Techdirt. Stories filed under "performance"

Former Copyright Boss: New Technology Should Be Presumed Illegal Until Congress Says Otherwise

Mike Masnick — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 10:12:03 PDT

One of the reasons why we live in such an innovative society is that we've (for the most part) enabled a permissionless innovation society -- one in which innovators no longer have to go through gatekeepers in order to bring innovation to market. This is a hugely valuable thing, and it's why we get concerned about laws that further extend permission culture. However, according to the former Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, under copyright law, any new technology should have to apply to Congress for approval and a review to make sure they don't upset the apple cart of copyright, before they're allowed to exist. I'm not joking. Mr. Oman, who was the Register of Copyright from 1985 to 1993 and was heavily involved in a variety of copyright issues, has filed an amicus brief in the Aereo case (pdf).

As you hopefully recall, Aereo is the online TV service, backed by Barry Diller, that sets you up with your very own physical TV antenna on a rooftop in Brooklyn, connected to a device that will then stream to you online what that antenna picks up. This ridiculously convoluted setup is an attempt to route around the ridiculous setup of today's copyright law -- something that Oman was intimately involved in creating with the 1976 Copyright Act. The TV networks sued Aereo, but were unable to get an injunction blocking the service. Oman's amicus brief seeks to have that ruling overturned, and argues that an injunction is proper.

But he goes much further than that in his argument, even to the point of claiming that with the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress specifically intended new technologies to first apply to Congress for permission, before releasing new products on the market that might upset existing business models:

Whenever possible, when the law is ambiguous or silent on the issue at bar, the courts should let those who want to market new technologies carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established. That is especially so if that technology poses grave dangers to the exclusive rights that Congress has given copyright owners. Commercial exploiters of new technologies should be required to convince Congress to sanction a new delivery system and/or exempt it from copyright liability. That is what Congress intended.

This is, to put it mildly, crazy talk. He is arguing that anything even remotely disruptive and innovative, must first go through the ridiculous process of convincing Congress that it should be allowed, rather than relying on what the law says and letting the courts sort out any issues. In other words, in cases of disruptive innovation, assume that new technologies are illegal until proven otherwise. That's a recipe for killing innovation.

Under those rules, it's unlikely that we would have radio, cable TV, VCRs, DVRs, mp3 players, YouTube and much, much more. That's not how innovation or the law works. You don't assume everything innovative is illegal just because it upsets some obsolete business models. But that appears to be how Oman thinks the world should act. Stunningly, he even seems to admit that he'd be fine with none of the above being able to come to market without Congressional approval, because he approvingly cites the dissent in the Betamax case (which made clear that the VCR was legal), which argues that the VCR should only be deemed legal with an act of Congress to modify the Copyright Act. You would think that the success of the VCR in revitalizing the movie industry would show just how ridiculous that is... but in Oman's copyright-centric world, the rules are "first, do not allow any innovation that upsets my friends."

Elsewhere, he argues -- quite correctly -- that Aereo's design was clearly done with the help of lawyers to stay on the legal side of the line, but he gets the exact wrong lesson out of that:

The Aereo system was not designed for the purpose of speed, convenience and efficiency. With its thousands of dime-sized antennae and its electronic loop-the-loops, it appears to have been designed by a copyright lawyer peering over the shoulder of an engineer to exploit what appeared to Aereo to be a loophole in the law and shoehorn the Aereo business model into the Cablevision decision.

In other words, he's admitting that the system was designed carefully to remain on the right side of the law... but he's somehow upset that this is possible. In his incredible worldview, you should not be able to design around the contours and exceptions to copyright law -- because anything that upsets Hollywood is, by default, illegal.

Perhaps we've learned who put the clause in the '76 Act that explicitly says that the law should be used to stop disruptive innovation if it gets in the way of the status quo.

Either way, he goes on at length, claiming that his efforts in helping to put together the '76 Act and his other work on copyright were continually focused on benefiting the copyright holder. He never mentions that this is not the purpose of copyright law. It is the means. But the intent is to benefit the public. Oman does not ever seem to take that into consideration.

