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Awesome, it was Metallica who started the whole nonsense behind today's state of DMCA. Finally getting some taste of their own medicine.

deleted 6y ago
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splaytreemap 6y ago
Metallica almost certainly still got paid, so I doubt they care much. Blizzard is probably furious.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Maybe they'd need to be paid twice - is there a way to license the music for online streaming? And was it done as part of the contract in this case?
- Mc_Big_G 6y ago
  Metallica is probably not in it for the $ much these days. I'd wager it's more about ego, so this probably stung. Deservedly.
lawnchair_larry 6y ago
As a teenager, I thought I had a right to enjoy their work without paying for it. But this attitude surprises me from adults. Why don’t bands deserve to be paid for their product?
- blandflakes 6y ago
  I want to pay artists for their work. I don't want to lease the bytes representing my access from a company, and then have them vanish later, because some kind of licensing agreement changed. Metallica was a huge driving force and public supporter behind the shitshow behavior. Do you like rootkits? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
  - VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
    well the industry corrected itself by pushing a la carte subscription music services which is what the freedom fighters hate but it turns out it's exactly what the people wanted all along.
    - blandflakes 6y ago
      I think it's pretty valid to want to pay a price for music, and then take that file wherever you go, without having to reconnect to update a license (I both pay for a subscription to Spotify and mp3s a la carte). Of course, that's also available today, but that's not really relevant to the problem being discussed, which is: it's possible to want to pay artists, while also finding overzealous enforcement of the DMCA problematic.
      - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
        I don’t think so. You have no right to ownership just because you buy the song. You didn’t commission it, you didn’t write it, produce it, market it, and so on. All you did was pay a couple dollars. In effect, all you’re doing is buying a license to play the song for personal use, not the right to keep the file forever.
        blandflakes 6y ago
        This is a weird take. There are stores that literally grant you that right, today. I'm pretty sure that even in the US, a court is not going to grant a musician the right to force you to delete the MP3s you bought off Amazon music. What is the basis for your belief that you don't have a right to the file you bought? Or are you disagreeing with the existence of stores that operate that way? Or with... basically the entire history of hard copy distribution, like cassettes, CDs, vinyl...
        ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
        https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-your-digital-downloads-hint-its-not-you/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-your-digital-download... Amazon actually will delete music from your hard drive. 5. Reservation of Rights Except for the rights explicitly granted to you in the Terms of Use, all right, title and interest in the Service, the Software and the Digital Content are reserved and retained by us, our Digital Content providers, and our licensors. You do not acquire any ownership rights in the Software or Digital Content as a result of downloading Software or Digital Content. And yeah I do disagree with the license of hard copy distribution. I don’t think just because I buy a book I can do whatever I want, even burning it. I really think the supposed harm to consumers is vastly exaggerated in HN; on the other hand, the harm to artists and creators is serious, especially to those without the privilege of patronage.
- VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
  no no no they're supposed to give their music away for free and then make money on concert tickets and t-shirts
  - sidpatil 6y ago
    That's essentially what most musicians end up doing when they stream on platforms like Spotify.
- dcwca 6y ago
  There are cases where it’s less important for bands to be paid for their music than it is to not sue children and not cripple consumer technology.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    Who in this discussion was advocating suing children?
    - dcwca 6y ago
      Metallica
- zucker42 6y ago
  How exactly does what happened here -- hundreds of streams, including the official Twitch stream, muting themselves to avoid losing their careers or getting sued for absurd amounts of money -- contribute to bands getting paid?
- ouid 6y ago
  Lets say that all of the earths water becomes polluted except for an infinite well that only you have access to. Do you not have the right to get paid for it? Shouldn't you get paid something like the value added to humanity? So, everything? You should get paid everything? What if the situation were different, and there where billions of people searching for infinite wells when all of the water became polluted and you were the lucky one to find it. Do you deserve everything now? How else were you supposed to have been incentivized to search for infinite wells if not for the possibility that everything would be yours upon finding it. Alright, what if it weren't water? What if it were something that, instead of keeping you alive, just made life worth living? I reckon you probably couldn't get everything for it, but surely you could get a lot. Does that seem like a bad system to you? I tell you what. I have a lot of money, I'll pay you to go searching for the infinite well of happiness (you can't survive on credit forever), and in exchange, it becomes mine when you find it, and then I can sell it for everything. The premise that monopoly rights on distribution are necessary to incentivize the searching is pretty severely undermined by the fact that those monopoly rights are aggregated by companies which incentivize the searching via other means.