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Comment by zucker42 | Hacker News Reader

Our overly restrictive copyright law does a lot of unnecessary damage to our culture and our society. Instead of adapting to technological change, many music companies seem intent on protecting their revenue by limiting the expression of others, and the ability to remix content.

I wonder if there are exceptions for properly licensed music. It is certainly so hard to license most music that such exceptions are practically useless, though.

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It so so bad that enormous resources are wasted in multinational stings [1] to get a few torrent seeders instead of using these resources to stop human trafficking or real crimes.

It is disgusting. Especially since the ones who pushed so hard to get these laws themselves have been accused of copyright violations.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/new-scene-security-notice-sparks-pi...

These are the kind of things that made me realize the whole copyright thing is a conveniently legal way for any government to make sure only currently-Approved media is ever available to the general public. Nothing is accidental.

Can you please elaborate on that? "Currently-approved media"? In my mind (European) by media we mean the Press. Do you mean Press or Social Media? A radio station, or a newspaper has a license to operate and is governed by specific requirements and protections. Facebook and Twitter are NOT part of the press (imho). The fact that e.g. BBC tweets some news doesn't fall under the Social Media "laws" but under the Press "laws".

Do you imply conspiracy? Could it just be that greedy capitalism runs ahead and legislation is 10y behind and ran by white old folks who just care to be re-elected and not to keep up to speed because, why bother?

I am not trying to make this political, I sincerely do not understand if you are implying conspiracy or ruthless reality.

I think by media, he means audio and video. Like how CDs and tapes are physical media. MP3s and MP4s are digital media.

Yes, this is exactly how I meant “media”, like multimedia. Apologies for the confusion :)

Your logical fallacies are whataboutism and false dichotomy. Copyright lawsuits do not detract from other issues. Copyright is a civil matter, whereas the ones you mention are criminal ones. The police and the US' various secret services are not involved in copyright issues.

The FBI and other agencies are often involved in raids and arrests, and actively seize websites that are supposedly used for piracy. I don't understand how you can argue that it is a civil matter that does not involve law enforcement. Just search "fbi raid bittorrent", there are plenty of examples.

Piracy historically referred to illicit printed copies created for unauthorized unlicensed material benefit to the copier, without demanded licensing terms or in absence of negotiations toward such licensing. The copyright lobby ensured it broadened to cover digital reproductions on shaky epistemological grounds imo.

> The Crown also revealed that police had handed seized hard drives to FBI staff who copied them at the police crime lab in South Auckland and sent the copies back to the US. Justice Winkelmann ruled that the handing of hard drives seized by New Zealand police in the raid to the FBI was in breach of extradition legislation, and the FBI's removal from New Zealand of cloned data from them was unlawful.

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

How do copyright issues not detract from other issues? There is clearly a finite amount of resources available to allocate to all our earthly concerns.

SPARKS weren't just a few torrent seeders, they were more specifically the source of a major part of BluRay releases in the warez scene. They also don't release on P2P, but on topsites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsite_(warez)

In fact the scene despises P2P (or at least used to).

I agree with you though. It's an absolute waste of resources that could be spent on actually making the world a better place.

Also they obtained and released blurays before they were put on sale to the public.

Well that's honestly what happens (in my experience) with any major DVD/BluRay release. Once they get pressed and given to retailers, they leak.

Yes, the people arrested are allegedly from groups who are definitely responsible for sourcing a large percentage of the pre-release films you notice online.

> In fact the scene despises P2P (or at least used to).

I can't understand that, isn't peer to peer inherently more resistant to law enforcement than any centralized FTP server?

From my understanding, the scene is about being part of a club, belonging, and part of this is contributing back.

Torrenting is just getting movies, without these social aspects, and without being part of the "elite".

Human trafficking hurts the profits of almost no large corporation; so - there's no economic pressure to eradicate it. And most governments are not very amenable to pressure by human-rights groups, especially when they advocate for foreigners with a different language, different skin color, no voting rights and no money.

