Tom Lehrer, Still Awesome, Releases Lyrics Into The Public Domain

from the good-for-him dept

Back in 2014 we had a post about Tom Lehrer and copyright. As you hopefully know, Lehrer, the unassuming retired math teacher, had a brief and massively successful music career, in part because all of his work is amazing. Years back, Buzzfeed had a fantastic article about Lehrer that is worth reading. That's what spurred my post about Lehrer and copyright, because in the Buzzfeed piece it became clear that Lehrer did not care one bit about retaining his copyrights.

While Lehrer has made startlingly little effort to ensure a future for his work, a handful of superfans have filled in the gap. One is Erik Meyn, a Norwegian who manages the Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel on YouTube, a feed of performance videos and playlists that has received more than 10 million views since 2007. Meyn originally posted content to the channel without Lehrer’s permission and called him from overseas in December 2008 to apologize, a conversation he later posted on the “Tom Lehrer!” Facebook page. An excerpt:

TL: Well, you see, I’m fine with that channel.

EM: You’re very kind. But my question is: Who in your family will take care of your copyright and your songs in the distant future?

TL: I don’t have a family.

EM: OK, but what do you think will happen to the channel and your songs? And if you have someone who will act on your behalf, could you give them my name in case they’d want the channel taken down?

TL: Yes, but there’s no need to remove that channel.

EM: I was just wondering what will happen in the future, because you’re certainly going to continue to sell records.

TL: Well, I don’t need to make money after I’m dead. These things will be taken care of.

EM: I feel like I gave away some of your songs to public domain without even asking you, and that wasn’t very nice of me.

TL: But I’m fine with that, you know.

EM: Will you establish any kind of foundation or charity or something like that?

TL: No, I won’t. They’re mostly rip-offs.

And then later, Lehrer talks about how he doesn't even care about his masters any more:

In 2011, Morris was rummaging through the Sparks Street basement, and alongside the collection of books and records Lehrer referred to as his “Noel Coward shrine” were two boxes marked “masters.” They were, to Morris, “the holy grail.” These were the original recordings of the 1959 album More Songs by Tom Lehrer: the orchestral session and outtakes and Lehrer’s recordings. Morris offered to help Lehrer remix them from half-inch tapes into stereo recordings.

“Well, why don’t you just take them with you?” Lehrer said.

“I was like, ‘Are you kidding?! These are the master copies!’” Morris recalled. “I was just trying to reassure him, I’ll be very careful with them, I won’t let them fall in the wrong hands, I’m not going to distribute copies to anyone without your permission.”

“I don’t care!” Lehrer told him. “They’re not worth anything to me.”

Lehrer clearly sees that he doesn't need to retain the copyrights and try to squeeze extra profits out of the works (of course, it helps that he never gave up the copyrights and masters to giant record companies). And I loved the fact that he said he was "fine with that" when told that his songs were given away to the public domain.

Of course, all of that is just talk in an article. Which is why it was exciting to see earlier this week that Lehrer's website has announced that all of his lyrics should be considered in the public domain:

I, Tom Lehrer, and the Tom Lehrer Trust 2000, hereby grant the following permission:

All the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else.

Some lyrics written by Tom Lehrer to copyrighted music by others are included herein, but of course such music may not be used without permission of the copyright owners. (The translated songs may be found in their original languages on YouTube.)

In other words, all the lyrics herein should be treated as though they were in the public domain.

In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music and publish or perform their versions without fear of legal action.

If you want to be technical, under US law there is no "official" way to move things into the public domain like this. You can only make an effective license not to sue about it, which is what Lehrer has done. And good for him.

And while at this time it's just his lyrics, it sounds like he's looking to figure out how to do something similar for the compositions as well:

This permission applies only to the lyrics on this website. Most of the music written by Tom Lehrer will be added gradually later with further disclaimers.

Of course, it's notable that at the time he made most of his recordings, you could only get a federal copyright for the composition and not the sound recordings. Some later recordings, however were released in the 2000s (and sometimes by other companies) and I imagine the copyright situation with those recordings may be a bit more complex. Still, putting the lyrics in the public domain is something worth celebrating.

And, thus, in celebration, I'll embed Tom Lehrer performing "Who's Next?" in the hopes that other musicians will embrace this (even though the song is actually about who will next get the nuclear bomb).

