No, we aren’t. I’m not forced to buy anything at all with DRM. Ever.
I suspect the big labels have a few lawyers, and they have considered that question in advance and have an answer ready for you. And you’re not gonna like it.
Except the hand that feeds them is generally full of works that others have created. Music videos, fan videos, LP, full albums, entire movies, movie clips, remixed materials, etc. YouTube was built upon infringement. It’s trying to be entirely legitimate, but is a house of cards built on the conceit that they could get away with this for a long time and take that money all the way to the bank…and hey…we’ll fix it later. In the meantime we’ll cut some very large checks to the music and creative industries and pacify that crowd.
Think about it from this perspective…prior to the advent of massive UGC, for 50+ years if you were a broadcaster and created a work that had other copyright materials in it and then put it out in the world, you had to have licenses and pay people for their contributions. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked pretty well. Then YouTube and devices like the iPhone came along and suddenly everyone was a broadcaster. It’s even their trademark…“broadcast yourself.”
Now everyone is a broadcaster and many take copyright works but they don’t get licenses or permission for work others have done. They then wrap themselves up in a concept of fair use that they don’t even fully understand or doesn’t apply to them (it’s a US thing). Some of these individuals have made a lot of money and built entire “networks” on YouTube and again many relied on the creative works of others. YouTube itself is treated like a broadcaster in that it has licenses with labels and collection societies so that it can stream copyright works, but they don’t create any works themselves. And YouTube cannot and does not grant you a license to use others works just because they pay the labels…they do not have that right. It’s just kinda ignored.
Add to this you can’t really get a license to use copyright protected works because there isn’t mechanism created to do so…because traditional licensing agencies don’t want to get a phone call or email from Joe Smith about getting permission and paying to use a song in his wedding video. And even if you get a license or permission, don’t forget an artist has a right to refuse the use of materials based on a moral objection.
Now I see a lot of comments everywhere saying fuck the government, fuck copyright, fuck the labels, fuck YouTube…we’ll go somewhere else. This type of militance just hurts the users side because it says…I don’t give a shit about your rights…I only care about my rights. Not a constructive place to start fixing the problem. And the problem is not simply getting rid of Copyright…which has fundamental protections that date back hundreds of years and survived many shifts in technology. No, the problem isn’t that copyright is incompatible (again a right that protects even you), it is that we’ve created an online culture of infringement first permission second…and that’s because we never took one tiny fraction of a second to help create a mechanism that allowed for copyright to work…we blazed forward a path of innovation and didn’t think anything about protecting the voice of the artist.
I’m a published writer and author and I have always ensured I owned my copyrights…but I’ve never enforced them. That said, if someone took my work, republished it for profit, failed to credit me, or used it in a way that morally disgusted me…copyright is about the only thing I’d have left to protect myself.
This is really an argument about going forward to find a solution/solutions and less about copyright and how the system is fucking us…because we helped create the system that’s “fucking us.”
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Yes, yes. You’ve made all these points already, multiple times in this thread in fact. Brevity is a skill worth learning.
Kindness and civility is also a skill worth learning. How’s that for brevity?
Ha! Fair enough.
The ice cream is still free. It’s more that you’re complaining that they don’t always pay you to eat it. I suppose, by that logic, it would be more fair if they always displayed ads and never paid you.
I suspect it would need to be a class action suit, with the weight of several thousand injured parties behind it.
Try getting a license for any song out there to use in a creative work…seriously…try it. It’s impossible.
Um, It’s pretty damned easy to get a mechanical license to record a cover that you can do anything you want with, and there are about a hundred different companies and agencies that will help you license music. There are also a million and one places to get it direct from the musicians- CD Baby, Soundcloud, Reverbnation…
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I think he was talking about licensing a recording, and he’s right that it can be notoriously difficult/expensive to license well-known recordings for use in creative projects.
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You can’t use a mechanical license if you want to use it for a “creative work” - it’s specifically permission to do something that isn’t creative, a direct cover of the song.
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I wonder if there’s any lawyers out there who would take it on spec. Also, do you think it would be possible, in the case where he contested it and they stood by it, to file criminal fraud charges against the individuals involved in the decision, rather than the company?
