(on behalf of Sony BMG Music UK); UMPI, Kobalt Music Publishing, LatinAutor, Warner Chappell, BMI - Broadcast Music Inc., UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA - UBEM, LatinAutor - UMPG, SOLAR Music Rights Management, AMRA, UMPG Publishing, CMRRA, LatinAutorPerf, LatinAutor - Warner Chappell, and 15 Music Rights Societies
What is happening here? Does YouTube have legal arrangements with all of these bodies to make sure they get their penny per kiloview?
Sadly, it seems like it’s going to be the norm now. I recall hearing the EU wants to legally mandate the mechanism of Content ID, just another nail in the coffin for the open web really.
Erm, what? Aren't those just two different ways of saying the same thing? The tragedy of the commons happens because there is no owner of the commons who can regulate their use.
Music (and likely other media) is typically licensed for distribution regionally or nationally. What you're seeing here is probably the (unexhaustive) laundry list of different rights holders for various international markets.
Remember region locking for DVDs? That wasn't (just) due to NSTC vs PAL.
Correct, in fact most DVDs were encoded 480p and 24 fps, so they're neither NTSC nor PAL.
Well except youtube keeps it in all this cases. Sad sad google now has to keep all the money for them self in a system they designed. What a unlucky coincident. Nothing they could do against that.
The arrangement is, essentially, yes, they have agreements with all of those bodies to give them the ad revenue in exchange for leaving the videos up
1. The viewer or listener of the music, you might or might not get the right to listen to music in your "territory" or country, and often the music is monetised which means you get ads, or a portion of your subscription revenue is apportioned to the "view";
2. YouTube itself, whom decides on the viewers' right to listen to the music based on their complicated set of algorithms or "claims" on the music track. They also have a complicated database of rights which includes not only rights holder relationships, but the much of the music catalogue itself;
3. A publisher of a piece of music. This copyright is for the composition (sheet music), and often YouTube may be able to work out the publishing right in a territory based on the melody match. So when you say "Content ID algo finds similarity in a dozen different recordings" this is in fact by design. Their melody matching system is in play as often publishers get paid on the composition;
4. The performance copyright of the music. This copyright is for the actual performance - whether it be live, on CD or MP3. Usually this is the record company, they will often upload or provide the music to YouTube and expect to get paid for performances. Content ID will then "claim" any third party copies of the performance and monetize them too (or sometimes block, depending on the territory of viewer, and what the publisher and performance owner wants to do for that territory);
5. Most countries also have music societies who collect on behalf of artists. So GEMA in Germany or PRS in the UK will collect money per view and by some complicated reporting will pay artists directly some small pittance every year if they are lucky. Some countries don't have societies which means YouTube doesn't need to pay. Where YouTube does not have an agreement in a country (less and less now) the music will not be monetized or may be blocked.
There are huge data reports which move around to keep this system going - and the collecting societies themselves work together to ensure that the money for a view of "Never Gonna Give Up" is passed to PRS who then occasionally will pay Rick Astley. It's a nice earner for a minority of musicians to have this income when all the cover versions and MP3 sales have dried up.
YouTube does have a lot of agreements with all the other parties and it's a constant job to renew and renegotiate these contracts constantly. You can see that in the rights notice you mention, this includes all the territories in which there are rights established: it's mind-boggling. No-one wants to lose control of this system and I imagine that makes it brittle and very difficult to disrupt...it's lawyers all the way down.
I hope that is not all too misleading!
The intellectual commons has been (and is), literally, subject to "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." scenarios. That shouldn't have ever been acceptable. Since no "normie" has ever given a damn about copyright terms only those who were financially incented to care (read: holders of copyrights) got a say. They used their lobby to make the change happen.
It totally won't enable over a hundred years of rent seeking for him, descendants who could inherit his property after he's dead and of course the monopolistic copyright giants.
I, on the other hand, am alive and would definitely have decided to become a world-renowned operatic singer, if only copyright wasn't so short that I couldn't pass on the rights to my artistic creations to my children's children's children's children's children's children's children. I could pass it on to my children's children's children's children's children's children, but I worry about their kids. Copyright isn't sufficiently long enough for that so I decided to produce no art at all instead, and become an engineer to produce trade secrets that can last indefinitely.
