Schroedinger's streaming service just died
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
I feel like we need to stop lying to ourselves like this.
Copyright is getting ridiculously out of hand because lobbyists hold the power and the system is not really accountable anymore.
That's where the real power is.
Typically when one uses the term "deep state" you mean someone working in the government that has their own agenda and/or are acting on a specific conspiracy / cabal agenda counter to the direction of, say, the administration providing the guidance and direction. This is why the person asked about employees vs. lobbyists.
Deep State refers to government employees who hold a lot of power e.g. heads of alphabet agencies, their close underlings, etc and wield it in such a way that there's little recourse for the average American.
Both these moneyed interests AND the Deep State exert an influence that citizens should seek to regulate.
The ones with the money and corporate power are pulling the strings of those who they install
Suppose you are the EPA and you'd like to implement some environmental rule that might or might not be strictly within your legal powers.
You work out a deal with a friendly organization and they sue you for improper stewardship of the environment (with details, obviously, according to the rule you want to implement). Then, instead of fighting their lawsuit, you settle it, agreeing to their demands -- which consist of the rule you wanted to implement. That rule is now one you are obligated to enforce pursuant to a legal agreement, instead of something you implemented on your own authority. This structure tends to prevent normal accountability mechanisms from working.
(As a side note, I'm always surprised, when I see descriptions of this tactic, that it's permissible for an agency to agree to take actions that are notionally not within the power of the agency. I would be interested to know more about what exactly is going on there.)
Score one for losing transparency into the cycle of bureaucrats funding former bureaucrats of similar political alignment by abusing the courts.
It's really sad when you realize that Trump's administration (when the initial rule establishing the website) was more transparent than Bidens. Before, the settlements were posted immediately; now, if you even know about them at all, you need to wait months after filing a FOIA to find out about it.
Some of the more prolific groups have been getting 1 to 3 million dollars a year from the settlements alone.
In simple terms: were they elected and do you pay for their salary?
In general, however, those agencies are slow moving (requires comment period, must decide given bounds, funding limited, etc) and pretty narrowly handcuffed / acting within the statute. Recently even those narrow powers have been rejected by the courts (see admin law judges, CFPB single director, etc).
And how much US Congressional experience do you have?
Yes, and the problem is not limited to copyright
Legislators are directly elected, president is elected somewhat indirectly but largely by popular vote, administrative rule making has notice and comment process, Article 3 judges are appointed by President and confirmed by legislature... everything derived from the will of the people. It sounds like you are upset that more people aren't as upset at the same things you are. That's not a problem with the government, that's a problem with the populace.
Organize a petition to have your congressional rep submit a bill for what you want. If they refuse, find someone to run who will do it. Actually do something, don't just post online about how the government isn't working... make it work for you!
https://theconversation.com/the-right-to-vote-is-not-in-the-...
> At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Madison expressed the prevailing view that “the freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of republican liberty,” meaning only people who owned land debt-free, without mortgages, would be able to vote. The Constitution left voting rules to individual states, which had long-standing laws limiting the vote to those freeholders.
> In the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, Madison trumpeted a benefit of the new system: the “total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity.” Even as the nation shifted toward broader inclusion in politics, Madison maintained his view that rights were fragile and ordinary people untrustworthy. In his 70s, he opposed the expansion of the franchise to nonlanded citizens when it was considered at Virginia’s Constitutional Convention in 1829, emphasizing that “the great danger is that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the Minority.”
There's a reason the Constitution, as originally written, doesn't actually guarantee anyone the right to vote. Even today, it wouldn't be unconstitutional to, say, ban redheads or people born on Tuesday from voting.
I think the 14th amendment would block any such ban, since 15/19/24/26 make it clear that this is a right people have by default.
And that's ignoring how hair color ties into race.
Oh but if you make laws that just happen to make it harder for black people and Latinos to vote, its just a bad coincidence yea? Awe so sad, wish we could do something about it!
No, they say the opposite. They set up specific conditions you can't use to disqualify for voting. It's a short list.
> And that's ignoring how hair color ties into race.
SCOTUS is pretty good at that. See the just announced Marietta case; Congress said you can't discriminate against end-stage renal failure patients. An insurer decided they'd get around it by not covering outpatient dialysis - of which 99.5% of patients are end-stage renal failure - and SCOTUS permitted it.