Exactly…
Take a video of your kids first steps, find the perfect song to put to said video, now prior to uploading, try and secure a license for said song at a reasonable rate. It’s a nearly impossible process, even if you go with a licensing company that has some artists…which aren’t typically the most popular or anything from the majors. For example, head over to cue songs and you can get a license for personal use…it’s $33 And in the terms:
For use in a single home video or slideshow created by an individual(s) that will be exclusively used for personal viewing by family/friends. You may share it on the web or on dvd. It does not allow for any commercial use and cannot be used to make money through ad revenue or any other vehicle
That’s pretty limiting for $33. So people just don’t bother.
And btw…if licensing was so easy and simple for even mechanical…why is YouTube filled with cover songs that no one has bothered to get a license for?
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If we really want to do the ice cream analogy: the content providers are like the ice cream supplier, and google is acting as the (very popular) ice cream stand.
The ice cream is given out to consumers in exchange for watching advertisements, and the ice cream stand rakes in money. They offer a share back to the ice cream producer.
That’s generally a good relationship for the supplier, because there are lots of customers. But apparently the Big Dairy companies can just come in and claim that they made a particular batch, and in that case, the ice cream stand a) believes them by default and b) gives Big Dairy the share of the ad revenue while it’s being contested, and c) even if the claim is found to be untrue (or just dropped), there’s no reversal of where the money went, let alone a penalty.
From the Big Dairy perspective, this is an obvious win, so of course it happens to anything popular.
From the indie producer perspective, it would be possible to set up an alternate “co-op” ice cream stand, but it’s also nice to be available in the big mainstream storefront. And it’s also completely fair to ask the storefront to treat them better.
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This is somewhat relevant, just to get an idea of what music licensing is like. It is from the wonderful CC license movie “Sita Sings the Blues” what she had to go through to make a DVD:
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It means, “Yo, copyright trollies! Yeah, YOU! Here is a ripe opportunity for YOU to inflict your evil upon the world.”
And still the “problem” goes away if they simply don’t pay anyone anything, ever.
Youtube has no obligation to pay out advertising revenue to you or to BigMedia or anyone else, even though they have chose to do so. They would, however, have an obligation to take down videos if someone filed a DMCA takedown notice with them. In the absence of the advertising sharing youtube has opted to engage in, there would probably be more takedown notices and fewer videos remaining on the site. Instead of doing this, they have a system whereby BigMedia can simply get a share of advertising money instead of taking down the video altogether, and if no complaints are ever made then the video poster gets the bonus of making money off of the ads. It’s hardly a terrible deal—and doesn’t make youtube’s video hosting service any less free for both uploaders and viewers—but if the aggrieved content-creators think they’re really being shafted it would be interesting to see if their indietube business model would work. I have my doubts.
I agree it’s hardly a terrible deal, although with YouTube’s own stats, over 50% of videos have less than 500 views and 30% of those have less than 100…so not a lot of ad revenue to share. The deal was a convenient method of putting to rest the idea that YouTube was making money off copyright materials they had no license to use. And we’re not even really talking about artists who simply don’t want anyone using their stuff…especially if commerce is attached. We have the recent pissing match with Goldie Blocks and Beastie Boys, for example.
Even with this system in place…takedowns are huge…the top 20 filers in 2013 had over 200,000,000 DMCA notices on google search alone…we have no idea the stats on YouTube because they won’t divulge those…but I’m sure it’s massive.
Except this is what s happening on Youtube isn’t it?
You write and produce a song, create a video, upload it to Youtube…
Then a publisher comes along and takes your profits, over and over again, the same publisher can come and issue the same claim on the same video even if its already been proven false/or just wasn’t followed through before.
All disguised as a copyright claim.
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I agree this is a problem, but part of the problem is again that infringement online was always an afterthought, and no mind was paid to making copyright work with the systems that we have…it was growth at all costs, we’ll figure it out later. That combined with the mentality of “free,” poor understanding of who controls what rights, poor databases regarding who owns what (don’t even get me started on that), and this abysmal DMCA system has made for a perfect cocktail of fail.
You cannot legislate a solution to this (good luck getting agreement with the EU, WIPO, UK, and US) and you don’t need to reform or destroy copyright to solve it. I’m actually working on this problem at the moment here in Europe…creating a solution that lets everyone use whatever they like and do whatever they like and protects everyone…and completely bypasses the DMCA…in fact it makes it redundant. We’ll likely announce it in a month or so.
Your profits? If you wanted to profit from your work you wouldn’t upload it on youtube. If you want to protect “your” profits, monetize it on your own site, where you can protect it and dictate who gets what and whether the video stays or goes.
