time you played a disc. So the “performance” of the music did not have a revenue stream attached to it, assuming that you were enjoying the music in the privacy of your own home.
But Spotify can be seen to benefit each time you play a song, because you pay an ongoing subscription for access to the music.
So a performance royalty is also due.
Now: further complexity. In many territories songwriters and publishers assign the management of performance and mechanical royalties to third parties. In the U.K. for example a songwriter will join PRS - the performing right society, which administers performance copyright for the words-and-music copyright in a song. They should also join the MCPS - the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society - to collect mechanical royalties. These organisations and others like them in other territories are known as Collective Management Organisations or “CMOs”.
Spotify has deals with these two organisations (PRS/MCPS) - and generally also with the equivalent CMOs around the world. Spotify says “this song was streamed X times and so we owe Y for mechanical royalties and Z for performance royalties. This money is then paid trough the CMOs to the publishers/songwriters. You cannot - as a publisher or an artist - get this money directly from Spotify.
This works on one level because it means that so long as a work is correctly identified in the database of the CMOs and that whoever is performing or mechanically reproducing a song submits accurate data showing how and when hat song was reproduced and what revenue is attached then it all works perfectly. More critically the CMO mechanism makes it possible for services like Spotify to exist (and even for live concerts to happen) because otherwise anyone who wanted to put on a concert would need to obtain the permission of every songwriter individually before their songs could be performed.
However - you need to keep in mind that this system was invented when sheet music and clockwork pianos where the main way that words-and-music copyright was mechanically reproduced, and performance was limited to someone standing up and singing the song in a concert hall.
So far, so complex.
To add a further few layers of complexity:
There is no authoratitive database that says “this words-and-music is the copyright of Tom Petty”. Additionally, when a record label ingests music into the Spotify catalogue there is no requirement to specify who wrote the words-and-music.
The way it works is that (in essence) Spotify sends the CMOs a list of everything that has been played and the CMOs say “I represent that words-and-music copyright in X territory - so you owe me $X representing Y streams.”
It’s a pretty clunky system - but as yet, no one has really come up with a better solution. Technology moved faster than copyright admin.
Add into the mix that some artists may not register with the appropriate CMOs; some artists may not have a publisher; some labels may be releasing cover versions of songs where they have not directly obtained the permission of the copyright holder - but this is ok because in theory the words-and-music royalties flow from Spotify through the CMOs to the copyright holders.
So it’s a very complex case and hinges on whether the relevant CMOs had been delegated authority by songwriters/copyright holders/publishers to exploit those works and whether Spotify was accurately accounting and paying out for the use of the copyrights.
So it’s not about BitTorrent or Spotify having pirated music and is everything to do with how technology, the exploitation of copyright and how money flows through music are all a bit out of sync with each other.
In the US, there is no CMO. After agreeing to a license, music publishers send their composition (word-and-music) catalog information directly to Spotify. There is no requirement that they need to send the associated recording with their musical composition. So the burden is on Spotify to match the composition up with the recording to recognize if the recording's underlying composition is licensed. (The recording is licensed because the actual audio file was sent to Spotify by the label).
So then Spotify needs to tie all this data together. Compositions can be owned by 5 publishers, who are all sending separate catalog files. Again, no requirement to send an unique identifier to tie these all are up. So Spotify does the best it can to associate all this data to figure out if a recording is licensed, but ultimately, they cannot verify millions of tracks. So they make business decisions that carry risk so people can listen to music. They can say, if we have 90% ownership, we will treat it as licensed or some other deviation from affirmatively knowing every copyright owner without a doubt.
So then the music publisher finds a handful of tracks that slipped through and were unlicensed. And they sue. And technically, those tracks were unlicensed, but its not for lack of trying from Spotify. And no music industry player is helping solve the metadata standards or systemic issues. They just lie in wait and sue for money or as a negotiation tactic. And they exploit the "Spotify is ripping off artists" narrative, when in reality, Spotify is working very hard and investing a lot of money to pay out artist and writers properly.
These lawsuits are very dishonest, but legally defensible. There are not in the spirit of any productive working relationship with the MAIN distribution channel of your product!
Of course, all these questions can be addressed in one way or another with conventional database tech. But blockchain has some undeniable appeal in an application like this.
A merkle tree has some useful properties for verifying the integrity of your data cryptographically. As such it is a useful way to distribute a ledger. But in this particular domain there is no double spend problem to worry about so proof of work and most other consensus protocols are... wasteful at best.
Stick it on a medium-sized server, and you can already serve thousands of users.