Indisputably, Congress drafted the Copyright Act to prevent the creative efforts of authors from being usurped by new technologies. That core principle is at the heart of the Copyright Act. Congressional intent would be undercut by any decision that would sanction the use of technologies which could be used indirectly to undermine its goals. Congress enacted a forward-looking statute that would protect those who create precisely so they have incentives to create.

Actually, that's quite disputable. The Copyright Act can only be designed to benefit the public. The means of doing so is by creating the ability of copyright holders to exclude, but that is hardly the only incentive to create. Allowing new technologies that disrupt old business models does not necessarily remove the incentive to create. Instead, as we've shown over and over again, the incentive to create appears to have increased greatly, even as respect for copyright has weakened tremendously over the past decade. So I fail to see how Congress' "intent" could possibly be undermined by new disruptive technologies coming along -- without permission -- and creating new and expansive markets that both help the public and provide new opportunities for content creators.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

DailyDirt: Analyzing The Olympics

Michael Ho — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:00:00 PDT

Despite the ridiculous restrictions on watching the Olympics, there are still plenty of statistics about various events for data nerds to collect and crunch that might provide some useful insights. By studying athletic performance over time, we can tell when technologies like fancy swimsuits are giving too much of an advantage or when a change in training and technique have made vast improvements. Here are just a few projects that are diving deep into Olympic data.

Various economic figures can be used to try to predict how many medals each country will earn in 2012. The USA is expected to get somewhere between 99 and 113 medals, and China is predicted to come in second place with 67-98 medals. [url]
The London Eye will be lit up like a mood ring during the Olympics, based on Tweets and a bit of sentimental analysis to gauge positive and negative commentary of the Games. The analysis is sponsored by an energy company, so it'll be watching for words like "Olympics", "London 2012" and the hashtag #energy2012. [url]
Researchers from the Center for Sports Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK will be studying the 2012 games to look for significant changes in athletic performance. They've developed a "performance improvement index" to quantify things like: how sprinters are running faster than ever before or that javelin throwers are in a performance plateau. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Copyright Maximalists Just Won't Quit: Pushing New Monopoly Rights For Performers Through Sneaky Treaty Agreement

Mike Masnick — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:24:00 PDT

One thing that is important to understand about IP maximalists and their strategy for continually expanding monopoly powers against the public's fundamental rights is just what a comprehensive, multi-pronged strategy it is. It's not like they just try to pass a law like SOPA and are done. They're constantly working a comprehensive global strategy. Part of that means trying to get similar laws passed around the globe. But, at the same time, they're often working on a whole slew of international agreements as well. And while we're now all aware of the big treaties -- like ACTA and TPP -- there are all sorts of other things going on all the time.

For example, it appears that some folks have been pushing -- somewhat below the radar -- another treaty agreement to create a new form of intellectual monopoly: performers' rights (pdf and embedded below). There's a meeting planned for June in China to try to push this through.

As you hopefully know, in the US copyright is affixed to new and creative works as soon as they're put into a fixed form. But the copyright goes to whoever does that "fixing" or, on large productions, generally whoever is considered the "producer." The specific actors in, say, a TV show, don't get any specific rights in their performance. This makes sense. They're paid to do a job, which they do. However, some countries grant performers a copyright in their performances, and this new treaty is an attempt to push such rights for "audiovisual performers". As far as I can tell, this gives the performers in a work special new rights to stop how others use it. So, imagine a situation where someone wants to create a mashup video -- and they even get permission from the copyright holder to use it. Under this treaty, they'd then also need to get permission from everyone who appears in the video too, or they'll be violating that person's "audiovisual performance rights".

There are a variety of serious problems within the specifics, but just in general, why is this needed? It seems to serve no legitimate economic interest. All it does is create yet another category of monopoly rights that will certainly be abused to limit people's abilities to express themselves. It also almost guarantees that more new audiovisual works will be locked up and lost to culture. Already we have a serious problem with orphan works where the copyright holder can't be found. Imagine what happens when you need to find not just the copyright holder, but every single performer in the work and then secure a license from each of them. Yeah, basically every video will quickly become too expensive to ever use for anything, and thus it will be locked up.