We definitely need an extension to copyright to incentivize long-term planners like me to create more art.
/s
Corporations can persist beyond the life of any humans within them for a good reason. It enables longer term investment and decision making to achieve things that can't be done in a single lifespan. Why should human lifespan be some essential time limit on property rights?
It also has the ethical problem that old or unhealthy people's work would be worth less than young healthy people's.
The median planning term for US corporations is far closer (even on a log scale) to one quarter than to one century. It's offensive to even suggest that any major US corporation is planning multiple human generations into the future, except, ironically, to be able to exploit their current IP holdings ad infinitum. Completely detached from reality, like most pro-IP arguments.
Neither scenario is testable. It ends up being a question of the kind of world you want to live in-- one where the estates of the dead lock up artifacts of culture and don't allow them to be used to create new works or one where new works based on older works can be more freely created.
Have you seen "Wicked" (or read the novels upon which it is based, or listened to the soundtrack, or purchased branded merch)? Have you read "The Last Ringbearer"? One of those works exists commercially and as a broad cultural phenomenon because expiration of copyright allowed it to. The other won't see a commercial release until at least 2043 because the estate of a dead man says it can't.
The success of Disney in "monetizing" and influencing culture with public domain stories makes me think there's significant validity in the argument of allowing old works to enter the public domain more quickly so they can be freely built-upon. It seems like both an economic and cultural good.
"Wicked" has probably done a lot more business than the estate of L. Frank Baum was going to in the early 2000s using the "The Wizard of Oz" properties.
What was the last movie you've watched that entered the public domain? I bet not a single person on this site will see that happen within their lifetimes.
The fact is copyright monopolists have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights.
> YouTube’s takedown algorithm claims that the following corporations all own the copyright to that audio recording that was MADE IN THE YEAR 1914: “SME, INgrooves (on behalf of Emerald); Wise Music Group, BMG Rights Management (US), LLC, UMPG Publishing, PEDL, Kobalt Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, Sony ATV Publishing, and 1 Music Rights Societies”
So what's going on here? Did some record company reissue the song later on CD, so YouTube is treating it like it was released at a later date than it was?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...:
> All works first published or released before January 1, 1926, have lost their copyright protection, effective January 1, 2021.
Google probably should compile a list of public domain recordings to act as a blacklist for YouTube copyright claims. Maybe that should even be legal a requirement for such automatic enforcement systems. If they partner with some library or national archive, such a project could help with media preservation efforts.
That's not the entire story. Sound recordings are a separate category, and pre-1923 sound recordings have a special clause that means they don't enter public domain until 2022.
Should or would. Why would they be interested in that, the current situation brings them money and that's all they seem to care about.
We should pass legislation that forces them to rectify it, at the expense of hiring actual humans if they have to.
When they’re looking at policing copyright on basically all modern works versus just the last 20 years worth of works, there has to be some automation involved. When you involve automation, you’re inevitably going to see dehumanizing situations like this. They can’t just decide to not uphold the law though.
Downside of having an automated restoration system that puts an actually offending piece of content back up: Multi-billion dollar lawsuits from the media cartels.
Happens all the time, they don't give a shit, in fact I'm starting to suspect that some music creators do this on purpose.
1. Unless you believe artists should make money solely from performances and not from streamed music which I was sorta onboard with until streaming-music-as-a-service turned into a gigantic industry.
In the US, sound recordings used to be handled under state copyright law. That's a phrase which should give any lawyer younger than 60 an aneurysm, as there is no such thing today - sound recording rights were brought into federal law in the 1970s, and preemption[0][1] means that states can't extend copyright law at all anymore. However, the actual recordings weren't properly grandfathered into federal law until 2018 with the passage of the MMA[2], which includes concepts from the CLASSICS Act[3].
Under the MMA, pre-federal sound recordings get a new copyright term on a sliding scale, with the lowest term length being 3 years for recordings made before 1923. Since the MMA was passed in 2018, those new terms expire... this January.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_preemption
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/301
Assuming there is no current legal rights holder for this recording, I firmly believe that companies that falsely assert their rights should be held criminally liable for theft.