Filed Under: copyright, music, public domain, tom lehrer

Should Antitrust Protect Competitors Or Competition?

from the rewriting-antitrust dept

While there is plenty of breaking news to go around, tech junkies will not have missed the Department of Justice’s long-awaited announcement of their antitrust lawsuit against Google. This is just the latest in a number of government moves aimed at applying more pressure to big tech. Congress is also reviewing potential reforms to antitrust law in order to make it easier to target online platforms. During recent hearings, the House Judiciary Committee examined how these companies compete and highlighted individual competitors­­ that struggle to compete or work with dominant firms.

But in its rush to legislate market fairness into the tech world, Congress seems to be missing the point: we need to protect competition, not the competitors themselves.

The Supreme Court warned about this nearly two decades ago. As the Court explained of the Sherman Act, “[t]he purpose of the Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.”

In other words, competition law doesn’t care what happens to small competitors, it cares that these companies have a chance to compete.

This is where Congress is treading on dangerous ground. Earlier this month, the House Judiciary Committee released an extensive report detailing their investigation into online markets. In this report, Congress finds themselves worried about what happens to individual competitors, not competition writ large.

For example, at one point the report states that “Google’s preferential treatment of its own verticals, as well as its direct listing of information in the ‘OneBox’ that appears at the top of Google search results, has the net effect of diverting traffic from competing verticals and jeopardizing the health and viability of their business.” Because of this, the report recommends Congress overturn judicial precedent on attempted monopolization, which currently requires that plaintiffs show that the company has a dangerous probability of monopolization.

But Google does not seem to be preventing vertical search engines from competing and as far as we can tell, it hasn’t monopolized this service. Their “OneBox” gives users a quick answer to a question or a product they are looking for. True, a competing vertical search engine may lose traffic, but the consumers get more search results overall. If Google could monopolize vertical search markets, then that would effectively prohibit competitors from offering better, rival services. But so long as a firm like Google can’t actually achieve that monopoly in the new market, the competitive constraints on behavior still exist.

And even if a general search feature and anticompetitive conduct led to monopolization of vertical search, antitrust law would act as a check to protect competition. The Department of Justice’s long-predicted antitrust lawsuit against Google is evidence of this. If Google has illegally acquired, attempted to acquire or maintained a monopoly, then current antitrust law will ensure that any anticompetitive harms are corrected without hurting the consumers. But if they simply outcompeted rivals by offering a more efficient product, then competition policy should not, and currently does not, worry about the individual competitors who can’t keep up.

Competition protects consumers and is critical in the online marketplace. In the fast-moving technology sector, some companies will not keep up. But Congress cannot lose focus by worrying about individual competitors. Instead, they must keep an eye out for anticompetitive behavior that prohibits competitions because the firm controls the entire market. In the end, if we artificially prop up less efficient or innovative competitors, then it will be the consumers who end up suffering.

Jeffrey Westling is a technology and innovation resident fellow at the R Street Institute.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, competitors, doj
Companies: google

Creative Director At Google Stadia Advocates Streamers Paying Game Devs And Publishers

from the ruh-roh dept

Way back in 2013, we discussed an interesting study conducted by Google looking at the effect of let's play and video game reviews has on the gaming industry. That study's conclusion was that viewers watched let's plays at a far higher clip than, say, video game trailers. Two-thirds of those views appeared to be watchers focusing on the video itself, whereas the other third were watching on secondary devices/screens in order to find tips and tricks for completing the game in question. Both were conducive to promoting the gaming industry, being a method for finding out if a game is worth buying and because gamers know they have a resource to help complete a game.

Fast forward to 2020 and Google has its own game-streaming platform that it's trying to get off of the ground. One of the folks that works at Google on the platform is Alex Hutchinson. And when it comes to let's play videos and streams, hoo boy does he have some thoughts.

Earlier today Alex Hutchinson, creative director at Typhoon Studios (bought by Google last year to make Stadia games), made a tweet suggesting that Twitch and YouTube users should be “paying the developers and publishers” of the games they stream.

And the tweet that set this shitstorm off:

The backlash online was swift and severe. So much so, in fact, that Hutchinson went on to wonder aloud why people were so mad about all of this. Several people attempted to explain to him that game streams are good for developers and publishers, not bad. Others pointed out that any licensing would go to the publisher and not the developer anyway, so Hutchinson was really just advocating for big companies to make more big money. And one streamer pointed out that Hutchinson's Twitter banner was fan-art of that very streamer, used without attribution or permission.