Beyond that, there are some significant concerns in the details. Article 5 establishes "moral rights" in association with the economic rights. In the US, we've more or less (quite thankfully) ignored the requirement of the Berne Convention rules that say we need to recognize moral rights (to get around this, the US gives "moral rights" to a very, very tiny subset of artists). Moral rights, of course, are an idea built off of copyright, but rather than being about the economic incentives, they're about letting people stop the use of something because they don't like how it's used. We see people try to misuse copyright law all the time today because they don't like how a work is being used. The proper response is to let people know that's not allowed -- not to create new moral rights instead.

The agreement specifically states (in a footnote) that it shall apply to digital content online, including the requirement that performers have "the exclusive right of authorizing the direct or indirect reproduction of their performances." In other words, forget making videos that include performances with anyone who hasn't "licensed" you their performance right. How can the folks behind this not realize what kind of ridiculous problems this will cause? Take a video at a party of some people dancing -- and unless you've "licensed" the work from every dancer, you may be in trouble.

And, like pretty much every IP-related treaty these days, this one includes a stupid, technologically-illogical clause demanding anti-circumvention laws -- with no additional requirement that the only circumventions that apply are those that actually violate the other rights in the agreement. Instead, it's the same overly broad anti-circumvention clause that takes away your fundamental rights.

The whole thing is quite ridiculous, and just shows the nature of maximalist thinking. All they look to do is to create more and more monopolies that limit free speech and communication. It's really all about making the lawyers happier by creating more and more regulations for the kinds of things people do every day. Hopefully countries are smart enough to reject such a totally ridiculous concept, but from what we've heard, US officials are all for this garbage.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Massive Hike In Fees For Venues Playing Music In The UK

Mike Masnick — Tue, 4 Oct 2011 02:59:33 PDT

We've seen this time and time again. The various music collection societies around the globe have been trying to squeeze out more and more cash -- either by extending what counts as a "public performance" or by massively jacking up the rates on existing licensees. We saw this recently in Australia, where rates went up by ridiculous amounts. To a lesser extent, we've seen something similar in Canada with its 1,300% fee increase. And, now, something similar is coming to the UK, where PPL massively increased a bunch of its fees:

Bills for a typical �wedding bash will soar from £30 to £380. Pubs which can now pay as little as £8 a night will have to fork out around £10,000 a year up front for a public �performance licence.

The fee for nightclubs will zoom from £167 to a mind-boggling £6,667 for each event.

If you're playing along at home, that last case describes a fee increase of 3,900%.

Now, for the most part, such collectives are passing money on directly to musicians, and not to record labels or the like. So you could argue that this means that musicians make more money, so perhaps it's okay. But that's not taking into account the overall impact of such fee increases. They actually harm musicians in multiple ways. First, as you would expect with such a massive increase in fees, many venues simply stop agreeing to pay a license to play music. Many may just not play music at all any more, and what good does that do any musician? Fewer venues playing music isn't helping anyone. It also means that a lot more of these kinds of venues end up going out of business. We keep hearing stories of people complaining about fewer venues being around for music these days, and you can blame ridiculous price hikes like this one for that.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Senators Unconcerned About Massive Unintended Consequences Of Criminalizing People For Embedding YouTube Videos

Mike Masnick — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 08:28:00 PDT

This is really no surprise, but the same Senate Judiciary Committee that unanimously approved the PROTECT IP Act, despite worries from internet experts and major media about how it would break the internet, has now also unanimously approved the anti-internet streaming bill that makes it a felony to stream certain videos online -- potentially putting people in jail for embedding YouTube videos or just putting up YouTube lip synching videos.

What's really troubling here is that the media and plenty of concerned citizens have directly raised the issues about the unintended consequences of this law. And while Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons continue to insist that (of course) the law is not intended to be used against such people, they have made no move to fix the bill. Even supporters of this bill, who insisted that we were wrong about what the bill allowed, eventually conceded that our argument was accurate and that this bill could be used to put people in jail for embedding a YouTube video or doing a lip synch video.