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    You’re comparing a routine transaction of paying someone for their performance, to an unrealistic hypothetical involving the monopolization of a critical resource required to survive more than 3 days. It’s hard to take that argument seriously. You’re misusing the word monopoly. Everyone has a monopoly on their own labor. But they don’t have a monopoly on music, and neither does Metallica. You’re not entitled to a man’s song and dance under any circumstances that don’t involve him entering into a mutually agreeable transaction with you. If this makes life not worth living, hopefully you can find someone else willing to accept your offer of giving them nothing in exchange for it. If you can’t, well, tough shit I guess. You still don’t deserve it for free. It’s not Lars’ problem if you will die without his music.
    - ouid 6y ago
      I'm not talking about a transaction where someone performs for me, that's not what copyright refers to, I'm talking about an infinite well. And the comparison was between any infinite well and an infinite well of water. Granting someone scarcity rights on an unscarce resources is inefficient. Society would, instantaneously, produce a lot more value if all of the things that were free to reproduce were reproduced at the quantity demanded. The question of copyright has ALWAYS been one of incentive, and I think my argument to that point is pretty clear. Further, I am not misusing the word monopoly. Copyright is precisely monopoly distribution rights.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  > Why don’t bands deserve to be paid for their product? The presentation suggests that Metallica goes unpaid for their product. I suspect there are many fat bank deposits that indicate otherwise. What I feel is more important is that the assertion obfuscates the primary motivation in play. Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. This government-granted privilege isn't one that's enjoyed by the vast bulk of producers. Worse, copyright gatekeepers have twisted the constitutional purpose of copyright - from encouraging the progress of science and the useful arts - into a pampered entitlement of never-ending profit.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    > Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. No, this is not a story of the evil capitalist overlord oppressing the little guy. Save the hero narrative. Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. The good news is there are actually a lot of them who don’t, and that’s their personal decision. You’re allowed to take it for free if they set their price at zero, but you’re not allowed to set their price at zero for them.
    - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
      > Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. Broke bands aren't who are paying legislators for ever-racheting copyright laws - each of which comes at the public's expense and further betrays the bargain between copyright holders and the public. and - Corruption fueled copyright laws tend to favor powerful, wealthy gatekeepers (by design). For everyone else there are far better methodologies to making a living. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/02273417726/how-being-more-open-human-awesome-can-save-anyone-worried-about-making-money-entertainment.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/02273417726/how-b...
Dirlewanger 6y ago
People just can't let something from 21 years ago go, can they? The band's done a complete 180 on everything regarding digital distribution, and it's been this way for years (I'm sure owning their masters and own label has something to do with it). You want a real culprit who actually thoroughly abused (and still to this day) the DMCA? Get mad at the RIAA. Also, if it weren't Metallica, it would have been someone else; virtually every big artist at the time felt the same way but didn't speak up.
- michalstanko 6y ago
  Not sure why are you downvoted. It's hard to find a similarly popular band sharing more stuff online for free these days than Metallica. Besides, the entire Napster thing was about a song "I Disappear" being available through Napster BEFORE it was even finished and sent to CD manufacturing, and, don't forget, it all happened in 2000. It has not been on their radar for about 20 years now. Hating based on skimming headlines of inaccurate articles is surely easier than trying to understand the band's motives.
  - jcpham2 6y ago
    I guarantee you people still volunteer their time to bootleg anything this band does on the internet, forever.
- capsulecorp 6y ago
  I think many people don't buy their "complete 180", as that only came after their massively failed campaign. I have no doubt that if these guys were successful in their initial endeavor there would have never been a 180 as you call it. So really, there's not much to praise about a group who tried their hardest to do the wrong thing, and settled for the alternative when they failed measurably. Glad this happened to them, well deserved.
- throwmusician 6y ago
  As artists, why shouldn't Metallica get paid for their work? I can't believe the audacity of people thinking they should just be able to steal others' (by virtue of copying) music. The people I know in the music industry are some of the hardest working that I know... And to be clear, Metallica was never against online streaming / downloading, only illegal piracy.
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

splaytreemap 6y ago

Metallica almost certainly still got paid, so I doubt they care much. Blizzard is probably furious.

