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Comment by indrora | Hacker News Reader

The issue here isn't that it's Google, it's that Google is doing what they're told to do.

Movie and music licensing has been absolutely destroyed recently and the hoops that you have to agree to are becoming untenable. Recently, I mentioned to a band it was sad they pulled their music off Spotify. Puzzled, they were not even aware that the licensing was pulled, and they had to go yell at their record label (who was unaware they were even on Spotify because they made less than a dollar in royalties per year on it) who has sat on it for over a year and refused to release the rights back to the artist so they can have it available on Spotify.

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> Recently, I mentioned to a band it was sad they pulled their music off Spotify. Puzzled, they were not even aware that the licensing was pulled, and they had to go yell at their record label (who was unaware they were even on Spotify because they made less than a dollar in royalties per year on it) who has sat on it for over a year and refused to release the rights back to the artist so they can have it available on Spotify.

That band didn't own their music and the "label" likely didn't either. They got fronted money that was never repaid (as per contract) and their shit traded hands multiple times. There was wild consolidation in this world over the last 10 - 25 years. What used to be money printing turned to "GOT EM!!" dollar signs in bold on contracts, which turned to small joints falling over (dollars and commas in bold didn't map on the backend) and now some banger owns their shit.

Most likely the banger who owned their shit lost it in the shuffle of the more banger shit they owned, or the overhead of the split with the 5% the small label who was able to retain that cut didn't even render on the P&L and they just shoved it in the virtual vault because who gives a fuck?

With all due respect, I feel like Google is large enough to refuse to be told what to do. If they really cared...

Refusing to be told what to do costs money. Say, Apple put its financial weight at labels with iTunes and iPod, and now we have 99¢ tracks as a norm.

But to spend money on something, a company has to plan to get more in return. Apple did. What would be the plan for Google? What money-making machine of theirs would it enable?

At one time Google had a first class music service, and I think they still rent and sell movies.

As for money making, I think a guarantee of 'yours forever, no takebacks' would put them way out front of their competition. But perhaps most people don't care enough for that to be true.

> yours forever, no takebacks

MP3s available form Amazon, iTunes, Bandcamp at the very least all have this commendable property.

And the sale is once and forever, while an enticing revenue source is a recurring one %)

Yeah, the only way things will change is if Google becomes a production studio. This won't be a better for situation for listeners nor for artists.

It's telling that Apple isn't able to persuade American content corporations into DRM free videos either. They're now biggest supporters and implementors of locked down DRM across their device portfolio.

The music industry was so terrified at what internet piracy was doing that they agreed to Apples terms. The film and television industry saw what Apple had done to music, and were terrified of what it would do to them. They held onto the only playable card they had.

No they are not. The courts have been swift and merciless on this shit for music, video and similar things. Google may seem big but they do depends on the law still.

In the current system where Google plays lame duck, sure.

But all G has to do is say 'yeah if you want us to feature your content, you must agree to X'

With 90% of the search market, half of phones, and who knows what percentage of the smartTV market, they could institute a death sentence to those they wanted to.

IF they wanted to.

That sounds like a pretty big abuse of their power and potentially raises anti-trust concerns. They could easily wield that power for nefarious reasons and I don't think any of us would want that. We can change laws. Companies should abide by them, however insufficient they may be at a given point in time.

> That sounds like a pretty big abuse of their power and potentially raises anti-trust concerns. They could easily wield that power for nefarious reasons and I don't think any of us would want that.

As if google doesn't already abuse its power and weild it for nefarious reasons, or have massive anti-trust concerns? But god forbid they use their power to prevent others abusing theirs by forcing people to pay again and again for media they already own.

"How dare Google use their market dominance to do X"

but also

"Why doesn't Google use their market dominance to do X"

Even the currently sleeping market watchdogs would wake up for that free promotion.

So just to be clear, you're suggesting that Google use threats of blocking content providers from their other products, to strong-arm them into better licensing terms?

There's a reason they don't do that, in any business. How do you think e.g. anti-trust regulators would feel about that?

Perhaps I wasn't clear, apologies. Not other products. Google is a video seller and distributor. They have a right to decide what terms they like or don't, just as Walmart does.

As a seller of widget X, there's no way I'd accept a product with a license that says they could just take it back anytime for any reason. No sane seller should agree to that.

