Could Collection Societies Help Up-And-Coming Artists With A 20/80 Distribution System?

from the one-idea dept

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of music collection societies in general. I tend to think that once they get the right to collect they begin to abuse that power in ways that actually harm musicians and songwriters more than help them. That’s because once they’re given a right to demand payments, they continually look to expand that right: covering more areas and increasing the amount they can demand.

While, at first, that might seem like a good thing for the musicians and songwriters they represent, what many don’t take into account is the wider repercussions and unintended consequences. For example, by making music more expensive to play, they actually take away a lot of the incentive for many places to play music — thereby cutting down on promotional venues for certain artists. This has hit coffee shops and other small venues especially hard, and that’s quite a problem since so many musicians actually get their start performing at various open mic nights. The second problem, of course, is in distribution. How do these collection societies accurately distribute money. By their very nature, they really can’t track how often songs from less-well-known artists and songwriters are played, and so they often just focus on bigger acts — effectively taking money that should go to smaller artists and giving it to bigger artists! If you catch representatives from those groups off-guard, they even seem willing to admit that, such as the time that a BMI exec responded to such criticism from a songwriter who wasn’t getting paid: “I would like to tell him is that he needs to write a hit song.”

Andrew Dubber has been thinking about this issue, and is wondering if there might be a slightly better solution that would help up-and-coming artists. His idea is that these collection societies should take 20% of their overall pot of money, and divide it equally among the lower 80% of the musicians and songwriters who are members. It wouldn’t be that much money, but it would give them all some money. The remaining 80% of the collection revenues would still be handed out as usual, using whatever techniques the collection societies use to figure out who gets what. My first reaction on hearing this is that it would get people to sign up for a chance at “free money,” making it something like a welfare system for musicians. But, Dubber points out in the comments that in order to qualify, you’ll still need to have a song that was used somewhere else. You can’t just say you’re a musician.

I’m still not totally convinced that this would work, and I’m also not convinced that the collection society setup is even worth saving at all. But if such societies are going to be around (and it’s almost certain they’re not going anywhere), then we might as well look at ways to make them actually help more musicians, rather than simply propping up the top of the top, while holding back new comers.

Filed Under: collection society, distribution, fairness, music

Could AT&T's iPad Email Leak Really Be A Much, Much More Serious Security Breach?

from the doesn't-sound-good dept

Last week, we wrote about the security glitch by AT&T, that allowed hackers to figure out the email addresses of 114,000 iPad users. A few people in the comments mocked this news, claiming that such info was pretty much meaningless, as email addresses are hardly private info these days. Of course, that ignored the connection of the email address to the fact that you bought an iPad. But now, some are realizing the potential security problems with this may be significantly worse. Slashdot point us to a story where someone walks through how poor security choices by the various mobile operators means that knowing the information revealed by the glitch can actually reveal much, much more. As the blog post walks through the details, it concludes that potentially, the data from the breach in some cases (though, not all) could then be used to figure out a lot more:

So yeah, knowing someone’s ICCID can give you their full unpublished billing name, their cellular phone number (and hence their home address), their current location on a realtime basis, their voicemail, and if you’re prepared to follow them around (within a few miles) then you get all their phone calls and SMS messages too.

There is a later edit, when he realizes that the voicemail/phone calls/SMS stuff might not be that big of a deal, since the iPad is not a phone device, but it’s still instructive of how a “simple” data breach can lead to much more in certain circumstances.

Filed Under: breach, ipad, security
Companies: apple, at&t

Langdell Still Claims Control Over The Word Edge; Sues EA For Mirror's Edge

from the step-away-from-the-edge dept

We’ve covered Tim Langdell and his ridiculous trademark claims for years. He’s the guy who got a trademark on the word “edge” for a video game fifteen or so years ago, and now seems to spend all of his time threatening and/or suing any game or app maker who puts the word “edge” in the title, even though there’s no likelihood of confusion, and Langdell’s own failure to actually release a game in many years raises questions about how valid the mark is. EA, who had been threatened by Langdell for its Mirror’s Edge game asked the USPTO to dump the trademark last year, claiming not only have the marks been abandoned, but that they were obtained via fraudulent means. The PTO is still reviewing that request.

However, Langdell is not sitting still. His lawyers kindly spammed me today with the news that they’re suing EA over this trademark. Not surprisingly, they play up Langdell’s position, and leave out the abandonment of the trademark, the lack of any likelihood of confusion and other pertinent details along those lines. Trademark law, despite Langdell’s apparent belief, does not give a company full control over a word, especially if they’re not using it. No one is confusing Mirror’s Edge with Langdell’s ancient games.

