9 ms·

Schroedinger's streaming service just died

257 points by samizdis 4y ago

lxe 4y ago
I can't believe how long this battle has been going on. It's been decades since the whole music industry reshuffle, and both artists and consumers continue to get shafted.
- xbar 4y ago
  Given a two-decade gap between 12% and 50% artist revenues, it seems like a series of label-oriented class actions should begin brewing, to the tune of tens of billions.
shtolcers 4y ago
..Or did it?
- dylan604 4y ago
  Just don't open the box, please. You'll ruin everything
googlryas 4y ago
Is this just wordplay? When you click "Buy now", are you just buying a license? Is "ownership" just a byproduct of physical goods? If I say I own a record, the proof is basically in the pudding. But how do I prove I own an MP3 file? I'd probably need to do something like show a receipt for it. But then again, what if I have shown that receipt to 100 people I've sold "my" copy of the MP3 file to? With physical reality, exact duplication is difficult, and is already covered under those existing laws. It seems like computing was big on licensing, even when tech was nascent and there wasn't clearly reams of money to be made in it, there must be a reason for it.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  It depends on whether you consider the difference in royalty rates to be just wordplay.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    No, certainly not. It does seem wrong for one group to claim one thing, and then another group to claim a different thing, both of which serve their own financial ends and not the actual content creators. Having said that, I was mostly talking about the difference between licensing and buying from a consumer's perspective. There are still a ton of restrictions which come with "owning" something, but those are just ignored by the author because those were laws passed by a legislature and not a license term by a private company.
  - Closi 4y ago
    > It depends on whether you consider the difference in royalty rates to be just wordplay. Royalty rates are a completely different issue to the text shown when you are purchasing - but wouldn't you expect different royalty rates for different types of product/media as an artist? As in, if I sell a vinyl record of your new single for $10 with your photo on the front and plaster it all over the record shops (with high distribution and manufacture costs) that the fee might be different than what I pay you for a $0.99 MP3 download (lower price but zero incremental cost), and that the $0.99 download fee might be different to the fee that the artist would charge for a live broadcast (highly dependent on licence context)?
- antihero 4y ago
  I own my files because you cannot take them from me. That is all that there is to it.
- clownbaby 4y ago
  And then, along came the blockchain and NFTs... one receipt per purchase?? This obviously doesn't help the streaming services, but, this - or something similar would help solve the quantum entanglement of digital music.
  - Closi 4y ago
    This metaphor is really not appropriate. We are really just talking about the definitions for 'Sale' and 'License' in a contract which we haven't been given access to read. NFT's don't solve this, unless we are talking about making licenses transferrable, but the author seems pretty clear that any form of license isn't acceptable in their eyes.
  - _carbyau_ 4y ago
    While I understand that NFTs could be used as a receipt for a digital purchase - the NFT system would have to scale impossibly well to keep track of the infinite copies of infinite digital goods multiplied by the billions of people. Blockchain might be amazeballs but it doesn't seem to scale THAT well.
- EMIRELADERO 4y ago
  > But how do I prove I own an MP3 file? Ownership of digital assets is determined by physical possesion and legal ownership of the storage medium in which those assets are. The only exceptions to this rule are in copyright law (regulating what you can do with a copy you own) and personal data laws such as GDPR.
- wmf 4y ago
  From a consumer perspective, ownership comes with first sale rights (e.g. the right to resell) but a license doesn't. There has been little progress so far on "owning" purely digital copies of anything because copyright holders oppose it and many activists oppose the DRM that would be required to enforce reselling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
  - mpnordland 4y ago
    We don't need DRM to enforce reselling. Equipment and methods to reproduce physical media are widespread today and there isn't a way to prevent copying and then reselling. Other than the marginal cost of CDs, Vinyl, cassettes, etc. Purely digital just drops that cost from a few cents to nothing. DRM free music stores have existed for over a decade and already de-facto operate in this manner. There isn't a practical reason to require DRM in order to have ownership over a digital copy of a song.
- kbenson 4y ago
  The issue, as outlined in the article, is that artists get different rates for whether a song was "sold" or "licensed" (with licensing giving a much higher percentage to the artist), and while services presented their sales as license agreements to the end customer, they presented them as sales to the artists, allowing the streaming service to restrict user rights while also not paying artists the much higher percentage. There are of course different ways to interpret what a sale of a digital good is (as you note), but legally speaking with regard to the status quo, it seems like something large might be changing. Either end users might find they have a lot more rights (the ones they've traditionally had for purchased items), or artists will get a lot more money because they've been getting screwed for decades for licensed works, or possibly we'll see new legislation codifying the current status quo to protect the large media companies (because for some reason legislators often seem to think past ability to make money is a reason in itself to protect the method in which it was done, regardless of legality).
  - texec 4y ago
    I think it's important to note that streaming services mostly take a fixed fee. This dispute was between the artist and the label. The difference in royalties was part of the record deal and Four Tet reached a settlement with this former record label.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > But how do I prove I own an MP3 file? The letters N, F, and T echo about in the background.