kzrdude 6y ago
Maybe they'd need to be paid twice - is there a way to license the music for online streaming? And was it done as part of the contract in this case?
Mc_Big_G 6y ago
Metallica is probably not in it for the $ much these days. I'd wager it's more about ego, so this probably stung. Deservedly.

lawnchair_larry 6y ago

As a teenager, I thought I had a right to enjoy their work without paying for it. But this attitude surprises me from adults. Why don’t bands deserve to be paid for their product?

blandflakes 6y ago
I want to pay artists for their work. I don't want to lease the bytes representing my access from a company, and then have them vanish later, because some kind of licensing agreement changed. Metallica was a huge driving force and public supporter behind the shitshow behavior. Do you like rootkits? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
- VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
  well the industry corrected itself by pushing a la carte subscription music services which is what the freedom fighters hate but it turns out it's exactly what the people wanted all along.
  - blandflakes 6y ago
    I think it's pretty valid to want to pay a price for music, and then take that file wherever you go, without having to reconnect to update a license (I both pay for a subscription to Spotify and mp3s a la carte). Of course, that's also available today, but that's not really relevant to the problem being discussed, which is: it's possible to want to pay artists, while also finding overzealous enforcement of the DMCA problematic.
    - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
      I don’t think so. You have no right to ownership just because you buy the song. You didn’t commission it, you didn’t write it, produce it, market it, and so on. All you did was pay a couple dollars. In effect, all you’re doing is buying a license to play the song for personal use, not the right to keep the file forever.
      - blandflakes 6y ago
        This is a weird take. There are stores that literally grant you that right, today. I'm pretty sure that even in the US, a court is not going to grant a musician the right to force you to delete the MP3s you bought off Amazon music. What is the basis for your belief that you don't have a right to the file you bought? Or are you disagreeing with the existence of stores that operate that way? Or with... basically the entire history of hard copy distribution, like cassettes, CDs, vinyl...
        ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
        https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-your-digital-downloads-hint-its-not-you/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-your-digital-download... Amazon actually will delete music from your hard drive. 5. Reservation of Rights Except for the rights explicitly granted to you in the Terms of Use, all right, title and interest in the Service, the Software and the Digital Content are reserved and retained by us, our Digital Content providers, and our licensors. You do not acquire any ownership rights in the Software or Digital Content as a result of downloading Software or Digital Content. And yeah I do disagree with the license of hard copy distribution. I don’t think just because I buy a book I can do whatever I want, even burning it. I really think the supposed harm to consumers is vastly exaggerated in HN; on the other hand, the harm to artists and creators is serious, especially to those without the privilege of patronage.
VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
no no no they're supposed to give their music away for free and then make money on concert tickets and t-shirts
- sidpatil 6y ago
  That's essentially what most musicians end up doing when they stream on platforms like Spotify.
dcwca 6y ago
There are cases where it’s less important for bands to be paid for their music than it is to not sue children and not cripple consumer technology.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  Who in this discussion was advocating suing children?
  - dcwca 6y ago
    Metallica
zucker42 6y ago
How exactly does what happened here -- hundreds of streams, including the official Twitch stream, muting themselves to avoid losing their careers or getting sued for absurd amounts of money -- contribute to bands getting paid?
ouid 6y ago
Lets say that all of the earths water becomes polluted except for an infinite well that only you have access to. Do you not have the right to get paid for it? Shouldn't you get paid something like the value added to humanity? So, everything? You should get paid everything? What if the situation were different, and there where billions of people searching for infinite wells when all of the water became polluted and you were the lucky one to find it. Do you deserve everything now? How else were you supposed to have been incentivized to search for infinite wells if not for the possibility that everything would be yours upon finding it. Alright, what if it weren't water? What if it were something that, instead of keeping you alive, just made life worth living? I reckon you probably couldn't get everything for it, but surely you could get a lot. Does that seem like a bad system to you? I tell you what. I have a lot of money, I'll pay you to go searching for the infinite well of happiness (you can't survive on credit forever), and in exchange, it becomes mine when you find it, and then I can sell it for everything. The premise that monopoly rights on distribution are necessary to incentivize the searching is pretty severely undermined by the fact that those monopoly rights are aggregated by companies which incentivize the searching via other means.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  You’re comparing a routine transaction of paying someone for their performance, to an unrealistic hypothetical involving the monopolization of a critical resource required to survive more than 3 days. It’s hard to take that argument seriously. You’re misusing the word monopoly. Everyone has a monopoly on their own labor. But they don’t have a monopoly on music, and neither does Metallica. You’re not entitled to a man’s song and dance under any circumstances that don’t involve him entering into a mutually agreeable transaction with you. If this makes life not worth living, hopefully you can find someone else willing to accept your offer of giving them nothing in exchange for it. If you can’t, well, tough shit I guess. You still don’t deserve it for free. It’s not Lars’ problem if you will die without his music.
  - ouid 6y ago
    I'm not talking about a transaction where someone performs for me, that's not what copyright refers to, I'm talking about an infinite well. And the comparison was between any infinite well and an infinite well of water. Granting someone scarcity rights on an unscarce resources is inefficient. Society would, instantaneously, produce a lot more value if all of the things that were free to reproduce were reproduced at the quantity demanded. The question of copyright has ALWAYS been one of incentive, and I think my argument to that point is pretty clear. Further, I am not misusing the word monopoly. Copyright is precisely monopoly distribution rights.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
> Why don’t bands deserve to be paid for their product? The presentation suggests that Metallica goes unpaid for their product. I suspect there are many fat bank deposits that indicate otherwise. What I feel is more important is that the assertion obfuscates the primary motivation in play. Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. This government-granted privilege isn't one that's enjoyed by the vast bulk of producers. Worse, copyright gatekeepers have twisted the constitutional purpose of copyright - from encouraging the progress of science and the useful arts - into a pampered entitlement of never-ending profit.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  > Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. No, this is not a story of the evil capitalist overlord oppressing the little guy. Save the hero narrative. Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. The good news is there are actually a lot of them who don’t, and that’s their personal decision. You’re allowed to take it for free if they set their price at zero, but you’re not allowed to set their price at zero for them.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    > Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. Broke bands aren't who are paying legislators for ever-racheting copyright laws - each of which comes at the public's expense and further betrays the bargain between copyright holders and the public. and - Corruption fueled copyright laws tend to favor powerful, wealthy gatekeepers (by design). For everyone else there are far better methodologies to making a living. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/02273417726/how-being-more-open-human-awesome-can-save-anyone-worried-about-making-money-entertainment.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/02273417726/how-b...