Meanwhile, I'm just wondering why Hutchinson doesn't just go read his own employer's 2013 study that shows just how beneficial let's plays and game-streaming is for the industry. He might also want to realize that Google's YouTube has an entire wing of it's service called YouTube Gaming, built around game-streaming.  

For what it's worth, there is no reason to think that Hutchinson is making any actual policy decisions at Google or for Stadia. And, more importantly, Google reps have already come out and said Hutchinson's tweets don't reflect the views of the company.  

But it's probably time to educate Hutchinson on the actual facts that his own employer has made clear in the past.

Filed Under: alex hutchinson, stadia, streamers, streaming, symbiosis, video games
Companies: google

Daily Deal: The 2021 All-In-One AWS, Cisco And CompTIA Super Certification Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The 2021 All-In-One AWS, Cisco, and CompTIA Super Bundle has 22 courses and over 240 hours of content to help you prepare to sit for various IT certification exams from Amazon, CompTIA, and more. The courses cover the latest best practices for working in the cloud and many have practice tests you can take to help prepare yourself for the real deal. This bundle is on sale for $99.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Trump's Law-Breaking Law Enforcement Commission Has Plenty Of Dystopian Ideas

from the if-only-the-public-didn't-have-so-damn-many-rights dept

Trump has made no secret of the fact he adores law enforcement. One of the first edicts he issued from his office told America in no uncertain terms that cops were to be respected, if not worshipped, for deigning to stand between millions of US peons and the forces of evil.

The Trump Administration will be a law and order administration. President Trump will honor our men and women in uniform and will support their mission of protecting the public. The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.

The Trump Administration has yet to end the "dangerous anti-police atmosphere." But, it's not for a lack of bootlicking. Unfortunately, cops have spent the intervening years increasing the distance between them and the people they serve by violating rights and killing unarmed people.

The professed respect for law and order doesn't extend to the Administration itself, which has violated the law on multiple occasions. This all dovetailed together when the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement was found to be in violation of the law by a federal judge.

Composed solely of law enforcement representatives, the Commission ran afoul of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. It did not provide adequate transparency or public access options. And it did not include a range of stakeholders to better serve the stated goal of improving police-community relations, which also violated the law. This egregious violation was called out by the judge handling the lawsuit against the government.

The Commission’s function is to improve policing, including relations between law enforcement and the communities they protect. Yet the Commission does not include a single member who represents elements of those communities, rather than law enforcement. Thus, even employing a deferential review, the Court concludes that the Commission’s membership is not “fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed by the advisory committee.” 5 U.S.C. app. 2 § 5(b)(2). Indeed, the Court is hard pressed to think of a starker example of non-compliance with FACA’s fair balance requirement than a commission charged with examining broad issues of policing in today’s America that is composed entirely of past and present law enforcement officials.

It gets worse. As Phillip Goff points out in his op-ed for the New York Times, the Commission was apparently assembled to help the President get his police state dystopia on.

The recommendations would... make the avenues to accountability for law enforcement so narrow that even the most egregious cases of police violence would have a harder time finding their way to just resolutions. Officers accused of wrongdoing would be granted access to body camera footage before speaking to internal investigators, allowing them to shape legally valid explanations for otherwise incriminating actions.

The Commission also offered its full support for qualified immunity, the rigged game that almost always lets badly behaving officers escape being held accountable for their actions. It also targeted so-called "progressive" prosecutors with plans to limit their ability to decline low level charges or eliminate cash bail.

In addition, more domestic surveillance is on tap. As local governments around the nation tangle with the tricky subject of facial recognition and its impact on residents, the federal commission was saying we just need more of it faster.

The commission recommends providing America’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies, from small town departments to the New York Police Department, with more money for facial recognition technologies.

More facial recognition. Less security for Americans.

The commission also recommends that police departments be granted back door access to encrypted cellphones.

If we gain nothing else from this, at least we can see law enforcement's desires laid bare. Here's what cops want. And with no one on the Commission to push back on these bad ideas, this is what the President may get if he remains in office. Fortunately, a lot of this lies beyond the expansive powers granted to the Leader of the Free World and it's unlikely many of these ideas will find the Congressional support needed to bring this dystopia to life fully. But this is how authoritarian governments begin: with a one-sided Commission that carefully considers both sides of the same side.