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    Which will then contain a link to the file, since storing the whole file on the chain is too expensive. Still, you'll now pay >50$ for each file, 98% of which are transaction fees - surprisingly surpassing the already horrible pay ratio of music labels.
    - lelandfe 4y ago
      You will also have to cross your fingers that your NFT's link to mediafire.com/MyMP3File stays live for, uh, forever.
      - flir 4y ago
        Store the file's hash instead?
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      > Which will then contain a link to the file Why? You already have a copy on your local machine ("local machine" being anywhere you'd want to play that file). What's more important is the hash; if you really care about remote storage, IPFS kills both those birds with one stone. > Still, you'll now pay >50$ for each file, 98% of which are transaction fees There are other NFT-capable blockchains besides Ethereum, you know :)
      - AlexandrB 4y ago
        As someone who loves organizing my music, a file hash would be a shitty solution. I want to be able to edit tags and transcode the song (e.g. for iTunes compatibility) without losing ownership.
        4y ago
- hbossy 4y ago
  >But how do I prove I own an MP3 file? It's not your job to prove you own something but their to prove you stole it.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > their [job] to prove you stole it. That's a sound legal principle, but unfortunately it doesn't apply in all situations and in all jurisdictions: "If the defendant is considered to have a criminal lifestyle, the court ... must decide whether he has benefited from his ‘general criminal conduct’ and, if so, by how much. ... The burden is on the defendant to rebut any assumption made." https://www.rahmanravelli.co.uk/expertise/confiscation/confiscation-the-proceeds-of-crime-act-2002/ https://www.rahmanravelli.co.uk/expertise/confiscation/confi...
Closi 4y ago
> The confiscation of your rights to your digital media depends on the fiction that you are licensing the music, not buying it. The fact that there's a giant "buy now" button on the interface notwithstanding, tech and entertainment companies maintain that you are engaged in a licensing deal, like an advertiser buying synch rights for a hamburger commercial. This post makes everything seem needlessly complicated - you are buying a licence, there is no contradiction here. How else would digital media / sale of MP3's work without licences? Is the author suggesting that everyone should legally be able to freely transfer/distribute their MP3's to anyone with no legal limit? I don't see any alternative to licences mentioned anywhere in the post - just lots of handwaving about some sort of wave function collapse (where wave function collapse just means a contract that has different terms for a digital purchase instead of a physical purchase).
- smallnix 4y ago
  I understood the point of the post to be about musicians not getting licensing royals.
  - Closi 4y ago
    It's a post that talks about the specifics of what a contract defines as a 'sale' and a 'licensing' vs what OP personally defines a 'sale' and a 'licencing' to mean, without actually sharing how the contract defines 'sale' and 'licencing' (which will be explicitly defined in a definitions section). But IMO because there isn't that much substance there, this idea that a 'sale' might have different definitions is referred to as a 'quantum state' rather than sharing the actual definition of 'sale' used whatever contract they are referencing.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > How else would digital media / sale of MP3's work without licences? Is the author suggesting that everyone should legally be able to freely transfer/distribute their MP3's to anyone with no legal limit? What would be wrong with the same first sale doctrine that applies to physical instances of digital media (such as CDs) ? CD: You buy it, you are free to resell it to someone else; you are not free to make copies. Digital data only: You buy it, you can resell it someone else (0); you are not free give additional copies to anyone else (1) (0) not likely to happen (1) you can of course make your own copies, eg. for backup or across devices Would enforcing such a legal structure be possible? Yes and no. Everyone knows that once you could rip CDs, the legal structure for that format was already severely challenged by people's actual behavior, so there's nothing particularly new there.
ghostly_s 4y ago
Except as noted in the linked BBC coverage, Four Tet's case was settled out of court (because he could not afford to fight it) and thus establishes no legal precedent for other artists to leverage.
- scoofy 4y ago
  >Four Tet Wow... Haven't heard that name in a long time. Saw him at the MFA in Boston so long ago i can barely remember. Great artist, I'm glad he at least showed it could be a reasonable line of argument.
  - isoprophlex 4y ago
    The album "new energy" has become one of my all time favorites. Check out some recent work. He still produces some insanely hi quality tracks, not all under the "four tet" moniker. Some of the ungoogle-able "unicode hell" releases are very good, and his "KH" tracks are dancefloor killers.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Yeah, there's no chance that this golden goose could ever be killed in a modern democracy. If the companies would still be profitable paying 50% royalties, then the 38% difference between that and 12% royalties represents the amount the industry will be able to spend (without thinking about it for a moment) to bribe politicians, create fake public-interest organizations and think-tanks, and settle cases like this.
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    > to bribe politicians, create fake public-interest organizations and think-tanks In other words to fool you, the voter. But if you've been fooled, how do you know these things? Are you acting on your knowledge and voting against those corrupt politicians and against those who agree with the propaganda? How does nobody else know this?
    - 4y ago
mbfg 4y ago
in another world, it is still alive.
jonplackett 4y ago
> eat its cake and have it, too Someone been watching Manhunt
mosfetarium 4y ago