Sadly to me, it’s socially acceptable to believe that the concerns of others are just, like, your opinion, man, and that it’s okay to not share the concerns of wider society, and furthermore okay that other narrower societies are not one’s concerns either; that to not care about others is a political stance, and therefore, to impress upon one the necessity of human rights for all, is to open the floor for a political debate. It’s strange to me, but nearly every time human rights are invoked, those invoking it are called out for being needlessly politically correct. As if being politically correct were the goal all along, as if being a sjw were a goal itself, so that the goal or argument in favor of the goal can be dismissed out of hand without discussion or debate. It’s a thought-terminating cliché.[0]

I feel gaslit by society sometimes. Where have all the nice good people gone? I know all those folks in Mr Rogers Neighborhood are real people irl, but they increasingly seem like characters and actors from a society that no longer exists and perhaps never did, but hopefully one day could exist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

I'm actually not a great fan of the "Human Rights discourse". I would rather phrase things in terms of interests, needs and desires, which should be catered to due to human (and sometimes class) solidarity.

Will read your link; for now, I'll reciprocate with this:

https://libcom.org/library/implosion-point-democratist-ideol...

Yep. Not just music companies too, patents are just as bad. That shit ought to expire after a decade tops, everyone would be better off.

Well they do expire after 2 decades, which is a lot better than 70+ years for copyrights.

Still effectively an eternity in the modern world.

Only in the move-fast-and-break-things part of the world. In other engineering professions (aviation, drilling, pharmacy) it can take a decade to go from initial design to fully-deployed product.

Of course, but this is a discussion about music and not petroleum engineering, right?

No this is a discussion between the 2 decades for patents, which seems fair, versus the 7 decades for copyrighted material, which doesn't :)

IMO the patent term should depend on the field.

As far as copyrighted content stuff... I think a year or two is enough. Especially for movies and music which, afaik, make most of their money right after release. This would disincentivize most of the blatant copyright abuse happening today, while still allowing the creators to earn their money.

Except for the people that pored years of their life into their inventions and now see others take their invention and run with it, of course. It can take a long time between a patent and a marketable product.

I think the "lone inventor" myth died out in the last century.

The LPF (League for Programming Freedom) saw all of this corporate nonsense coming in 1990: portfolio warfare among giants; trolling and extorting; patenting trivial things and then trolling; and to your point, the death of the heroic lone inventor without a large team of patent lawyers to earn the money.

The LPF is gone now, software patents are the domain of large corporations, and garage guy is (largely?) no more.

Big companies like to push for restrictions and subsidies using this very argument - oh the poor lone inventor, they can't survive if we don't create this overly restrictive law or subsidy. In practice, huge cartels benefit from these at the expense of small inventors and everybody else.

As a lone inventor you can spend your energy on building a company, or on enforcing your patents. getting bogged down in the courts won't make you money, building a company might.

The MLB used to go out of their way to report fans who shared short game clips on twitter and it never made any sense to me. Do they have the right do to that under the current copyright system? Sure. But it seems so short-sighted. It's free advertising of the best kind: word of mouth. Why would you want to stop people from sharing samples of your product that way?

> Why would you want to stop people from sharing samples of your product that way?

I don't know how much this is relevant here but I read of this a few years ago and now I feel like I shoe horn it into every single problem in the world: the principal-agent problem.

For those not in the know (sorry, if you're like me you will be addicted to this from now on)

> The principal–agent problem, in political science and economics (also known as agency dilemma or the agency problem) occurs when one person or entity (the "agent"), is able to make decisions and/or take actions on behalf of, or that impact, another person or entity: the "principal".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

The management of the company has no REAL interest in the long term benefit to the franchise, much less baseball in general. They're just trying to survive this quarter. Here "survival" is very twisted. You could think you are doing a heck of a job but if your revenue grows a very respectable ten percent year over year this quarter but your competition is out there growing twenty five, then well your bosses aren't going to like that very much. It is basically survival of the worst, really.

I think I am guilty of assuming the best intention of other people sometimes and then I see the "Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law" tags on mattresses and I am reminded that we need laws not to prevent people from stuffing literally human hair and who knows what other nastiness in "new" mattresses but to do so without disclosing the fact the mattresses are made with nastiness.

> They're just trying to survive this quarter.

They are probably trying to maximize the metrics their employees (whoever represents the shareholders) use to evaluate them. And those are short term metrics by necessity of the evaluation.

Survival is one, but it's a really easy one to top, so they are probably ignoring it.

How is baseball a 'quarter' based business? The employees in franchises float with the successes on the field, I'd think. I guess I should go read Inside Baseball or something.

IANAL, but based on what I’ve seen about the US judicial system, maybe if they don’t pursue people sharing short clips, it would be harder for them to make a case in court against someone sharing the whole game?

That’s a common misconception. You don’t lose copyright if you don’t defend it.

Trademarks can be lost if not defended.