Kagan's dissent correctly pointed out it's like banning yarmulkes and claiming you're not discriminating against Jews.
Those amendments don't directly give maximum protection, but they establish it as a right, which seems to indirectly give pretty good protection.
The 15th is kind of iffy, but slavery interacts weirdly with citizenship to begin with. And before the 15th there was nothing calling voting a right.
As far as the 19th goes, the 14th was in big part scoped to male voters at the time.
Overall I think it would be pretty hard to argue the constitutionality of any restriction that isn't applied "evenly".
It's too easy to get voters to vote for things that are deceptively drafted, and then you're stuck with it forever.
For what it's worth, it's not so much lobbyists as the ability to generate dollars period (many lobbyists aren't actually very good at this), and there's still power there in numbers as seen in recent elections so don't sell yourself short if you have a compelling case to make. Just sayin'! :)
Democratically accountable legislature is still democratically accountable legislature when the citizens pay attention or participate or not. People are supposed to work their ass off in democracy when they fight for political power. Instead they treat it as a opinion contest that should have options they like.
"This is the organization. And this is the idea."
All I see on the sociopolitical HN threads is an avalanche of brilliant ideas. But ~nobody is organized, is trying to organize, or even is theorizing about it. It just feels so empty and futile, makes me weep deep inside.
Same thing goes for lobbyists. They would have zero power if politicians gave them zero power. If the population would be smart and informed, this wouldn't happen. So, what's happening now is totally a result of democracy, which of course is a totally ridiculous idea^1, but it's still democratic.
[1]: Let people who have absolutely no idea how to run things decide who should run things. That's like if the passengers of an airplane, having zero experience with aviation, deciding on who the captain should be.
I guess they would vote for an airliner captain? E.g. most people go to doctors for medical adcive rather than new age mumbo jumbo. I don't see the problem in this particular case.
‘10 MIDI’ by Four Tet, (c) 2017 BMG
(Edited slightly)
Is "ownership" just a byproduct of physical goods? If I say I own a record, the proof is basically in the pudding. But how do I prove I own an MP3 file? I'd probably need to do something like show a receipt for it. But then again, what if I have shown that receipt to 100 people I've sold "my" copy of the MP3 file to? With physical reality, exact duplication is difficult, and is already covered under those existing laws.
It seems like computing was big on licensing, even when tech was nascent and there wasn't clearly reams of money to be made in it, there must be a reason for it.
Having said that, I was mostly talking about the difference between licensing and buying from a consumer's perspective. There are still a ton of restrictions which come with "owning" something, but those are just ignored by the author because those were laws passed by a legislature and not a license term by a private company.
Royalty rates are a completely different issue to the text shown when you are purchasing - but wouldn't you expect different royalty rates for different types of product/media as an artist?
As in, if I sell a vinyl record of your new single for $10 with your photo on the front and plaster it all over the record shops (with high distribution and manufacture costs) that the fee might be different than what I pay you for a $0.99 MP3 download (lower price but zero incremental cost), and that the $0.99 download fee might be different to the fee that the artist would charge for a live broadcast (highly dependent on licence context)?
This obviously doesn't help the streaming services, but, this - or something similar would help solve the quantum entanglement of digital music.
NFT's don't solve this, unless we are talking about making licenses transferrable, but the author seems pretty clear that any form of license isn't acceptable in their eyes.
Blockchain might be amazeballs but it doesn't seem to scale THAT well.
Ownership of digital assets is determined by physical possesion and legal ownership of the storage medium in which those assets are.
The only exceptions to this rule are in copyright law (regulating what you can do with a copy you own) and personal data laws such as GDPR.
Purely digital just drops that cost from a few cents to nothing. DRM free music stores have existed for over a decade and already de-facto operate in this manner.
There isn't a practical reason to require DRM in order to have ownership over a digital copy of a song.
There are of course different ways to interpret what a sale of a digital good is (as you note), but legally speaking with regard to the status quo, it seems like something large might be changing. Either end users might find they have a lot more rights (the ones they've traditionally had for purchased items), or artists will get a lot more money because they've been getting screwed for decades for licensed works, or possibly we'll see new legislation codifying the current status quo to protect the large media companies (because for some reason legislators often seem to think past ability to make money is a reason in itself to protect the method in which it was done, regardless of legality).