I feel like this issue is brought on by the fact that it seems like copyright law hasn't been properly reexamined for the modern era. I support the notion that the ideal model is people pay the rightsholder in order to enjoy the media, and offering resale of pure-digital media instead leads to some weird "You make money based on the peak simultaneous number of owners, rather than the number of people who consumed it", which just doesn't make any sense to me as an economic model. So yeah, you see labels calling the user purchase one thing, in order to make it line up with the intent of the consumer relationship, then on the royalties they call it a different thing to make it line-up with that intent. I don't feel the publishers are violating the intent of these relationships at all, it's just that copyright law being extremely out of date requires stupid language games. The correct solution is to re-examine copyright law to either establish that the intent is you pay the rightsholder to get access for you as a distinct individual, or that the intent is that you are purchasing resalable access, and be done with this nonsense. I absolutely don't blame artists for trying though, the labels screw them so it seems fair that they should try to screw the labels.
- TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
  You can resell books, movies, music, and games. Why should it matter if they're distributed through a digital or physical medium? Copyright is just abused to milk as much money as possible and restrict usage.
8bitsrule 4y ago
Good news about the Four Tet decision. He's been a consistently high-quality, highly-innovative EM creator for over 20 years. Hopefully getting 50% of the streaming and download take instead of 13% will rock that industry. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61871547 https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61871547
- salgernon 4y ago
  By coincidence, after reading this submitted article and not knowing the named artist, I completed the game “Universal Paperclips” by “Everybody House Games” today, and the brief credit scroll listed ‘10 MIDI’ by Four Tet, (c) 2017 BMG So off to listen to his content now. (Edited slightly)
Waterluvian 4y ago
“but at least it's a law, created by a democratically accountable legislature.” I feel like we need to stop lying to ourselves like this. Copyright is getting ridiculously out of hand because lobbyists hold the power and the system is not really accountable anymore.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Congress doesn't even bother reading the bills they pass. Most of the actual details are deferred to the administrative bureaucracy. That's where the real power is.
  - bitexploder 4y ago
    The deep state is a real thing. I don’t think it has to be explicitly negative, but there are a lot of unelected bureaucrats that hold a lot of power with minimal accountability and visibility.
    - feet 4y ago
      Yea its the corporations, lobbyists, think-tanks and those who pay them. Its consolidation of corporate power. Its fascism
    - vajrabum 4y ago
      Are you talking about Government employees or lobbyists? BTW, notice that their power is circumscribed by the law. When that changes their powers change.
      - feet 4y ago
        Lmao what? They write the laws! Think tanks are literally paid to draft legislation
        sailfast 4y ago
        Think tanks are not the government. They are private institutions. Typically when one uses the term "deep state" you mean someone working in the government that has their own agenda and/or are acting on a specific conspiracy / cabal agenda counter to the direction of, say, the administration providing the guidance and direction. This is why the person asked about employees vs. lobbyists.
underlines 4y ago
personal anectode: I'm born in 1986 and had internet since 1998. Immediately got into contact with IRC's XDCC file-sharing and Usenet bin groups. Never paid for music, started burning CDs in 1999 and owned the first commercial MP3 player. Only when Spotify came around, I started to pay for music out of lazyness to further take care of my HDD sized, tediously managed and tagged MP3 (and later M4A) library. So at least for a large part of my life, that crazy industry didn't get a dime from me. Reading about their practices now makes me feel even less sorry.
BLKNSLVR 4y ago
Could I sell my bandcamp account? The irony of this is that bandcamp seems to be a far more direct-to-the-artist model than any streaming service (which is why I use it), because it (it's hard to avoid puns here) records which albums I've purchased so that I can listen to them via the app / website or download lossless copies of said albums for my own curated library and to be able to listen to offline. This, however, gives my account a certain value as to the content accessible through it, and therefore my account has some resale value* - but this resale pays nothing to the artist or label or bandcamp; it's much more like a physical item (other than that if bandcamp goes under then it's lost, or if bandcamp don't like their accounts being re-sold it could get terminated due to breach of terms of service or something like that). * my musical taste means that this resale value is very low and it would be difficult to find a purchaser, but that's beside the point.
- timando 4y ago
  The terms of service might not let you sell it, but I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to change the email address and password on the account and give the login details to someone else in exchange for some money.
skybrian 4y ago
Here's the news story without the editorializing. Maybe change the link? Four Tet wins royalty battle over streaming music https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61871547 https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61871547
sailfast 4y ago
TIL Record Labels were double dealing the license vs. purchase royalties. That's really sad, and I'm glad somebody finally made some case law out of this that will benefit artists moving forward. EDIT: I forgot it was settled out of court so it's not "case law" but definitely tells record labels that they will probably lose in the future. They must owe billions...
deltaonefour 4y ago
>Schroedinger's streaming service just died It's both alive and dead at the same time. Like the cat.
jjmorrison 4y ago
Did it tho?
CyborgCabbage 4y ago
More and more I feel copyright just doesn't make any sense in the digital age. Software engineers have already cottoned on and started doing open source, I hope we see a similar movement for art and media.