Filed Under: edge, mirror's edge, tim langdell, trademark, video games
Companies: ea

Anti-Piracy Campaign Shows You 'Killing' Look Alike Pop Stars

from the that's-convincing dept

There have been some really ridiculous “anti-piracy” campaigns out there, but this one is really quite impressive. TorrentFreak has the details on a site, called FreemusicHK.com, that pretends to be a site for downloading unauthorized music. However, when you actually do go to download it, instead you get to play a little flash game where you get to “kill” look alike pop stars on the cover of their albums. Of course, the pop-stars aren’t just lookalikes, but name-alikes, too. So, it’s Any Winehouse, instead of Amy. It’s Madownload, instead of Madonna. It’s Biur, instead of Blur. Copy Play instead of Cold Play Moby’s “Play” album… etc. If this really is some sort of anti-piracy campaign, they’re doing it wrong. As multiple people are pointing out, they’ve made the whole thing so silly and ridiculous that’s it’s kind of fun to play. It’s really quite incredible how tone deaf various “anti-piracy” campaigns have been to what consumers are actually thinking.

Filed Under: anti-piracy, education campaign, propaganda

Does Section 230 Need Fixing?

from the that-would-be-no dept

David Thompson, a lawyer who works for a company that tries to either hide or force unflattering content offline, has written up a series of blog posts for the Volokh Conspiracy site, arguing that section 230 of the CDA is flawed in large part because of Google and then goes on to propose a way to “fix” Section 230 while still preserving online anonymity. He leaves out, of course, that this would help his employer. Funny, that.

Unfortunately, I don’t find his arguments convincing, and believe they make a few logical leaps and some questionable assumptions. First of all, he seems to suggest that there are a whole bunch of sites that now use section 230 to “hide” and to encourage defamatory or libelous content. While there have been a few such sites here and there, they’re mostly pretty rare. And.. more importantly, in most cases, social mores can handle such sites. As people learn about the nature of such sites, they take the content found on them a lot less seriously. Second, he suggests that Section 230 provides extra protections online compared to the offline world. This is an argument that anti-Section 230 people have made time and time again, but it’s been debunked. The purpose of Section 230 was never to allow the internet to flourish under some sort of special “libel subsidy” as Thompson implies, but to make sure that liability is properly assigned to the party who actually did the action, rather than a third party. Thompson’s examples of it being treated “differently” in the real world mostly involve situations where the third parties had a much more active role in the activity. In the cases where that’s not true, such as swap meets being liable for infringing goods sold at their sites, I’d argue that the problem is with the offline world laws — and that they should be fixed to properly apply liability.

As for the gratuitous “blame Google” aspect, I think that Thompson and other Section 230-haters are overplaying the actual impact of finding content people don’t like on Google. So many people seem to assume that if there’s “bad” content found on Google about them, that it automatically destroys their reputation. There may be a few extreme cases of that being true, but in most cases, people are actually adapting and do realize that not all content they find online is trustworthy. Thompson and others seem to assume most internet surfers are stupid. I’m not sure that’s an assumption that we should make.

Finally, in his “solution” post he claims that the idea that we need Section 230 to help the internet is disproved by the fact that almost no other country has Section 230-like protections, and the internet still functions there. He lists out a bunch of other countries, but doesn’t seem to realize that the situation on the ground in those countries disproves his point:

But in fifteen years of experience, we’ve seen that CDA 230 is not required for a thriving Internet.  Europe does not have a statute equivalent to CDA 230, the U.K. has stricter libel laws than the United States, and Directive 2000/31/EC requires EU member nations to enforce libel laws online.  But some estimates suggest that Internet use is actually higher in the U.K. than the U.S.  The same goes for Japan (hosts may be liable if they have knowledge of libel, higher Internet use than the U.S.) and Canada (hosts immune only if “innocent dissemination” higher Internet use than U.S.).  Fast-growing nations like Brazil have experienced ten-fold increases in Internet use in the last decade, even without a local version of CDA 230.

Indeed. But if you look at the UK, this has created massive problems with libel tourism and ridiculous libel cases filed on a regular basis, causing serious harm. In fact, there’s an effort underway in the UK to not just reform libel laws, but to get Section 230-like protections put in place, because they realize it’s important to protect liability from being falsely applied. The same is true in Canada, where a bunch of recent libel cases have driven home the massive problems of not having such protections — allowing people to use Canadian defamation law to silence critics, rather than to actually protect against libel. In Japan, the effort of making hosts liable has had some chilling effects on certain services, that have cracked down on the ability to have free and open conversations in some forums. These aren’t examples to aspire to. They’re examples of why those countries need Section 230-like protections. The mistaken assumption Thompson makes is that the entire purpose of Section 230 is to “help the internet survive.” It’s not. It’s to properly apply liability.

Finally, what is his suggestion to “fix” Section 230? It’s to only grant Section 230 protections to sites that do data retention on users, so that they can be tracked down if there’s a libel claim. He acts as if this is a simple requirement. He’s wrong. This has all sorts of problems. First, it puts a real cost on sites that want this kind of protection. Second, it takes away some freedom to comment truly anonymously by some users, which could put a serious chilling effect on certain types of important speech. Third, it opens up a serious opportunity for data breaches and data abuse. We should be encouraging the world to go in the other direction.