And that's a huge, huge problem. Of course, no one thinks the bill is for that purpose directly or that it's going to be widely used for such purposes. However, the bill, as written, clearly allows law enforcement to charge people with a felony for that, assuming it meets a few other conditions. But those conditions are pretty minimal (ads on your page? you're in trouble...). The risk here of abuse is a serious risk, and it's incredibly troubling that Klobuchar, Cornyn and Coons failed to change or adapt the bill, and worse that the rest of the Senate Judiciary Committee allowed the bill to move forward in such a broken state. They were clearly made aware of problems with the bill, but directly chose not to make any changes. How do you explain that other than incompetence or corruption?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos

Mike Masnick — Wed, 1 Jun 2011 10:32:05 PDT

Okay, this is just getting ridiculous. A few weeks back, we noted that Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons had proposed a new bill that was designed to make "streaming" infringing material a felony. At the time, the actual text of the bill wasn't available, but we assumed, naturally, that it would just extend "public performance" rights to section 506a of the Copyright Act.

Supporters of this bill claim that all it's really doing is harmonizing US copyright law's civil and criminal sections. After all, the rights afforded under copyright law in civil cases cover a list of rights: reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works or perform the work. The rules for criminal infringement only cover reproducing and distributing -- but not performing. So, supporters claim, all this does is "harmonize" copyright law and bring the criminal side into line with the civil side by adding "performance rights" to the list of things.

If only it were that simple. But, of course, it's not. First of all, despite claims to the contrary, there's a damn good reason why Congress did not include performance rights as a criminal/felony issue: because who would have thought that it would be a criminal act to perform a work without permission? It could be infringing, but that can be covered by a fine. When we suddenly criminalize a performance, that raises all sorts of questionable issues.

Furthermore, as we suspected, in the full text of the bill, "performance" is not clearly defined. This is the really troubling part. Everyone keeps insisting that this is targeted towards "streaming" websites, but is streaming a "performance"? If so, how does embedding play into this? Is the site that hosts the content guilty of performing? What about the site that merely linked to and/or embedded the video (linking and embedding are technically effectively the same thing). Without clear definitions, we run into problems pretty quickly.

And it gets worse. Because rather than just (pointlessly) adding "performance" to the list, the bill tries to also define what constitutes a potential felony crime in these circumstances:

the offense consists of 10 or more public performances by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copyrighted works

So yeah. If you embed a YouTube video that turns out to be infringing, and more than 10 people view it because of your link... you could be facing five years in jail. This is, of course, ridiculous, and suggests (yet again) politicians who are regulating a technology they simply do not understand. Should it really be a criminal act to embed a YouTube video, even if you don't know it was infringing...? This could create a massive chilling effect to the very useful service YouTube provides in letting people embed videos.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

BMI Says A Single Person Listening To His Own Music Via The Cloud Is A Public Performance

Tim Cushing — Tue, 10 May 2011 09:10:36 PDT

There's no time like late on a Friday to send out disturbing missives. Companies who need to let staff go often find it easier to let the week "play out" before handing out the pink slips. Congressmen who need to shove through some questionable legislation often wait until the papers have gone to bed, or at least a majority of the voting citizens.

Martin Berenson, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for BMI has decided there's no time like Friday evening to kick out an editorial about streaming music via the "cloud."

Berenson chooses to couch his arguments in the relative safety of Capitol Records (and others) ongoing legal battle with MP3tunes.com, a "subscription Internet music 'locker' service," before launching a grazing attack on "cloud-computing" in general. While the legality of MP3tunes' actions is still under question, Berenson expresses his concern that its legal arguments could "create loopholes in the copyright law relating to the public performance right."

There's a lot to unpack in this editorial, but what it all boils down to is this: BMI wants a chunk of this "cloud" money.

MP3tunes logically points out (in its arguments against Capitol Records) that a user making a copy on a "dedicated, private, remote storage device" and playing it back to himself is a private performance and, therefore, needs no licensing. Google, the EFF and Public Knowledge have all entered amici briefs (or "broad attacks on the performing right," according to Berenson) stating that, "if a user initiates a stream, it should not be considered a public performance" by the service.

This seems to be a logical thought: one person listening to his or her own music is not a public performance. But, won't someone please think of the licensing? No worries, Berenson has that covered:

As previously noted, BMI argues that the public performing right has long applied to on-demand, interactive streaming. Additionally, it makes no difference if the audience for the transmission is only one person, who may receive the program at a unique time, and that MP3tunes’ attempt to make one to one transmissions into private performances is contrary to established law. We stress that it was only the existence of the unique copy made by each subscriber that was the critical factor that saved Cablevision from being an infringer. MP3tunes cannot evade that essential aspect of the court’s ruling on the grounds it would be more efficient to infringe with one copy in storage for all recipients.