Dirlewanger 6y ago

People just can't let something from 21 years ago go, can they? The band's done a complete 180 on everything regarding digital distribution, and it's been this way for years (I'm sure owning their masters and own label has something to do with it). You want a real culprit who actually thoroughly abused (and still to this day) the DMCA? Get mad at the RIAA. Also, if it weren't Metallica, it would have been someone else; virtually every big artist at the time felt the same way but didn't speak up.

michalstanko 6y ago
Not sure why are you downvoted. It's hard to find a similarly popular band sharing more stuff online for free these days than Metallica. Besides, the entire Napster thing was about a song "I Disappear" being available through Napster BEFORE it was even finished and sent to CD manufacturing, and, don't forget, it all happened in 2000. It has not been on their radar for about 20 years now. Hating based on skimming headlines of inaccurate articles is surely easier than trying to understand the band's motives.
- jcpham2 6y ago
  I guarantee you people still volunteer their time to bootleg anything this band does on the internet, forever.
capsulecorp 6y ago
I think many people don't buy their "complete 180", as that only came after their massively failed campaign. I have no doubt that if these guys were successful in their initial endeavor there would have never been a 180 as you call it. So really, there's not much to praise about a group who tried their hardest to do the wrong thing, and settled for the alternative when they failed measurably. Glad this happened to them, well deserved.
throwmusician 6y ago
As artists, why shouldn't Metallica get paid for their work? I can't believe the audacity of people thinking they should just be able to steal others' (by virtue of copying) music. The people I know in the music industry are some of the hardest working that I know... And to be clear, Metallica was never against online streaming / downloading, only illegal piracy.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]