Is it possible for a musician to publish their music in a way so that everybody else can do with it whatever they like?

If so, are there already websites that deal with only this type of music? Like there is pexels.com for images?

I remember working for a startup and finding open source music to use in our promotional videos. So I suppose it’s a thing.

Look up Creative Commons licences. Some allow for commercial use. Jamendo is (was?) a fairly popular website for that.

There's some Funkwhale [1] communities that might be close to what you're looking for

I haven't found what I'm looking for but I want to share my music like software, source code and all, easily modifiable and reusable

I miss what.cd originals, what were those called?

It was really inspiring to see people sharing their own music like that

Bandcamp has this feeling in spirit with their donation based option

SoundCloud had that spirit before Go

Splice is cool but seems specific and not very open

Not music but, LibrVox[2] has something special going

Won't all music coming out today eventually be in the public domain?

[1] https://fediverse.party/en/funkwhale [2] https://librivox.org/

Splice is literally a sample shop, instead of buying from a certain company's web shop and paying for a whole sample pack at once, you can cherry pick sounds and just pay for what you need and mix and match several packs and company offerings at once.

They're under rather strict licensing terms though, no reselling as samples even if they're heavily modified for example.

Well, like in open source software we have licenses like MIT and WTFPL, in creative industries there's different Creative Commons licenses like CC0 or CC-BY-SA for example which would grant different usage rights in certain circumstances.

There's a lot of different mediums which supports sharing and searching for media under different CC licenses, I've tagged a majority of my SoundCloud releases for example with great success.

If we're talking about a whole site dedicated for openly licensed music and audio, freesounds.org comes to mind.

The issue with the permissive licensing is when the works get legally used in works that aren’t licensed that way. This is a common cause of YouTube contentID legal “false positive” results.

Both you and the other person have the rights to that audio and platforms like YouTube have put no effort into giving us a solution to resolve this “edge case”.

Is there some international scale comparison? I'm fairly sure Creative Commons does not mean the same thing f.e. in Germany due to GEMA.

The whole thing is wack, can't imagine licensing some code under GPLv3 and turns out that does not apply in some country.

Is it possible for a musician to publish their music in a way so that everybody else can do with it whatever they like?

Yes. This happens all the time, and sometimes sounds come from places like BBC.

If so, are there already websites that deal with only this type of music? Like there is pexels.com for images?

Yes and no. People put up websites and other things that let you download music, but most of it isn't as organized as the free stuff for artists. It also seems like it is more decentralized and requires a bit more work, sometimes hours of work. It is quicker to look at photos than it is to listen to music and sound clips.

Sources: Spouse creates somewhat experimental electronic music, and uses free-to-use sounds alongside his own stuff. I've watched him sit for hours sorting through sounds and clips and music. Also, youtubers often use such music and link to it in their descriptions (Steve the Bartender, for example, and Im pretty sure Binging with Babish does something similar, or at least did at one time).

Check out https://freemusicarchive.org directed by the awesome WFMU radio station.

WFMU sold the FMA to Kitsplit in 2018, who in turn sold it to Tribe of Noise in 2019.

I'm currently looking into this for streaming (twitch in particular) specifically. A musician can license their music within the Creative Commons. This means that people can do almost whatever they want, use it wherever, remix it, etc... As long as the author gets attribution. Similarly, specifically for streaming, you would need a _synchronization license_, the license required to synchronize music to image (ie, streams). It is possible to issue a global blanket sync license, meaning that basically everyone can use it, usually with the same requirement that you the streamer give attribution

Glad to see a few people have brought up Jamendo already, but I'm really surprised that no one has mentioned ccMixter [0]. This is one of the really early sites to try and address this exact need. They have an enormous back catalog of open-licensed music designed specifically for mixing and reuse, and a still quite active community of dedicated users (though the site design needs a bit of a refresh).

[0] http://ccmixter.org/

Nine Inch Nails released the album "Ghosts I - IV" under the Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA) and the banjo riff in the song "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X was sampled from a song on this album.

It's not just copyright law that causes unnecessary damage, but how private companies often overreact to it.

I took a multiday cross country road trip a few years ago and installed a dashcam before I left. I put together a timelapse video, complete with some of my favorite music that I felt was appropriate given the purpose of my trip and the landscape in view. Those friends and family who have seen it think it's pretty cool.

But good luck sharing it anywhere online because Content ID and the like are everywhere.