The letters N, F, and T echo about in the background.
Why? You already have a copy on your local machine ("local machine" being anywhere you'd want to play that file). What's more important is the hash; if you really care about remote storage, IPFS kills both those birds with one stone.
> Still, you'll now pay >50$ for each file, 98% of which are transaction fees
There are other NFT-capable blockchains besides Ethereum, you know :)
A Shazam-esque audio fingerprinting approach could work here, too (though obviously IPFS won't give you that for free like it would a file hash). Might be troublesome for remixes, though.
That's a sound legal principle, but unfortunately it doesn't apply in all situations and in all jurisdictions:
"If the defendant is considered to have a criminal lifestyle, the court ... must decide whether he has benefited from his ‘general criminal conduct’ and, if so, by how much. ... The burden is on the defendant to rebut any assumption made."
https://www.rahmanravelli.co.uk/expertise/confiscation/confi...
EDIT: I forgot it was settled out of court so it's not "case law" but definitely tells record labels that they will probably lose in the future. They must owe billions...
Wow... Haven't heard that name in a long time. Saw him at the MFA in Boston so long ago i can barely remember. Great artist, I'm glad he at least showed it could be a reasonable line of argument.
Check out some recent work. He still produces some insanely hi quality tracks, not all under the "four tet" moniker. Some of the ungoogle-able "unicode hell" releases are very good, and his "KH" tracks are dancefloor killers.
In other words to fool you, the voter. But if you've been fooled, how do you know these things? Are you acting on your knowledge and voting against those corrupt politicians and against those who agree with the propaganda? How does nobody else know this?
So whatever the term is, it does crack the door open a little bit (hopefully).
The irony of this is that bandcamp seems to be a far more direct-to-the-artist model than any streaming service (which is why I use it), because it (it's hard to avoid puns here) records which albums I've purchased so that I can listen to them via the app / website or download lossless copies of said albums for my own curated library and to be able to listen to offline. This, however, gives my account a certain value as to the content accessible through it, and therefore my account has some resale value* - but this resale pays nothing to the artist or label or bandcamp; it's much more like a physical item (other than that if bandcamp goes under then it's lost, or if bandcamp don't like their accounts being re-sold it could get terminated due to breach of terms of service or something like that).
* my musical taste means that this resale value is very low and it would be difficult to find a purchaser, but that's beside the point.
So yeah, you see labels calling the user purchase one thing, in order to make it line up with the intent of the consumer relationship, then on the royalties they call it a different thing to make it line-up with that intent. I don't feel the publishers are violating the intent of these relationships at all, it's just that copyright law being extremely out of date requires stupid language games. The correct solution is to re-examine copyright law to either establish that the intent is you pay the rightsholder to get access for you as a distinct individual, or that the intent is that you are purchasing resalable access, and be done with this nonsense.
I absolutely don't blame artists for trying though, the labels screw them so it seems fair that they should try to screw the labels.
Copyright is just abused to milk as much money as possible and restrict usage.
Four Tet wins royalty battle over streaming music https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61871547
So at least for a large part of my life, that crazy industry didn't get a dime from me. Reading about their practices now makes me feel even less sorry.
Someone been watching Manhunt
It's both alive and dead at the same time. Like the cat.
This post makes everything seem needlessly complicated - you are buying a licence, there is no contradiction here.
How else would digital media / sale of MP3's work without licences? Is the author suggesting that everyone should legally be able to freely transfer/distribute their MP3's to anyone with no legal limit?
I don't see any alternative to licences mentioned anywhere in the post - just lots of handwaving about some sort of wave function collapse (where wave function collapse just means a contract that has different terms for a digital purchase instead of a physical purchase).
But IMO because there isn't that much substance there, this idea that a 'sale' might have different definitions is referred to as a 'quantum state' rather than sharing the actual definition of 'sale' used whatever contract they are referencing.
What would be wrong with the same first sale doctrine that applies to physical instances of digital media (such as CDs) ?
CD: You buy it, you are free to resell it to someone else; you are not free to make copies.