Their market share of "search, mobile phones, smart TVs" is what you originally claimed would give them leverage. But none of those have any bearing on movie rentals / sales on YouTube. They're entirely different products.

Now, the terms for the movie rentals / sales would definitely be negotiated between Google and the content owner. And Google could of course make your no-DRM policy a line in the sand in those negotiations. But why would the content providers agree to that? There's plenty of other competitive platforms they can (and do!) sell exactly the same content on, being specifically on YouTube's movie rental system won't make or break them.

And then we get back to your original proposal, which was clearly that they'd be using all their unrelated properties as (highly unethical) leverage in the negotiations.

If that's not what you're proposing, maybe you could be really concrete about what you think Google would be saying in those contract negotiations? "We will be selling your movies without DRM; if you don't agree then X". What exactly do you think X would be?

Well, leveraging the other properties but only so far as around those services. So if I search my TV for movies to rent, it would only show me those. Same with the Movies and TV app on my phone.

It would be unethical to completely remove them from search. But would it be unethical to prefer partners and give them higher precedent in results?

As for what X is, I don't know precisely. They could easily update Play terms that no app my sell an item to a user that may be removed later. That would mean X would mean you weren't in Play Movies and TV, but also weren't allowed to sell movies via a Play Store App.

That would kill the small labels, but not the big labels because they have a way to connect with their customers that google does not control, namely radio.

That said, I agree with the principle of what you're saying. Google put a LOT of things in place on youtube specifically so the large publishers wouldn't go after them, and that has extended to everything else.

Google absolutely has a large responsibility in this, but it's also true they're not the only party with responsibility for it.

The whole music industry's yearly revenue is less than two months of Google's revenue, so I'm sure there is a way.

I think you massively misunderstand the impact of money on law.

I wasn't talking about changing the (interpretation of the) law, but from your reply I would argue that you're the one who has a massive misunderstanding regarding the law, fwiw.

So how much money does Google make from their music streaming service? They can exit the business citing the shitty, unfair practices of music/movie licensing.

But they won’t. They aren’t in the business to ethically make money, just legally. Many times, what is legally right is not ethically right.

They can also use their vast resources to try to change laws, even if it is a Herculean task. They won’t try that either. Because the only thing that matters is profit, everything else be damned

I thought this too for the longest time. Then I heard an anecdote from one of my colleagues that does licensing: The music licensing industry heads (RIAA/MPAA/ASCAP/etc) are tiny fish monetarily, but they own everything and control it. If the RIAA doesn't like you, they can make you go away. The issue is that if anyone wants to fight them on Antitrust grounds, this turns the big light of Antitrust litigation around on those big fish that depend on Very Carefully not being in the spotlight.

Putting it differently: if Google tried to do anything, their counter would be calling the licensing bodies anticompetitive, which puts Google in the crosshairs next.

> The issue here isn't that it's Google, it's that Google is doing what they're told to do.

Nice try. One of the largest tech companies of the world, which in most countries other than USA holds basically a monopoly on mobile computing, is not being pushed around by the creative industries. Remember when Youtube became a thing and the media companies wanted it gone? Google fought with them and created a technology stack that almost any media company today uses, because it was in their interest to do so.

No, it's Google all the way down alright. They can force creative industries to accept real ownership of the media by the users, but this time it's just not in their interest to do so.

This is definitely not the case. If anything, Google is reportedly afraid of making any business changes[1] that may potentially come up as being anti-competitive, even at the cost of becoming obsolete in their existing markets.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/technology/ai-chatgpt-goo...

Based on the description it seems unlikely this is related to studio licensing. For one thing it was a purchased movie, so changes in streaming licensing should not apply. For another thing, the details of app updates and file caching are usually left up to the platform, for obvious reasons: the platforms know way more about that stuff than the studios.

That's the funny part about corporations. Because of the large internal hierarchy, even if majority of Google employees thinks that these antics about control over user are a bad idea, everybody perceives there is an expectation not to bring it up internally.

They can bring it up internally all right; last I heard, Memegen is still a thing at Google.

But it's not the majority, especially not the majority of the engineers, who makes decisions like that.

(And if you'e so annoyed you'd rather leave than shut up, welcome to today's IT job market.)

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