I hate to be that guy but this actually seems like a reasonable restriction to me. If your favourite artists "want" to charge for your sharing of the music they have the right.

Honestly I think the biggest problem with copyright these days is the infinite period for which it lasts.

It amazes me that people who are supposed to have studied business and marketing continually throw the long term health of their company/industry under the bus to satisfy the short term revenue stream.

Music makes its revenue by propagating itself into the cultural zeitgeist. Attempts to limit consumption of music runs counter to that business model if you ask me.

This situation also reminds me of another common shortsighted trend: sports teams moving their broadcasting to paid cable networks.

Sports at some point depends on the social network effects of fandom. By restricting viewership with paywalls and cable subscriptions, they’re alienating young fans from ever becoming fans. They’re shrinking the sports fan base from appealing to everyone to being yet another exclusive niche where you're either deep into it or you’re out.

If I don’t have any of my real life friends taking interest in sports, so many of the benefits of being a fan disappear.

Annoying, nonsensical restrictions like only being allowed to watch out of market games with online streaming subscriptions, only being able to buy NFL Sunday Ticket through DirecTV...this stuff is insane.

You may not be aware: no joke, DirecTV won’t sell you the Internet version of NFL Sunday Ticket unless you live in a multi-unit residence. In other words, you have to be verified to not be able to be sold a physical dish to attach to your home to be allowed the privilege of spending $300 to watch a bunch of games that already have more advertising than gameplay.

These sports teams will eventually find themselves in a situation where they have to squeeze more revenue from a shrinking, aging customer base. If you were 15 right now and had a choice between watching 18 minutes of NFL gameplay surrounded by 2 hours of ads and stoppage, or jumping on Fortnite with your friends, which would you choose? These sports networks can’t fathom that they’re competing with more and more entertainment options as time goes on.

The tl;dr of this is that you need to give your customers what they want.

You know, I can understand if you are streaming to 100+ people that musicians want a cut of that. Thats a small music hall if it was a concert.

However, Facebook kicks you out even with 3 or 4 people watching. Even when I bought all the music beforehand. I find the rules much to strict, unfair and quite frankly ridiculous that there is such strictness.

Something I was going to mention but “cut for time” was the idea of a royalty threshold.

Sure, charge influencers a royalty or collect a portion of advertising revenue for influencers with over some number of thousand followers.

But for individuals, the labels should be encouraging sharing.

Also, it seems somewhat obvious in retrospect that it’d be smart for the big labels to own a social network, with deep music features and integration with major music streaming services (E.g. “add this song this person is dancing to to your Spotify”). Now would be a great time for them to clone TikTok.

> It amazes me that people who are supposed to have studied business and marketing continually throw the long term health of their company/industry under the bus to satisfy the short term revenue stream.

It shouldn't really be surprising, given the incentives. Performance reviews, bonuses, etc. are probably based more on short-term performance than long-term health because it's easier to measure.

In addition to what I said, I will fully understand if I’m actually completely wrong, too.

What I mean is...I shouldn’t assume that these companies haven’t already made these calculations in relation to the long term picture. For example, perhaps the MLB has run the math and knows that going for broad appeal (e.g. games streamed/broadcast for free) is inefficient or results in lower revenue. Perhaps cable companies have already calculated that they will bleed customers no matter what they do; that they’re best off milking their customer base until they disappear.

Seems like a model could exist for an entrepreneur to create a subscription based licensing program for creators to use music in their streams.

> Seems like a model could exist for an entrepreneur to create a subscription based licensing program for creators to use music in their streams.

There are a few - I use Pretzel.rocks. (No affiliation.)

Music licensing is already a thing you know.

Exists, Pretzel.rocks, monstercat, Jamendo amongst others.

Can't recommend pretzel rocks enough. They have a great team Nate is awesome. They also genuinely care about creator's being fairly compensated.

For a second, I thought Zuckerberg was writing a comment on HN.

Looking at the username and the first person speech.

Nope, the reason for my username is unrelated to Mark Zuckerberg.

And people wonder why TikTok (previously Musical.ly) is so popular.

Their core business model and feed algorithm are built around syncing music to video content and paying the music publishers and composers.

> Instead of adapting to technological change

When I look at the way that Journalism has adapted its business models to technological change, I think we engineers should be a bit more wary...

As a musician I wonder what would happen if I play my own music, that I own 100% of the rights and permissions for. Or do a live concert of my own music.

Well, it's been exactly the same for the last 25 years.

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