257 points by samizdis 4y ago

lxe 4y ago

I can't believe how long this battle has been going on. It's been decades since the whole music industry reshuffle, and both artists and consumers continue to get shafted.

xbar 4y ago
Given a two-decade gap between 12% and 50% artist revenues, it seems like a series of label-oriented class actions should begin brewing, to the tune of tens of billions.

shtolcers 4y ago

..Or did it?

dylan604 4y ago
Just don't open the box, please. You'll ruin everything

googlryas 4y ago

Is this just wordplay? When you click "Buy now", are you just buying a license? Is "ownership" just a byproduct of physical goods? If I say I own a record, the proof is basically in the pudding. But how do I prove I own an MP3 file? I'd probably need to do something like show a receipt for it. But then again, what if I have shown that receipt to 100 people I've sold "my" copy of the MP3 file to? With physical reality, exact duplication is difficult, and is already covered under those existing laws. It seems like computing was big on licensing, even when tech was nascent and there wasn't clearly reams of money to be made in it, there must be a reason for it.

mannykannot 4y ago
It depends on whether you consider the difference in royalty rates to be just wordplay.
- googlryas 4y ago
  No, certainly not. It does seem wrong for one group to claim one thing, and then another group to claim a different thing, both of which serve their own financial ends and not the actual content creators. Having said that, I was mostly talking about the difference between licensing and buying from a consumer's perspective. There are still a ton of restrictions which come with "owning" something, but those are just ignored by the author because those were laws passed by a legislature and not a license term by a private company.
- Closi 4y ago
  > It depends on whether you consider the difference in royalty rates to be just wordplay. Royalty rates are a completely different issue to the text shown when you are purchasing - but wouldn't you expect different royalty rates for different types of product/media as an artist? As in, if I sell a vinyl record of your new single for $10 with your photo on the front and plaster it all over the record shops (with high distribution and manufacture costs) that the fee might be different than what I pay you for a $0.99 MP3 download (lower price but zero incremental cost), and that the $0.99 download fee might be different to the fee that the artist would charge for a live broadcast (highly dependent on licence context)?
antihero 4y ago
I own my files because you cannot take them from me. That is all that there is to it.
clownbaby 4y ago
And then, along came the blockchain and NFTs... one receipt per purchase?? This obviously doesn't help the streaming services, but, this - or something similar would help solve the quantum entanglement of digital music.
- Closi 4y ago
  This metaphor is really not appropriate. We are really just talking about the definitions for 'Sale' and 'License' in a contract which we haven't been given access to read. NFT's don't solve this, unless we are talking about making licenses transferrable, but the author seems pretty clear that any form of license isn't acceptable in their eyes.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  While I understand that NFTs could be used as a receipt for a digital purchase - the NFT system would have to scale impossibly well to keep track of the infinite copies of infinite digital goods multiplied by the billions of people. Blockchain might be amazeballs but it doesn't seem to scale THAT well.
EMIRELADERO 4y ago
> But how do I prove I own an MP3 file? Ownership of digital assets is determined by physical possesion and legal ownership of the storage medium in which those assets are. The only exceptions to this rule are in copyright law (regulating what you can do with a copy you own) and personal data laws such as GDPR.
wmf 4y ago
From a consumer perspective, ownership comes with first sale rights (e.g. the right to resell) but a license doesn't. There has been little progress so far on "owning" purely digital copies of anything because copyright holders oppose it and many activists oppose the DRM that would be required to enforce reselling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