Well, there you have it:

The right to collect licensing fees has "long applied" to streaming services, and since it's been there before, it logically follows that it should always be that way, no matter the differences of each situation.

It makes no difference if only one person is listening -- it's still a public performance. BMI and their fellow performance rights groups have always been willing to grant individuals the rights of a crowd.

Storage efficiency = infringement.

But Berenson's just warming up, and this is where it gets really interesting (and by "interesting," I mean "ludicrous"):

The strength of the public performing right would be threatened by a ruling that broadens the Cablevision court’s private-performance ruling to otherwise-unlicensed services. Cloud computing will no doubt grow tremendously in the future and if MP3tunes’ argument is adopted by the court, unlicensed entertainment services in “the cloud” will steal audiences from existing licensed streaming services (as well as from more traditional media entities), and copyright owners will be harmed by such a ruling.

From that point, Berenson takes a quick run at Amazon's Cloud Drive, mSpot and underdog neo-Luddites, Zediva (in particular, noting that Zediva's DVD player farm "competes unfairly with licensed services" -- which is a totally understandable statement, because the film industry has always been nothing but fair when dealing with competitors and customers).

While Berenson does not specifically attack or threaten Amazon's new service/player, one can only gather from this editorial that the rent-seekers (BMI, ASCAP, etc.) are beginning to formulate their plan to get a piece of this hot, new action, if not already forming an orderly line outside the virtual door. The sentence, "The issues are not confined to MP3tunes," seems to indicate that he considers these services to be next in line for the MP3tunes treatment.

After all, Berenson equates listening to unlicensed music streams to "theft" and there's really nothing more sincere than an "editorial" from a self-interest group. In closing, he offers this baffling line:

These efforts to diminish or circumvent the performing right point up the need for heightened vigilance on our part.

Godspeed, BMI. The more you can do to separate people from their music, the richer you should become. And with an entire nation of individual listeners billable as one (1) crowd, the sky's the limit. (Hence, the "pointing up," I assume.) Just watch out for those pesky "clouds".

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Appeals Court Tells ASCAP: A Download Is Not A Performance

Mike Masnick — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:04:00 PDT

A few years back, we covered the legal fight pitting ASCAP against Yahoo and RealNetworks, where the two internet companies were told to pay up based on a ridiculously arbitrary fee formula, including a totally made up multiplier called the "music-use-adjustment-fraction." The really scary part was that it calculated the revenue based on all of Yahoo's revenue. So, yes, even though Yahoo makes most of its revenue in ways that have nothing to do with music, its total revenue is used as part of the calculation. The one good thing that came out of the legal fight was the court making it clear to ASCAP that a download is not a performance, which requires a separate fee. As you may recall, ASCAP has been trying to claim just about anything involving music is a "public performance," in a weak attempt to get more cash.

Both sides appealed. Yahoo and RealNetworks appealed the crazy fee formula, and ASCAP appealed the claim that a download was not a public performance. The Second Circuit appeals court has now ruled and gone against ASCAP on both issues. It reaffirmed that a download is not a public performance (and thus, performance rights fees are not applicable) and rejected the bizarre calculation method used, as not "adequately supported" as being reasonable. A few highlights:

The fact that the statute defines performance in the audio-visual context as "show[ing]" the work or making it "audible" reinforces the conclusion that "to perform" a musical work entails contemporaneous perceptibility. ASCAP has provided no reason, and we can surmise none, why the statute would require a contemporaneously perceptible event in the context of an audio-visual work, but not in the context of a musical work.

The downloads at issue in this appeal are not musical performances that are contemporaneously perceived by the listener. They are simply transfers of electronic files containing digital copies from an on-line server to a local hard drive. The downloaded songs are not performed in any perceptible manner during the transfers; the user must take some further action to play the songs after they are downloaded. Because the electronic download itself involves no recitation, rendering, or playing of the musical work encoded in the digital transmission, we hold that such a download is not a performance of that work....

