8 ms·

Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes

153 points by breve 1y ago

prox 1y ago
This is so true, the system is broken beyond belief. I want to write a rant here but let’s just say the article is right on all counts. It’s obvious tech companies as always bowed to one party and listened to them, and didn’t incorporate the user in this. (And to the few that do : thank you)
socalgal2 1y ago
I kinda feel like the solution is to stop promoting artist that sign with labels? Like the label doesn’t want you to use the music. the artist chose the label to protect their right's also, it does seem a little whiny on Beato’s part. He’s not wrong that allowing the music on his channel is probably a net positive for the artist and the label but at the same time he’s benefiting from the music. if he wasn’t then he would be fine with removing it
- rkachowski 1y ago
  The music in question would be the music of the artist he's interviewing at the time, the absurdity is that you can interview the creator but not show what they've created.
  - croes 1y ago
    The absurdity is that someone else then the creator can hold the copyright. In Germany there is a distinction between the selling rights and the creator rights and a company can never be the creator nor can you sell the creator rights.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    If the creator gave up their copyright then it's not absurd, it's law. This is why it's important for budding artists to keep their masters.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      Good luck with that if you're a new artist looking at a deal. The label will just say "No" and move on. Artists need exceptional leverage to negotiate a licensing deal instead of a buy out with a reversion option. Most new artists don't have that. While HN is stuck on its usual obsession with copyright, the reality is the entire ecosystem is bad. Labels and distributors have the best of all possible worlds. They used to invest in artist development. Now they don't. Most spend very little on promotion, except for household name headliners who are guaranteed earners. Some demand 360 deals where they get a share of all income - sales, plays, touring, and so on. They're giant corporations run by MBAs whose existence is entirely parasitic.
      - bonoboTP 1y ago
        Why can't an artist or band just make songs and upload them to the platforms directly? And do live shows. What extra does a label give? As you said, they used to invest in artist development and were indispensable for producing the physical media at scale and distributing it to physical record stores everywhere, including internationally. Today all this is much simpler to manage.
        AstralStorm 1y ago
        You can. You will not be seen unless a label or some big name promotes you. Radio? Forget about it. Big concerts next to big agents? Nope. Thing is, breaking through or even is ever harder.
        bigyabai 1y ago
        It's worth nothing that we don't live in the 1980s anymore. Radio play, opening for Nickleback, selling merch - all of this matters much less than having a dedicated Internet following. We have lots of examples of musicians in the modern era eschewing radio play entirely, only for radios to beg for licensing rights to play their music. Or successful artists who started their own label or bought-back the rights to their masters. The times have changed quite significantly. The other thing people seem to forget is that many of the original labels were talent agencies. The reason they promote anyone at all is to try and recoup the investment of supporting all of them. You don't have to empathize with record labels, but modern artists can absolutely "scale" without someone artificially inflating their popularity.
- bambax 1y ago
  > if he wasn’t then he would be fine with removing it Mmm... what? He talks about music. It would be hard to do lectures about paintings, or architecture, without showing anything. How can he demonstrate what he's talking about if he can't play even a very short excerpt of the piece he's commenting?
talove 1y ago
It’s all brinkmanship: if you can’t unilaterally control it, the instinct is to destroy it. I work in tech, but thanks to some stubborn drive for creation my parents instilled in me, I also make music. And honestly, compared to music, even the advertising industry feels cutting-edge. Music is still operating with one foot stuck decades in the past.
croes 1y ago
Music compaines don't care if it hurts the artist. The have masses of licensed music and can afford the income damage caused by copyright strikes.
bambax 1y ago
One answer to this madness is to starve the beast: never buy any music or any content from an established company. Torrent everything. It may not work at all, but at least you can tell yourself you're not helping the bastards.
- dokyun 1y ago
  +1 for Soulseek
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    It's still better than things like Spotify. I listen to a lot of traditional Irish music and love to do things like shuffling a playlist of all the same tune by different performers. To do that on Spotify I need to search the tune name, then create a new playlist and manually add them all. With my local files I can just grep, even the metadata, and pipe it into a playlist for mpv to play instantly.
- rglullis 1y ago
  Few people are buying anything in this world where streaming is the norm and the labels make money by cutting deals with the distribution platforms. The solution for me, in this specific case, would be for Beato to act against YouTube and take his channel elsewhere. He has enough followers to be able to start his own Peertube server, find a few sponsors and keep going forever.
  - motoxpro 1y ago