- mpnordland 4y ago
  We don't need DRM to enforce reselling. Equipment and methods to reproduce physical media are widespread today and there isn't a way to prevent copying and then reselling. Other than the marginal cost of CDs, Vinyl, cassettes, etc. Purely digital just drops that cost from a few cents to nothing. DRM free music stores have existed for over a decade and already de-facto operate in this manner. There isn't a practical reason to require DRM in order to have ownership over a digital copy of a song.
kbenson 4y ago
The issue, as outlined in the article, is that artists get different rates for whether a song was "sold" or "licensed" (with licensing giving a much higher percentage to the artist), and while services presented their sales as license agreements to the end customer, they presented them as sales to the artists, allowing the streaming service to restrict user rights while also not paying artists the much higher percentage. There are of course different ways to interpret what a sale of a digital good is (as you note), but legally speaking with regard to the status quo, it seems like something large might be changing. Either end users might find they have a lot more rights (the ones they've traditionally had for purchased items), or artists will get a lot more money because they've been getting screwed for decades for licensed works, or possibly we'll see new legislation codifying the current status quo to protect the large media companies (because for some reason legislators often seem to think past ability to make money is a reason in itself to protect the method in which it was done, regardless of legality).
- texec 4y ago
  I think it's important to note that streaming services mostly take a fixed fee. This dispute was between the artist and the label. The difference in royalties was part of the record deal and Four Tet reached a settlement with this former record label.
yellowapple 4y ago
> But how do I prove I own an MP3 file? The letters N, F, and T echo about in the background.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  Which will then contain a link to the file, since storing the whole file on the chain is too expensive. Still, you'll now pay >50$ for each file, 98% of which are transaction fees - surprisingly surpassing the already horrible pay ratio of music labels.
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    You will also have to cross your fingers that your NFT's link to mediafire.com/MyMP3File stays live for, uh, forever.
    - flir 4y ago
      Store the file's hash instead?
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    > Which will then contain a link to the file Why? You already have a copy on your local machine ("local machine" being anywhere you'd want to play that file). What's more important is the hash; if you really care about remote storage, IPFS kills both those birds with one stone. > Still, you'll now pay >50$ for each file, 98% of which are transaction fees There are other NFT-capable blockchains besides Ethereum, you know :)
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      As someone who loves organizing my music, a file hash would be a shitty solution. I want to be able to edit tags and transcode the song (e.g. for iTunes compatibility) without losing ownership.
      - 4y ago
hbossy 4y ago
>But how do I prove I own an MP3 file? It's not your job to prove you own something but their to prove you stole it.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > their [job] to prove you stole it. That's a sound legal principle, but unfortunately it doesn't apply in all situations and in all jurisdictions: "If the defendant is considered to have a criminal lifestyle, the court ... must decide whether he has benefited from his ‘general criminal conduct’ and, if so, by how much. ... The burden is on the defendant to rebut any assumption made." https://www.rahmanravelli.co.uk/expertise/confiscation/confiscation-the-proceeds-of-crime-act-2002/ https://www.rahmanravelli.co.uk/expertise/confiscation/confi...