The court also scolds ASCAP for blatantly misreading other opinions on what constitutes a public performance and points out that ASCAP appears to "misread the definition of 'publicly,'" noting that ASCAP's definition of a public performance seems to "render superfluous" the term "a performance" in the Copyright Act. Ouch.

As for the royalty fees, the court is pretty clear that it doesn't buy the formula being used:

First, the district court did not adequately support the reasonableness of its method for measuring the value of the Internet Companies' music use. Second, the district court did not adequately support the reasonableness of the 2.5% royalty rate applied to the value of the Internet Companies' music use.

In other words, you don't just get to make up numbers out of nowhere.

That said, the court does say that it isn't necessarily against using such a "music-use-adjustment-fraction," it just needs the number to actually be supported. This is unfortunate, as it leads to improperly using non-music revenue as part of the calculation for how much should be paid for the music license. However, the court tries to deal with this by saying that the reasonable support needed would justify what the multiplier factor would be. Its main concern with the lower court's ruling was that it didn't take this into account and used a measure that made little sense (time spent listening to streams) which had little bearing on ad revenue:

The district court's MUAF accounts for the value of Yahoo!'s music use by using the amount of time that music is streamed. Streaming time, however, neither drives nor correlates with Yahoo!'s advertising revenue. The record evidence makes plain that Yahoo!'s advertising revenue model more accurately correlates with the number of times a particular page is accessed by users than to the duration of streaming time.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

UK Pubs Can Get Huge Refunds From Music Collection Group After Overcharging

Mike Masnick — Mon, 7 Jun 2010 23:32:00 PDT

After seeing so many stories of various collection and performance licensing groups being able to boost their rates and expand their coverage over the past few years, it's nice to see at least some pushback. IanVisits points out that, over in the UK, the Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL) has lost a lawsuit which claimed it had seriously overcharged. So now pubs, bars and restaurants can start claiming refunds. Of course, a bit annoyingly, these venues have to proactively make a claim. Contrast that to demands from such collection societies about how you automatically have to pay up for a license... The article also notes that the ruling requires new rates, with some pubs and restaurants expecting the money they have to pay to be cut in half. Nice to see that more venues might be comfortable playing and promoting music again...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

BMI Sues T-Mobile, Claims It Needs To Pay Up Over Ringback Tones

Mike Masnick — Fri, 8 Jan 2010 17:02:00 PST

I'm still in the camp of folks who doesn't quite understand "ringback tones" -- the ugly stepchild of ringtones, where it's not what music your phone plays, but what music a caller hears when they call you and are waiting for you to pick up. While ringbacks have been a big deal in Asia, they're still a relatively small market in the US. But, that's not going to stop collections societies from demanding cash, of course. mike allen alerts us to the news that BMI has sued T-Mobile over its ringback tones. Of course, here's the thing: a court has already established that ringtones are not performances, so are ringback tones performances? Or, of course, T-Mobile could just ban the use of any BMI songs as ringbacks, and then see how those artists feel about how BMI is "protecting" their interests...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

PRS's Latest Trick: Demanding Money From Shop Assistant Who Was Singing At Work

Mike Masnick — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:04:00 PDT

Sometimes, these collection societies write the jokes themselves, it seems. PRS, the music collection society in the UK, famous for going way over the line in demanding money from people (remember the time it demanded a woman pay up for playing music for her horses? Or how it calls small businesses and if they hear any music in the background, demand payment?), has done it again. It threatened a shop assistant for singing out loud (public performance!) while stacking the grocery shelves, demanding she pay £1,000 for the privilege. Of course, why was she singing? Because PRS had already threatened the owner for having a radio -- so he got rid of the radio.

Of course, as with the horse debacle, once PRS realized the PR nightmare it had created for itself, it apologized (and sent some flowers). But, that hardly makes the situation better. Why is PRS demanding such things in the first place? Given the long trail of similar examples, this isn't just some random one-off accident. It's basically how PRS operates. And that's because it's structured its business so that its "investigators" aren't really "investigators" at all, but sales people. They have every incentive to get as many companies to pay up as possible, no matter if there's any real performance at issue.