Digital data only: You buy it, you can resell it someone else (0); you are not free give additional copies to anyone else (1)
(0) not likely to happen (1) you can of course make your own copies, eg. for backup or across devices
Would enforcing such a legal structure be possible? Yes and no. Everyone knows that once you could rip CDs, the legal structure for that format was already severely challenged by people's actual behavior, so there's nothing particularly new there.
Sounds like you are buying a transferable licence?
(If this isn't a licence, what would you call it? As presumably once you have 'sold' it, it can still reside on your laptop but you aren't allowed to play it).
It's not a license because it cannot be revoked by whoever sold it to you.
So once I sell it, if it's still on my hard-drive am I allowed to listen to it in your world?
And if I have it but am not allowed to listen to it, what is that lack of playing-permission called if not 'not owning a license'?
> It's not a license because it cannot be revoked by whoever sold it to you.
Licences can be irrevocable, so this isn't a necessary property of a licence.
I don't recall the precise case law that applies to CDs. There's certainly a version of things (probably the one desired by record companies) in which one or both of these is true (a) you can't rip it (b) you can't listen to the rips after you've sold it.
Remember, methods of enforcing such a legal regime are distinct from the regime itself.
> Licences can be irrevocable, so this isn't a necessary property of a licence.
With networked digital technology, it is not always a matter of the legal terms of the license. If the playback mechanism requires contacting a remote server, whether you have a license of not does not matter if said server is no longer in existence.
And sure, licenses can be irrevocable, but those connected with digital media, in general, have not been.
Where x describes a licence, just with different licensing terms.
The same is possible with physical media. Analog media can be duplicated with varying levels of loss, digital media can be duplicated with no loss, and then the original item resold. Why must digital files be treated significantly differently, and suddenly DRM is required to even allow legitimate resale?
If copyright owners had their way, they’d automatically get a blanket license to everyone’s content, while giving the individual person zero rights. The historical behavior of the industry (all the way back to Thomas Edison) indicates that this would be the case.
That's not what the article states. The author is saying that the same transaction - IE: my 'buying' a track on iTunes, for example - is considered a license transfer, between me and the record company, and a sale, between the record company and the artist.
This superposition of license and sale for the same transaction is collapsed into a license - so: no transfer rights, no right to make copies, etc. - when the record company it talking to me.
On the other hand - when the record company is talking to the artist - the superposition collapses to a sale, so the artist gets 13% of the value instead of the 50% they would get if it was a license sale.
If I'm a Domino's franchisee, and I pay Domino's a different commission for an order placed online vs a customer walking into the store, the pizza isn't in a state of quantum superposition - that's just making a simple concept overly complex by incorrectly throwing quantum words at it. The concept is just that different things have different prices in the master agreement.
If I'm a movie theatre that happens to sell a DVD of the same movie, when a customer comes in they also aren't in a shrodingers-cat quantum dilemma superposition state, it's just the simple idea that different things have different prices and different compensation structures for artists.
This is like saying "Was a movie ticket sold or was it admission?" - you can purchase admission, so it's a nonsense question.
The contracts will then define what a particular transaction means in a particular context, and what the royalty rate is. Without seeing the exact contracts and definitions of 'sale' and 'license', which are suspiciously absent in the article, then the whole premise of the article is IMO missing substance.
I'm not confused by the concept of purchasing ("buying") a license. I get that! But if the label is using one concept to determine the royalty rate, but switching to a difference concept to determine the customer's rights, then there's still a problem. Again, I don't know the details of the artists' contracts. But I do know this is probably relevant for some subset of artists whose contracts don't deal directly with digital distribution. In those cases, when terms like "license" and "sale" are used to denote different things, there's a problem if the labels use "sale" on one hand, and "license" on the other hand. If they sell me a license, the artist should be paid the "license" rate.
All they are describing is that they have agreed to different royalty rates for different types of sale.
I have zero doubt that the contracts will have very clear definitions of what counts as a 'sale' and what counts as 'licensing', but this article just pretends that it is highly ambiguous in order to make a strange analogy to quantum mechanics.
They get the rights management from licensing on the user side (no "giving away old albums to a friend" possible), while giving artists the lower cut as if it was a physical album sale with high distribution costs. It has nothing to do with digital vs physical sales, you could play the same trick with a CD sale.
How about a simple purchase of a copy, with its use being limited only by current copyright law? A.k.a, no copying, redistributing, derivative work-making, etc. (Absent fair use cases)