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Is there any legislative or regulatory work that is trying to address the gigantic mess that is music (or media in general) copyright and licensing in the US?

by fivre 6y ago

Is there any legislative or regulatory work that is trying to address the gigantic mess that is music (or media in general) copyright and licensing in the US? The DMCA is over 2 decades old, and seemingly nothing useful has come up since. The current system seems to do not much other than provide a big stick for the RIAA and MPAA to wield whenever they get bored and try to extract rent using law that still seems stuck in some mire of player piano era logic. The last sane system I encountered was when I was doing college radio, where you had a license to play music, were required to log what music you played, and were assured that some clearinghouse would sort out the royalties that needed paying out of the aggregate license fees. There seems to be mass confusion over what's legal on modern services like Twitch, where music is used in the same spirit as radio (background music chosen at the whim of the DJ/streamer), but isn't legal because it runs up against licensing schemes designed for including music in TV and film productions with massive budgets. There doesn't seem to be any clear way to handle shit as any sort of small content creator, as the rightsholders seem to want to preserve some weird fantasy land where they're both entitled to complex negotiated rights deals (which make sense if you're say, some massive entity a la NBC, and want to include music in a new big budget show) while also not providing anything for the rest of society (if you're not NBC- or CBS-sized, the people who negotiate rights contracts won't give you the time of day). If you're not one of the mammoth-class media conglomerates, your options appear to be "do not use music ever" or "use music casually, and then be on the receiving end of a massive legal bludgeon". You can't get the time (or music) of day, but if you do somehow manage to get it, then you _do_ get the time of day, but in the form of massive retroactive fees or whatever that you "should" have paid had the licensing cthulu been willing to engage with you before you determined that the rightsholders weren't interested in dealing with you. Right ol' kafkaesque nightmare, it is.

bleepblorp 6y ago
The DMCA was intended to give large content publishers a big stick to extract rent from third parties without needing to do any work. It is functioning as intended and is very unlikely to be reformed to favor the public interest. If anything, the next DMCA will be tilted even further towards publisher interests. The latest EU publisher payout copyright 'reform' -- which, among other things, banned photography of buildings and skylines -- is the most likely model for the next US copyright 'reform' measure. Congress only passes laws that large piles of money pay for[0], so the only prospect of copyright reform is if someone puts up a billion dollars in campaign contributions (bribes). Further money may be needed to re-stack the judiciary to ensure a reform will survive the wide-eyed fanatics on the USSC. This scenario is deeply unlikely as piles of money large enough to afford to spend a billion dollars purchasing legislation are very happy with the law as it stands. [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/S1537592714001595a.pdf/testing_theories_of_american_politics_elites_interest_groups_and_average_citizens.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
- wackget 6y ago
  >The latest EU publisher payout copyright 'reform' -- which, among other things, banned photography of buildings and skylines That sounds like absolute nonsense, unless you can cite a source. First of all the EU has no power to actually pass laws, only make draft recommendations. Secondly the whole "copyrighted buildings" thing is about prohibiting commercial use of a structure's image in advertisements etc. Hyperbole does not help your cause.
zanny 6y ago
The point of the DMCA and US copyright is not to be reasonable, just, fair, or whatever. It exists to make large corporations money via regulatory capture. There is no reform because reforming or fixing it is antithetical to the current intent - nigh unlimited power for a fortune 500 companies mob of lawyers (or affiliate) to take down and sue with impunity. The moneyed interests here have a trillion dollar industry on the line. The people just have... freedom? and sanity? to gain in return. And those are nebulous, unfocused interests. If the collective citizenry cannot unanimously push for police to not crush windpipes on the street anymore its never going to voice disdain for a thousand page book of artificial made up scarcity built up over hundreds of years.