On top of that, the very fact that PRS forced this shopowner to take away his radio should show how backwards and braindead PRS's strategy is. The radio in the shop isn't a "public performance." It's not the reason people go to the shop. But it did help promote the musicians PRS supposedly represents. Not any more. Musicians in the UK should be furious at PRS for making it more difficult to get their music heard, let alone for threatening someone for singing while stocking the shelves.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Dutch Collection Society Backs Down Slightly On Video Embeds

Mike Masnick — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:27:03 PDT

Dennis Laumen alerts us to an update on the story concerning Dutch music collection society Buma/Stemra's plan to charge bloggers for embedding YouTube videos on their site. After the story got lots of publicity, Buma appears to have backed down ever so slightly, saying that "amateur" bloggers are off the hook. But, the definition of "amateur" is basically only if you don't have any ads. Put up some Google AdSense... and suddenly you're a "pro" who has to pay up.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Dutch Collection Society Looks To Charge Bloggers For Embedding YouTube Videos

Mike Masnick — Wed, 7 Oct 2009 11:01:17 PDT

Over the past year, we've noticed an explosion in ridiculous attempts by music collection societies (often totally clueless about technology) to extend their ability to collect for positively ridiculous things (while also looking to significantly increase their collection rates). The latest, sent in by Dennis Laumen, is that the Dutch collection society, Buma/Stemra, is claiming that it's going to start charging bloggers 130 euros for every 6 videos they embed. This is, of course, technologically clueless. The embedding of a video doesn't change the fact that it's actually playing from and hosted at the original site (such as YouTube). All embedding does is allow the video to appear via the other page, even though, technically, it's all still happening at its original location. Claiming that this is somehow a "new" publication of the content is technologically incorrect.

This is somewhat similar to ASCAP's recent technologically clueless claim that embedding YouTube videos should count as a public performance (along with its other recent claims that iTunes 30-second previews and your mobile phone ringtones should also be counted as public performances). You sort of get the feeling that many of these collection societies came to the conclusion about two years ago that they're functionally obsolete, and rather than adapt to the times, they've all agreed to the same basic principle of going out in a blaze of glory. They're trying to vastly increase rates while covering any and ever attempt to use music in any way, bleeding everyone dry while making it that much more difficult for up-and-coming acts to get heard (since venues that promote them can't pay the crazy rates) and (even better) setting up their payout mechanisms to massively favor the top acts.

For the most part, these collection societies are simply being greedy, without putting a single thought towards actually helping composers and songwriters. They're looking for every single penny they could possibly collect today, and ignoring the medium and long-term impact of trying to charge for any sort of promotional behavior.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Can You Plagiarize A Play You Licensed To Perform? The Urinetown Saga...

Mike Masnick — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:28:00 PDT

A few years back I got to see the musical Urinetown when it came through San Francisco. It's really very funny, and if you happen to live somewhere that it's playing, I'd recommend you go check it out. However, apparently, in going to watch it in some places, you might be seeing an "infringing" version -- even if it's been properly licensed. William Patry lays out some of the details behind the latest bizarre situation in the world of intellectual property rights, where the folks behind Urinetown's Broadway production accused those behind Chicago's production of plagiarism as well as violations of copyright and trademark law. It wasn't because the folks in Chicago hadn't licensed the work. In fact, the "Chicago team" licensed both the script and the music to perform. Apparently, though, that wasn't enough. The folks in NY said the folks in Chicago had "blatantly" plagiarized and copied the NY production in producing their own version. This is the point at which it might be worth pointing out that of course they copied the NY production. That's because they were putting on the same damn play. Apparently, the folks in NY thought that even with the script and the music, the Chicago version needed to look different than the NY version, which seems rather ridiculous. All of this came out in a lawsuit filed by the people in Chicago against their accusers in NY (who even demanded that the Chicago team "decline and remit" the awards it had won for its production). Unfortunately, the court tossed out the case, as the folks in Chicago apparently sued the wrong party in NY (whoops). So, perhaps there will be a follow up with the correct party being sued. In the meantime, it does seem rather ironic that a play about taking laws to ridiculous extremes now faces just such a battle. Perhaps it'll give the playwright an idea for his next play.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story