Filed Under: donald trump, dystopia, faca, facial recognition, law and order, police, qualified immunity

As EU Starts To Draft Its Most Important New Online Law, The Digital Services Act, MEPs Want Basic Rights High On The Agenda

from the but-massive-lobbying-and-dirty-tricks-will-soon-fix-that dept

The EU is now starting to work in earnest on what is likely to be its most important new law for the online world, the Digital Services Act (DSA). Techdirt wrote about this last year, when the European Commission started sketching out (bad) ideas for the new law. The basic impetus for the DSA is to replace the EU's e-Commerce Directive, which was passed 20 years ago, and is clearly in need of an update. As the European Commission's page on the DSA explains, there are two core elements:

First, the Commission would propose clear rules framing the responsibilities of digital services to address the risks faced by their users and to protect their rights. The legal obligations would ensure a modern system of cooperation for the supervision of platforms and guarantee effective enforcement.

Second, the Digital Services Act package would propose ex ante rules covering large online platforms acting as gatekeepers, which now set the rules of the game for their users and their competitors. The initiative should ensure that those platforms behave fairly and can be challenged by new entrants and existing competitors, so that consumers have the widest choice and the Single Market remains competitive and open to innovations.

Those aims mean that the DSA touches on several of the most contentious issues in the online world, such as the introduction of mandatory pan-European rules for tackling online hate speech and disinformation, and efforts to control platforms that are "gatekeepers" -- basically US companies like Google and Facebook. In other words, the DSA is going to be important, and not just for the EU. One of the key players in the drafting of the DSA is the European Parliament. The good news is that in a series of votes MEPs have made clear that they want protection for key human rights to be an integral part of the new law.

The votes concerned reports from three of the Parliament's specialist committees: those for the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, Legal Affairs, and Civil Liberties (pdf). The three reports are couched in a rather impenetrable EU-speak; fortunately, the European Parliament has put out a press release on the votes that provides a more comprehensible summary of the three reports. The European Parliament is quite open about what the EU hopes to achieve with the DSA: "With the upcoming package, the European Union aims to shape the digital economy at EU level as well as setting the standards for the rest of the world, as it did with data protection." One of the priorities of the DSA is tackling illegal content online. On this, MEPs say:

A binding "notice-and-action" mechanism must be set up so that users can notify online intermediaries about potentially illegal online content or activities. This would help online intermediaries to react quickly and be more transparent regarding the actions they have taken on potentially illegal content. Users should be able to seek redress through a national dispute settlement body.

The European Parliament wants a distinction made between illegal content and harmful content, with a legal liability only for the former. MEPs say that there should be no general monitoring of users, and that platforms should not use upload filters for controlling harmful or illegal content: "The final decision on whether content is legal or not should instead be taken by an independent judiciary and not by private undertakings". It's hard to square that with the awful Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive, which inevitably requires precisely this kind of upload filter to block allegedly infringing content. MEPs say that harmful content should be dealt with through "enhanced transparency obligations and by helping citizens to acquire media and digital literacy regarding the dissemination of such content." According to the European Parliament, another priority of the DSA should be enhancing consumer protection and user safety:

Platforms and online intermediation services will need to get better at detecting and taking down false claims and tackling rogue traders, e.g. those selling false medical equipment or dangerous products online, as happened during the COVID-19 outbreak.

MEPs also call for a new "Know Your Business Customer" principle to be introduced, requiring platforms to check and stop fraudulent companies using their services to sell their illegal and unsafe products and content.

More controversial is a call for rules to prevent -- not merely remedy -- what MEPs called "market failures by big platforms". The stated aim is to open up markets to new entrants. Some of the most striking ideas to emerge from the reports are: to allow online users to opt out of content curation, to be informed if a service is enabled by AI, and to ban microtargeted advertising:

Targeted advertising must be regulated more strictly in favour of less intrusive, contextualised forms of advertising that require less data and do not depend on previous user interaction with content. MEPs also call on the Commission to further assess options for regulating targeted advertising, including a phase-out leading to a ban.