The system is meant to flag the vast majority of uses of other people's videos but glosses over any questions about whether such use is considered "fair use" per local law or whether the presumed owner of the video actually cares or has granted permission for the use.
It assumes anyone using a video that's not theirs is doing so in violation of copyright, and refuses to allow that video to be posted. It's automatic and often wrong, but Youtube don't care because it's keeping the parties that can have a significant effect on Youtube's business (and bottom line) happy - the large conglomerates, corporations, and industries that profit off of media world wide.
They want any valuable media to be producing income for them forever, with Youtube and other online providers strong armed into policing their unfair system.
Thus, the imbalances in the present copyright system (infinitely extending copyrights providing rent to corporations) is extended into Youtube's de facto monopoly on sharing user videos.
Youtube's automated takedown system steps on ordinary content creators daily, but Youtube (Google) doesn't care, because individual content creators can't cause them as much trouble as corporations.
So, it's working just fine if you keep that in mind.
Youtube and Google are monopolies that need to be broken up.
How did it becoming a huge money maker for people who already have way too much change your views?
There is a better way: setting up your own video hosting platform.
I think it is not that difficult or expensive these days, although I have not done it, to set up your own website which allows you to upload videos for your own purposes.
That's the only business model that makes sense. Once you record a song, it's trivially copied and distributed. The musicians remain scarce: there's only one of them.
So are books. What do we do with writers?
This is like saying I shouldn't be able to sell widgets at a profit to cover the cost of construction my production line or for the effort spent to create the design.
Composers, designers, programmers, writers... What would be the equivalent for any of these? Working in real time?
It seems like what would really help would be to make rights public and easily accessible. However, making the rights platform into an NFT platform specifically wouldn't really help.
There is no such thing. Data is just bits. Really big numbers. Asserting ownership over numbers is simply delusional. The second that number is published, it's already over.
Non-fungible tokens do absolutely nothing to change those facts. They just let people delude themselves into believing they actually own stuff. The only thing they own is the token.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-warner-music-lawsuit-sett...
But now it is Google and venture capital perpetuating the slow, banal, bureaucratic injustice.
The good news is, there's no reason to believe that Google won't also be disrupted eventually. It's sort of happening already, with people voluntarily deciding to not use music in their videos, which makes YouTube less valuable as an asset, something Google brought upon themselves.
If tomorrow you come with an alternative that pleases customers but irks IP lobbies, you'll be fighting that battle alone while Youtube continues business as usual. Today the only alternative is pirating related, and it is notoriously a tough business model now that financial system players can just cut offending companies off their network.
Who wants to work for these companies anymore?
I don't know the full details, but as a point of interest, the Ig Nobel awards was a project at MIT, and after a dispute between the editor, Marc Abrahams, and MIT, he claimed to own the intellectual property rights and MIT dropped it and he moved it to Harvard where he is an alum.
here from "The Tech" http://tech.mit.edu/V115/N48/ignobel.48n.html
"Legal rift takes awards from MIT
For the past four years, the Ig Nobel prizes were awarded at MIT, by the Journal of Irreproducible Results and its successor, the Annals of Improbable Research. However, a legal dispute that arose between the MIT Museum - the publisher of AIR - and its editor, Marc Abrahams, caused the ceremony to be moved from MIT to Harvard.
Abrahams and the MIT Museum produced AIR for a year without a contract between them, but the museum wanted to create another organization to publish the magazine because handling the AIR required too much effort from the museum staff, said Warren A. Seamans, director of the MIT Museum.
Last March, contract negotiations broke down, and Abrahams claimed sole control of AIR. To avoid a lawsuit, MIT abandoned the magazine and the Ig Nobel prizes."
[0] www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523.amp
Soon a single stroke of a piano will be all it takes to take down videos :(
I'm rambling, but I'm over youtube. I'll access it via third party tools stripping adverts, and recording (just like I did as a child) but I don't see them as necessary.
Youtube was a delight before. And generally still can be. But not necessary and increaslingly clunky and way too overly advert dominated.
Maybe they should rebrand it as a historical archive and be done with it. If they can't make the copyright work, sunset it like almost everything else and let other players emerge who can.
/endrant
We need suitable alternatives. Maybe something decentralized in nature.