Closi 4y ago

> The confiscation of your rights to your digital media depends on the fiction that you are licensing the music, not buying it. The fact that there's a giant "buy now" button on the interface notwithstanding, tech and entertainment companies maintain that you are engaged in a licensing deal, like an advertiser buying synch rights for a hamburger commercial. This post makes everything seem needlessly complicated - you are buying a licence, there is no contradiction here. How else would digital media / sale of MP3's work without licences? Is the author suggesting that everyone should legally be able to freely transfer/distribute their MP3's to anyone with no legal limit? I don't see any alternative to licences mentioned anywhere in the post - just lots of handwaving about some sort of wave function collapse (where wave function collapse just means a contract that has different terms for a digital purchase instead of a physical purchase).

smallnix 4y ago
I understood the point of the post to be about musicians not getting licensing royals.
- Closi 4y ago
  It's a post that talks about the specifics of what a contract defines as a 'sale' and a 'licensing' vs what OP personally defines a 'sale' and a 'licencing' to mean, without actually sharing how the contract defines 'sale' and 'licencing' (which will be explicitly defined in a definitions section). But IMO because there isn't that much substance there, this idea that a 'sale' might have different definitions is referred to as a 'quantum state' rather than sharing the actual definition of 'sale' used whatever contract they are referencing.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> How else would digital media / sale of MP3's work without licences? Is the author suggesting that everyone should legally be able to freely transfer/distribute their MP3's to anyone with no legal limit? What would be wrong with the same first sale doctrine that applies to physical instances of digital media (such as CDs) ? CD: You buy it, you are free to resell it to someone else; you are not free to make copies. Digital data only: You buy it, you can resell it someone else (0); you are not free give additional copies to anyone else (1) (0) not likely to happen (1) you can of course make your own copies, eg. for backup or across devices Would enforcing such a legal structure be possible? Yes and no. Everyone knows that once you could rip CDs, the legal structure for that format was already severely challenged by people's actual behavior, so there's nothing particularly new there.

ghostly_s 4y ago

Except as noted in the linked BBC coverage, Four Tet's case was settled out of court (because he could not afford to fight it) and thus establishes no legal precedent for other artists to leverage.

scoofy 4y ago
>Four Tet Wow... Haven't heard that name in a long time. Saw him at the MFA in Boston so long ago i can barely remember. Great artist, I'm glad he at least showed it could be a reasonable line of argument.
- isoprophlex 4y ago
  The album "new energy" has become one of my all time favorites. Check out some recent work. He still produces some insanely hi quality tracks, not all under the "four tet" moniker. Some of the ungoogle-able "unicode hell" releases are very good, and his "KH" tracks are dancefloor killers.
pessimizer 4y ago
Yeah, there's no chance that this golden goose could ever be killed in a modern democracy. If the companies would still be profitable paying 50% royalties, then the 38% difference between that and 12% royalties represents the amount the industry will be able to spend (without thinking about it for a moment) to bribe politicians, create fake public-interest organizations and think-tanks, and settle cases like this.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  > to bribe politicians, create fake public-interest organizations and think-tanks In other words to fool you, the voter. But if you've been fooled, how do you know these things? Are you acting on your knowledge and voting against those corrupt politicians and against those who agree with the propaganda? How does nobody else know this?
  - 4y ago

mbfg 4y ago

in another world, it is still alive.

jonplackett 4y ago

> eat its cake and have it, too Someone been watching Manhunt

mosfetarium 4y ago

I feel like this issue is brought on by the fact that it seems like copyright law hasn't been properly reexamined for the modern era. I support the notion that the ideal model is people pay the rightsholder in order to enjoy the media, and offering resale of pure-digital media instead leads to some weird "You make money based on the peak simultaneous number of owners, rather than the number of people who consumed it", which just doesn't make any sense to me as an economic model. So yeah, you see labels calling the user purchase one thing, in order to make it line up with the intent of the consumer relationship, then on the royalties they call it a different thing to make it line-up with that intent. I don't feel the publishers are violating the intent of these relationships at all, it's just that copyright law being extremely out of date requires stupid language games. The correct solution is to re-examine copyright law to either establish that the intent is you pay the rightsholder to get access for you as a distinct individual, or that the intent is that you are purchasing resalable access, and be done with this nonsense. I absolutely don't blame artists for trying though, the labels screw them so it seems fair that they should try to screw the labels.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
You can resell books, movies, music, and games. Why should it matter if they're distributed through a digital or physical medium? Copyright is just abused to milk as much money as possible and restrict usage.