    Neither the GP or this comment are viable in the real world. Businesses/creators need continued distribution, see Nike as an example of what happens when you "take your audience elsewhere to monetize them better/more." 1. People buy the other option (in Nike's case they kept going to footlocker and buying other shoes rather than only buying Nike DTC, in Beato's case they would continue to go to YouTube to discover new guitar content) 2. The business can't get new customers because no one is on the new platform (Nike DTC/Peertube) It's viable for a split second (covid, "stick it to Youtube cause they suck") then people just go back to living their lives.
aquir 1y ago
Pirate the music and if you want to support the artist to concerts/gigs and buy merch. These labels are inserted themselves between the fans and the artists w/o any benefit but for themselves.
- stavros 1y ago
  Well clearly the artists are seeing benefit, otherwise they wouldn't sign up for a label.
- saaaaaam 1y ago
  Unless you’re a big artist most tours break even at best, but more often lose money. That loss is sometimes supported by the label investing some money because tours can be a good way to market music and find new audiences. A lot of venues also take big commissions on merch, squeezing the profitability on that part of the business. Unfortunately for a lot of smaller artists the economics of touring are not great. 1000 tickets at $25 does not equal $25000 in the artist’s pocket. The artist will maybe get 70% of those ticket sales (the promoter gets a significant cut) and the artist needs to pay her touring costs out of her share. If you’re an artist going on tour with a four piece band, and tour manager/instrument tech then your daily costs are going to be thousands of dollars. Everyone needs to be paid from that split and all the travel, accommodation and food costs need to be paid, and sometimes the cost of local support acts is paid from the artist’s share. The agent who secured the booking gets a percentage, and the manager who looks after the artist’s career gets a percentage. After commissions, $25000 in ticket sales might mean the artist only sees $10000 - before she has paid the costs of the tour. With at least six people to be paid (four musicians and the tour manager plus the artist) and accommodated, fed and moved around, that $10000 really doesn’t go very far. If it’s a band the economics are no different really - all the band members need to make a living while they are on the road. And of course if that’s 300 tickets at $20 rather than 1000 at $25 none of these costs scale down, the musicians aren’t going to take less, hotel rooms aren’t going to drop in price. Pirating the music and going to see the ban play live might actually mean the label says “live brings us no uptick on our recordings, so we are not going to invest in tour support for this artist”.
Veserv 1y ago
The most ridiculous part of music copyrights is that the DMCA explicitly encodes statutory damages of at least 750$ up to 30,000$, and up to 150,000$ for willful infringement per work [1]. Yet musical compositions are subject to compulsory mechanical copyright licenses at a fixed rate of 12.4 cents or 2.38 cents per minute, whichever is higher [2] for music covers [3] (i.e. same song, different singer/band or even same singer different time). Meaning you can make a cover without permission as long as you pay the copyright holder at the rates specified in the law. So we already have cheap compulsory licensing for musical compositions which caps damages at a 1/6,000 to 1/240,000 of the DMCA rates. We should just have compulsory mechanical licensing for recordings as well. If we really want to get crazy, we could even let copyright holders declare a compulsory licensing rate per work then multiply that by some number to get their intellectual property value and then charge them property tax on that intellectual property. So you can set a high compulsory licensing rate, but then you have to pay more property tax on your income generating property or vice versa. This allows valuable works to be protected to support the artists making them, while allowing less valuable works to be easily usable by whoever wants to. [1] https://uwf.edu/go/legal-and-consumer-info/digital-millenium-copyright-act-dmca-compliance/ https://uwf.edu/go/legal-and-consumer-info/digital-millenium... [2] https://copyright.gov/licensing/m200a.pdf https://copyright.gov/licensing/m200a.pdf [3] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ73.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ73.pdf
- atoav 1y ago
  As a former film student I can say from experience that licensing rights can be expensive. And how expensive depends on the usage. E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema. Want to play any popular music in your cinema film? The license can easily cost 25.000 € (for film students that is typically more than the budget). Smaller labels make better prices tho and sometimes the artist lets you use it for free (if it is their choice to make).
  - jermaustin1 1y ago
    > E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema. Not a criticism, just an addendum for anyone interested: In the US, almost every bar/restaurant/venue is an ASCAP licensee, and it is relatively cheap (around $10/year/occupant for all forms of media), so a venue that wants to play live or recorded music, television broadcasts, etc., and seats 100 people would pay about $1000/year. It's a very good price, and one of the main reasons that at any concert hall or arena, you will hear even huge artists playing covers without having to get them pre-approved.
ggm 1y ago
I read a review by an IPR lawyer long ago who said since music performing rights encouraged artists to record more tunes, in 75 years we'd be drowning in free, and should pay now for the future benefit of growing the size of the free pool in perpetuity. Not surprisingly the same review recommended extending copyright lifetimes not reducing them. Strange.
alfiedotwtf 1y ago
Starsky Carr did a filter sweep while reviewing a synthesizer, and with that got his account shutdown because it was auto-copyright strike. He appealed and luckily it was reversed, but I'm sure others with smaller audiences wouldn't be so lucky.
jimnotgym 1y ago