As Techdirt has noted, such targeted advertising doesn't really seem to bring much in the way of benefit to advertisers, but certainly causes people to be tracked relentlessly, and huge amounts of personal information to be gathered. Getting rid of it in the EU could encourage companies to re-think their advertising strategies globally, just as the GDPR has had a big knock-on effect on data protection everywhere. That would be welcome, as would a move to enshrine in the DSA a right to use digital services anonymously "whenever possible". Adding a right to strong encryption without backdoors would be even better: at the moment, one report simply "Stresses the importance to apply effective end-to-end encryption to data".

Two of the reports approved by the European Parliament are what are known as "legislative initiatives" (PDF). Although not binding on the European Commission, such initiatives require a much fuller response if any of the proposed ideas are rejected. This gives the European Parliament's ideas more chance of making it into the final text of the DSA. Against that, some of the most powerful companies in the world will be deeply affected by the EU's new law, which guarantees years of fierce lobbying and dirty tricks, as the dispiriting experience of the Copyright Directive demonstrated.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: digital services act, dsa, e-commerce directive, eu, eu parliament, harmful content, illegal content, intermediary liability, online harms, tracking

FLVTO.biz Petitions SCOTUS To Hear Jurisdiction Argument In Stream-Ripping Lawsuit

from the we-are-not-the-world dept

While the music industry's war on stream-ripping sites -- sites that have perfectly legitimate and legal uses -- continues, it's true that this is a war in which one side has almost universally surrendered. Facing legal opposition with well-funded industry groups, most stream-ripping sites simply close up shop when staring down litigation. But Russia-based FLVTO.biz has been an exception. We first wrote about the site's decision to defend itself back in early 2019. At that point, the owner of the site, Tofig Kurbanov, had successfully argued in a Florida court that the United States legal system had no jurisdiction over his site, given that it operates in Russia and makes no effort to entice American patronage.

It was a sensible ruling. After all, why should anyone want websites in one nation to be subject to the laws of every other nation's laws just because the internet is designed to be international? And, yet, the RIAA labels appealed the ruling and got it reversed. The case was sent back to the lower courts where it was supposed to once again proceed, except that Kurbanov's team has asked the Supreme Court to consider its jurisdiction arguments once more.

Those plans were then confirmed last month back at the Virginia court where the lawsuit began, which is considering the case anew following the Fourth Circuit ruling. Kurbanov’s lawyers have asked the district court to pause the ongoing proceedings there pending their application to the Supreme Court.

That application was submitted earlier this week. It argues that the top court should consider the case, because some Supreme Court style consideration is required on the issue of whether or not “the ‘due process clause’ of the United States Constitution is violated when a foreign citizen is subjected to personal jurisdiction based entirely on: (1) his operation of a website that is popular both within the United States and worldwide, but which is not specifically aimed at the United States; and (2) minor internet-based and internet-initiated transactions entered into by the foreign citizen entirely from outside the United States”.

This is indeed just the sort of important due process argument in the age of the internet that a sober SCOTUS should be weighing in on. And, while we could get lost in the legality of it all, common sense really should rule the day here. Does American law have jurisdiction over foreign entities not making any real effort to do commerce on American soil or does it not? And, if so, what precedent does that set for every other nation out there in terms of how American-based businesses conduct business over the internet?

Shall legal pornography websites in America be subject to the more prudish laws of other nations? Should news organizations in America face litigation from countries with far fewer press and free speech protections? Hell, should American entities legitimately selling RIAA label music themselves face threats from countries with obscenity laws and the like?

Evan Fray-Witzer said: “If you operate a website that is popular, then you’re subject to jurisdiction anywhere – and everywhere – that people access the website. And that’s not a precedent that anyone should want to stand, because if Kurbanov can be dragged into court here from Russia, then any US citizen who creates a popular website can expect to be dragged into court anywhere in the world”.

The lawyer also told Torrentfreak that the major labels should support his client’s bid to get the Supreme Court to provide clarity on this issue.

“If the record companies are so certain that the Fourth Circuit got this question right, then they should be anxious for the Supreme Court to take up the case”, he added. “We invite them to join our petition and ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on these crucial jurisdictional questions. But I’m not holding my breath that they’ll do so”.

It can be hard for the labels to see past the ends of their own noses, but they should realize that they could truly be biting themselves in their own asses if SCOTUS refuses to hear this case and this precedent gets set. The internet is international, but American laws are not.

Filed Under: copyright, jurisdiction, russia, streaming, supreme court, us
Companies: flvto, flvto.biz