8bitsrule 4y ago

Good news about the Four Tet decision. He's been a consistently high-quality, highly-innovative EM creator for over 20 years. Hopefully getting 50% of the streaming and download take instead of 13% will rock that industry. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61871547 https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61871547

salgernon 4y ago
By coincidence, after reading this submitted article and not knowing the named artist, I completed the game “Universal Paperclips” by “Everybody House Games” today, and the brief credit scroll listed ‘10 MIDI’ by Four Tet, (c) 2017 BMG So off to listen to his content now. (Edited slightly)

Waterluvian 4y ago

“but at least it's a law, created by a democratically accountable legislature.” I feel like we need to stop lying to ourselves like this. Copyright is getting ridiculously out of hand because lobbyists hold the power and the system is not really accountable anymore.

zdragnar 4y ago
Congress doesn't even bother reading the bills they pass. Most of the actual details are deferred to the administrative bureaucracy. That's where the real power is.
- bitexploder 4y ago
  The deep state is a real thing. I don’t think it has to be explicitly negative, but there are a lot of unelected bureaucrats that hold a lot of power with minimal accountability and visibility.
  - feet 4y ago
    Yea its the corporations, lobbyists, think-tanks and those who pay them. Its consolidation of corporate power. Its fascism
  - vajrabum 4y ago
    Are you talking about Government employees or lobbyists? BTW, notice that their power is circumscribed by the law. When that changes their powers change.
    - feet 4y ago
      Lmao what? They write the laws! Think tanks are literally paid to draft legislation
      - sailfast 4y ago
        Think tanks are not the government. They are private institutions. Typically when one uses the term "deep state" you mean someone working in the government that has their own agenda and/or are acting on a specific conspiracy / cabal agenda counter to the direction of, say, the administration providing the guidance and direction. This is why the person asked about employees vs. lobbyists.

underlines 4y ago

personal anectode: I'm born in 1986 and had internet since 1998. Immediately got into contact with IRC's XDCC file-sharing and Usenet bin groups. Never paid for music, started burning CDs in 1999 and owned the first commercial MP3 player. Only when Spotify came around, I started to pay for music out of lazyness to further take care of my HDD sized, tediously managed and tagged MP3 (and later M4A) library. So at least for a large part of my life, that crazy industry didn't get a dime from me. Reading about their practices now makes me feel even less sorry.

BLKNSLVR 4y ago

Could I sell my bandcamp account? The irony of this is that bandcamp seems to be a far more direct-to-the-artist model than any streaming service (which is why I use it), because it (it's hard to avoid puns here) records which albums I've purchased so that I can listen to them via the app / website or download lossless copies of said albums for my own curated library and to be able to listen to offline. This, however, gives my account a certain value as to the content accessible through it, and therefore my account has some resale value* - but this resale pays nothing to the artist or label or bandcamp; it's much more like a physical item (other than that if bandcamp goes under then it's lost, or if bandcamp don't like their accounts being re-sold it could get terminated due to breach of terms of service or something like that). * my musical taste means that this resale value is very low and it would be difficult to find a purchaser, but that's beside the point.

timando 4y ago
The terms of service might not let you sell it, but I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to change the email address and password on the account and give the login details to someone else in exchange for some money.

skybrian 4y ago

Here's the news story without the editorializing. Maybe change the link? Four Tet wins royalty battle over streaming music https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61871547 https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61871547

sailfast 4y ago

TIL Record Labels were double dealing the license vs. purchase royalties. That's really sad, and I'm glad somebody finally made some case law out of this that will benefit artists moving forward. EDIT: I forgot it was settled out of court so it's not "case law" but definitely tells record labels that they will probably lose in the future. They must owe billions...

deltaonefour 4y ago

>Schroedinger's streaming service just died It's both alive and dead at the same time. Like the cat.

jjmorrison 4y ago

Did it tho?

CyborgCabbage 4y ago

More and more I feel copyright just doesn't make any sense in the digital age. Software engineers have already cottoned on and started doing open source, I hope we see a similar movement for art and media.