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Comment by bphogan | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the problem, I guess. You can't profit from other people's copyrighted material without their permission. That's just how copyright works. And they can grant or deny that parmission.

Get a license or use something else. And don't complain that they're being "unfair" by taking your stuff down and not telling you what infringed. If you didn't upload/sample/perform other people's stuff, you wouldn't need to worry about what songs were infringing.

Get your samples cleared. After having to get written permission from Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and other services to use screenshots of their web pages in my books, this doesn't surprise me in the least. Fair use is a defense, not a right.

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Building upon the cultural contributions of our past is how all of human civilization was built. Until the late twentieth century. Disney (for instance) strips our culture like a jackal, yet buys senators (such as Ernest Frederick "Fritz" Hollings) to subvert the law so they can keep it a one-way flow. To allow a few to subvert all of human existence for their personal gain is obscene.

Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Culture is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture. -- Alex Kozinski

I understand that's how culture works. But I'm talking about the fact that because of Disney, this is now how it works, and it should not be surprising that this is happening.

There's a big difference between "how it should be" and "how it actually is."

I agree completely, there is a big difference between how it should be and how it actually is. But its obvious that Disney's vision of reality isn't how it works. Culture works by sharing, still. How it will work going forward is up in the air yet; we can still control the outcome by not giving in.

Nobody on SoundCloud is profiting from other people's copyright works as well, at least not through that service. To date there's no royalty or revenue sharing model for artists there. Should every DJ who's ever performed be subject to takedown requests because they play other people's music publicly?

Actually, the DJs kinda do need a license. The venues they perform at often have a BMI or ASCAP license so they don't have to.

But I was DJing at a place that didn't have one. Employer got sued and had to pay up.

1976 copyright act says "no public performance." This is actually what they cited in the Aereo case too.

You should watch the documentary Everything is a Remix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coGpmA4saEk

So many downvotes, and yet, I never said I was in favor of the practice. It's just the way the laws work. You can work to get them changed or you can ignore them, but if you ignore them, don't cry on the Internet that you got your stuff taken down.

Plenty of civil disobedience is of the form of ignore bad laws and complain loudly when they are enforced.

This is without passing comment on whether copyright infringement is terrorism or freedom fighting.

> You can't profit from other people's copyrighted material without their permission. That's just how copyright works.

Sure you can. "Fair use" is the most common example of that, but you don't need to make a fair use defense in order to find examples of people profiting off of others' copyrighted works legitimately.

In fact, it should be noted that a lot of famous songs you probably know are themselves based on copyrighted works. Coolio's "Gansta's Paradise"[0] and Kanye West's "Stronger"[1] are very famous examples. Not all samples are licensed - it's very common to use unlicensed samples, even in music released by major studios.

I don't know which artists are with which labels off the top of my head, but I'd bet anything Universal is profiting off of unlicensed samples for some of their artists. Many (most?) Soundcloud users, on the other hand, aren't making a single cent off of the music they post.

[0] samples large parts of "Pastime Paradise" by Stevie Wonder

[1] samples Daft Punk, but this was actually itself sampled Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby"

I've been making music with my computer since 1999, and when I was young and dumb I made some remixes using some James Brown samples. I used a sample from "The Payback" which you'll hear in TONS of songs.

Didn't get it cleared.

Got a C&D and my website got taken down.

I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying that if you don't clear your samples, and you're a little guy, this will happen. Don't be surprised when it does.

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