I watched Beato's video. I couldn't help thinking that making hundreds of false claims was harassment? Any lawyers around?
rsp1984 1y ago
It gets even crazier when compared to other IP law: Engineer makes an invention: Write 30-Page patent application. Multi-year patenting process with USPTO, pay 1000s of $ if DIY, 10x that if using an IP law firm. Multiply by 4x if going international. With luck, patent gets issued 3 years later. It protects you for 25 years, but only if you have deep pockets for an IP lawsuit in case someone does copy you -- and with uncertain outcome. Artist releases a song: automatically enjoys 100+ years of protection, even for minor samples, hooks, melodic elements. Lawsuits are easily won as long as you can prove you are the copyright holder. I have my theories about how we ended up in this state of affairs but no jurist with a sliver of common sense can seriously claim that this is fine.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Borealid 1y ago
  I think it's worth mentioning that with a patent, nobody else is allowed to use the patented idea. This holds even if they have never heard of you before, and were entirely unaware your patent (or your version of the patented concept) existed. You are granted a monopoly. With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours. Someone unaware of your work cannot infringe your copyright. You do not have a monopoly on anything, you are just protected against someone deriving their work from yours directly. This difference probably factors into how easy it is to win a lawsuit: for a copyright infringement, you need to show they made a copy. You wouldn't be bringing suit in the first place if there were substantial doubt in that area. It also factors into how easy it should be to get a patent vs a copyright: a patent closes off much, much, MUCH more idea-space than a copyright.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    > With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours. That is patently false for music - a songwriter's claim today that they never heard a slightly similar hook from 40 years ago generally doesn't hold in court.
neilv 1y ago
If some legislator or public interest lawyer would like to fix some of the DMCA shortcomings or abuses, I think Rick Beato would be a good poster child for legitimate fair use. Beato does high-quality, knowledgeable videos that make IMHO legitimate educational use of short audio clips, interleaved with discussion. No one can listen to a Beato video to get the experience of the full song, and the Beato video plausibly promotes people wanting to listen to the full song.
- Doxin 1y ago
  Another good example of what should clearly count as fair use is the 3BSkyen channel on youtube[0]. The guy does analyses of animated media and has a habit of turning 5 minutes of media into an hour or more of analysis. He cuts and rewinds and replays stuff constantly. No one in their right mind is going to watch a 3BSkyen video instead of the original. There is no competition between them. And yet for a lot of IP he can't show the media he's reacting to because it'll immediately and automatically get claimed. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@3BSkyen https://www.youtube.com/@3BSkyen
userbinator 1y ago
Of course there's the other big elephant in the room: AI music. Not being copyrightable, I've already seen a few YouTubers use it to avoid copyright strikes.
- AstralStorm 1y ago
  Until it accidentally hits filters, and then how can you prove the AI did it and did not incidentally plagiarize some original piece? It's the opposite of a solution.
strken 1y ago
I don't understand why false DMCA claims don't result in legal consequences for the people or companies making them.
rglover 1y ago
Labels would make a fortune if they just set up an online license request store. Any track in various lengths for various prices. Once you pay, you're granted a license. Could take a few minutes for a podcaster to search a song, buy a license for the right length, and you're done. Have a URL that displays a license and instruct creators to put that at the bottom of their video/audio description. Then, any bots can scan for the license URL, verify its key as valid, and move on if the license is valid. Charge affordable prices (e.g., $1 per second) and make it easy to use. This would take very little time at all and even if it's dirty, the catalog data and mp3s should exist for most stuff. Add a "this track can't be licensed" when data is missing and offer a "let me know" signup.
- cainxinth 1y ago
  I have a friend who is a music supervisor. Navigating the web of rights and relationships necessary to license music is as much art as science. Sometimes it’s as straightforward as you describe (minus the convenient online platform), but from his telling, it more often involves a lot of begging, pleading, and favor trading. Also, podcasters rarely pay for licensed music. There is a ton of high quality royalty free “sound alikes” these days.
- strunz 1y ago
  That defeats the whole point of this issue. These uses are fair use, they shouldn't have to license anything. You can't teach music without playing it, Youtube is just allowing rights holders to make claims without any evidence or punishment for being wrong.
  - rglover 1y ago
    Fair use is the problem. It's too ambiguous and as a result lawyers can play the games they're playing. My solution is dirt simple, keeps everybody happy, and quits wasting time pretending we're living in 1998.
camgunz 1y ago
This is because whatever Google tech is checking for this stuff is too simple right? Or, maybe it's too aggressive because of music industry contracts?
stevage 1y ago
Maybe it's time for Beato and others to start boycotting music owned by UMG?
mvdtnz 1y ago
> But feature a barely audible 8 1/2-second clip of music underneath audio dialogue, and you could have your entire podcast career evaporate overnight. Genuine question - is it really this severe? Or is this an exaggeration?
pmkary 1y ago
The man is almost always right about everything.