Thankfully, many of the comments in response to Thompson’s posts make these points — and more. The overall problem is that Thompson has set up a rationale for Section 230 that is not accurate, and a world that does not exist to justify his plan.

Filed Under: defamation, liability, libel, section 230

Marvel Pricing Digital Comics Three Times Higher Than Paper Copies [Updated]

from the economics-failure dept

Adam sends over a link to Scott Kurtz’s discussion concerning Marvel’s decision to price its digital comics for the iPad higher than paper copies. (Update: as is noted in the comments, it looks like it’s not actually 3x the cost, but it still priced higher than the paper copy). As Kurtz notes, this serves no good consumer purpose whatsoever, and only serves to keep retailers happy:

I wish this made sense to me. The only reason to price the digital copy at 6 dollars is to keep retailers happy. It’s not in service of Marvel readers and it’s certainly not in service of expanding Marvel’s audience. I have a lot of friends discovering Marvel comics for the first time through the iPad app. Paying for 1/3 of a comic for the same price they normally pay for a whole comic is not something they’ll appreciate or understand. I get Marvel’s desire to make a move like this without spooking retailers or Diamond. It’s like a scuba-diver pacing his rise to the surface to avoid getting the bends. But what does Marvel risk by scaring off potential new digital customers by pricing a virtual copy of a comic higher than the physical copy you get to keep? And for what? To keep retailers happy?

Of course, we’ve seen this before. Incumbent businesses have legacy relationships. And one of the reasons why they’re often so slow to shift to smart new business models is because it will upset those legacy relationships. But if your upstart competitors don’t have those relationships and can route around them entirely to offer a better product for less, you’re going to get hung up by your legacy relationships. Kurtz suggests that Marvel stop worrying about retailers and focus on consumers for once:

The only problem with that thinking is that Marvel Comics isn’t in the business of keeping retailers solvent. Marvel Comics is in the business of producing and distributing comic books to as many readers as possible. At least it SHOULD be. And if digital distribution has a chance of being more profitable than brick-and-mortar store distribution then Marvel owes it to its readers, creators and stock holders to pursue that business without having to worry about someone else’s business for nostalgia’s sake.

Marvel should take a page out of Steve Job’s notebook on this one. Be visionary and push ahead no matter who it pisses off. Especially if it’s good for the company, readers and the industry itself.

It’s easier said than done, but not doing it can be a lot more costly in the long run.

Filed Under: comics, digital, pricing
Companies: marvel

FIFA Threatens To Sue Brewery, Because Dutch World Cup Fans Wore Orange

from the you-can't-do-that dept

FIFA, the organization that runs the World Cup, is notoriously aggressive in defending not just its own intellectual property, but those of any sponsors, while going to extreme lengths to crack down on any non-sponsor getting any kind of publicity whatsoever without paying. It’s not unlike the Olympics in that manner. Of course, that leads to some absolutely ridiculous situations, like the one many of you are sending in about FIFA ejecting 36 Dutch World Cup team supporters for the massive sin of all wearing the same orange dresses. Why? Because the women all bought the dresses from a Dutch brewery, named Bavaria, so FIFA claims it was a viral marketing stunt by the brewery to capitalize on its IP without paying. In fact, FIFA is now threatening to sue. I’d love to see that lawsuit, because it’s difficult to think of any sane reason why this should break any law. As someone from the brewery noted:

“Fifa does not have the monopoly on orange and people have the freedom to wear what they want.”

What if a bunch of fans all just decided to wear the same things to show support for their team?

Of course, the really amusing part of all of this is that, without ejecting those women, I would bet most people would have had no idea at all that the orange dresses represented this brewery. Now, however, it’s all over the press. Nice work FIFA. You just helped promote the brewery.

Filed Under: ambush marketing, dresses, fifa, orange, viral marketing, world cup
Companies: bavaria, fifa

Would You Confuse This Couch With Humphrey Bogart?

from the don't-bogart-that-couch dept

We’ve mentioned it in passing on this site, but one especially troubling area of what (misleadingly) called “intellectual property” law is the rise of publicity and/or privacy rights (especially in New York and California), which try to get famous people an “intellectual property” type monopoly right over their names or likenesses, even in ridiculous situations. The latest such example involves the estate of actor Humphrey Bogart, suing furniture company Ashley Furniture for creating a furniture colleciton named “Bogart.” From what I can tell, it looks like.. well, lots of other furniture on the market these days. For example, below is the sectional/recliner sofa:

Having recently gone shopping for similar couches, I can tell you first hand that they pretty much all look like that. Nothing about that couch screams “Humphrey Bogart,” and the name certainly isn’t going to make one bit of difference in the purchasing decision. It’s not as if the name makes a big difference here, so it’s pretty silly to claim that anyone is buying anything in this collection of furniture because of the association with the actor. But, that’s what happens when you get ridiculous laws like publicity rights laws, that create a monopoly right out of someone’s name.

Filed Under: couches, humphrey bogart, privacy rights, publicity rights
Companies: ashley furniture