Blockchain meanwhile... something something ... 4 txns/second ... 1 terrawatt per txn ... up to several days to clear a txn when network is congested
Blockchains are not the next big thing in databases. They are here to revolutionize how existing organizations co-ordinate, enter into contracts with each other, and even allow individuals themselves co-ordinate directly with each other without intermediaries through novel org structures.
You are trading computational scalability for social scalability.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-blockchains-a...
Blockchains are the next big thing in nothing. They are not here to revolutionise anything [1]
> hey are here to revolutionize how existing organizations co-ordinate, enter into contracts with each other etc.
Nope. There are about zero things in blockchain that help with that. Because at the end of the day someone has to do all the job of, you know, adding all the info about who owns what percentage of what song in which region of the world.
Oh wait. Which song was that? A Japanese LP that's 2 seconds longer than the original single released in Europe? Or that remastered song on a "Best of album" that was published by a different publisher than the remastered version published on the "Remastered" album that is published by a different combination of publishers than the original 1960s album that is different from that singular French copy of a concert in 1995...
All that for a single song that ends up being attributed to the same singers and songwriters, except that one cover by all the same people sans that one guy, and except that different cover that will be attributed to the same songwriters, but a different singer, and except...
All that info has to be: standardized, assigned to every single one of those 30 million songs, and any new releases should contain the same standardized info.
You know, something the publishers could agree on right now, and they don't. So how in the seven hells is blockchain going to help?
[1] https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
I beg to differ [1]
> So how in the seven hells is blockchain going to help?
It's not a silver bullet, and most things are not ones that were not possible before. But it facilitates some combinations, makes some things a lot more practical, and opens space for innovation.
In this case, in particular, what comes to mind is:
- there's a replicated consensus of all this attributions. Every single company agrees and has a shared database of the rights and the licensing. - the disintermediation: there's not necessarily a need to have a middle man managing this informations and agreements. - auditable, notorized, unforgeable history: you have this immutable record of when songs were released, who held their records, who and when licensed them, etc. - open information: if you design this system as an open network, any interested party can join and get the information it wants without needing APIs, etc.
All this without getting into tokens and handling the payments and distribution of royalties on the chain, and other innovations that the capabilities of the blockchain can bring.
[1] https://blockchaintechguide.com/a-blockchain-based-future/
Don't mistake Bitcoin's limitations for Blockchain limitations. These are characteristics of the consensus mechanism, of Proof of Work in particular.
But I know there are a few other startups trying to do the same thing.
Spotify wouldn't even exist without illegal file sharing on the outset.
Edit: Ok thanks for the screenshots. I disabled my adblocker but they're still not showing up. Probably just something broken.
When Spotify was in a spat with Taylor Swift's former label, the two companies couldn't even agree on how much in royalties she was making a year. https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/13/7213775/taylor-swift-spo...
Mechanical licenses are governed very differently from recordings. For one, they are subject to compulsory licensing, which allows you pay a statutory rate to license them, as opposed to directly licensing them from the rightsholder. The suit alleges that Spotify did neither in this case.
I was under the impression it was standard operating procedure for them.
My backout plan is to manually copy over all the artists I'm following. It'll take an hour or two, and I'd have to remember which of their albums I liked the most.
For custom playlists? Currently you're shit out of luck, you'll have to do it manually.
Just grab an auth token from https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-current-us... and call the above script with it. Very hacky, but it works.
(Horrifyingly crufty playlist backup: https://github.com/rjp/spotify-playlists )
Spotify has allowed me to find and enjoy so much amazing music that I wouldn't have had the budget to pay for via iTunes.
Napster allowed me to find and enjoy so much amazing music that I wouldn't have had the budget to pay for via iTunes.
Large music labels prefer revenue/relationships with Apple and Apple music and will use their monopoly to hurt or ruin competitors like Spotify.
Who would really install and pay for spotify if the entire library consisted of a two minute track of street sounds from Los Angeles and thirty seconds of doorbells? Basically no one. Nobody really cares about the technology, what they want is the music, without which even the coolest technology is uninteresting.
There are a lot of music producers and publishers. There aren't many streaming services that have a large customer base and the tech to service it.
And arguably Spotify only has a large customer base because it has the content people want. It's very similar to a chicken and egg problem.
The problem is that copyright has an unreasonable amount of authority.
iTunes Music Store, Amazon MP3 downloads, and actual brick and mortar record stores beg to differ.
The other two count (although Apple Music and Amazon Music Streaming, not the music store and downloads), but I didn't say there was only ONE distributer, just that there were only a few.
A good distributer, with a wide audience, is able to take a big cut and not have producers run away. Apple is able to take 30%, and so is Steam. If it was so easy to make an alternative, people would do it. The network effect is strong.