153 points by breve 1y ago

prox 1y ago

This is so true, the system is broken beyond belief. I want to write a rant here but let’s just say the article is right on all counts. It’s obvious tech companies as always bowed to one party and listened to them, and didn’t incorporate the user in this. (And to the few that do : thank you)

socalgal2 1y ago

I kinda feel like the solution is to stop promoting artist that sign with labels? Like the label doesn’t want you to use the music. the artist chose the label to protect their right's also, it does seem a little whiny on Beato’s part. He’s not wrong that allowing the music on his channel is probably a net positive for the artist and the label but at the same time he’s benefiting from the music. if he wasn’t then he would be fine with removing it

rkachowski 1y ago
The music in question would be the music of the artist he's interviewing at the time, the absurdity is that you can interview the creator but not show what they've created.
- croes 1y ago
  The absurdity is that someone else then the creator can hold the copyright. In Germany there is a distinction between the selling rights and the creator rights and a company can never be the creator nor can you sell the creator rights.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  If the creator gave up their copyright then it's not absurd, it's law. This is why it's important for budding artists to keep their masters.
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    Good luck with that if you're a new artist looking at a deal. The label will just say "No" and move on. Artists need exceptional leverage to negotiate a licensing deal instead of a buy out with a reversion option. Most new artists don't have that. While HN is stuck on its usual obsession with copyright, the reality is the entire ecosystem is bad. Labels and distributors have the best of all possible worlds. They used to invest in artist development. Now they don't. Most spend very little on promotion, except for household name headliners who are guaranteed earners. Some demand 360 deals where they get a share of all income - sales, plays, touring, and so on. They're giant corporations run by MBAs whose existence is entirely parasitic.
    - bonoboTP 1y ago
      Why can't an artist or band just make songs and upload them to the platforms directly? And do live shows. What extra does a label give? As you said, they used to invest in artist development and were indispensable for producing the physical media at scale and distributing it to physical record stores everywhere, including internationally. Today all this is much simpler to manage.
      - AstralStorm 1y ago
        You can. You will not be seen unless a label or some big name promotes you. Radio? Forget about it. Big concerts next to big agents? Nope. Thing is, breaking through or even is ever harder.
        bigyabai 1y ago
        It's worth nothing that we don't live in the 1980s anymore. Radio play, opening for Nickleback, selling merch - all of this matters much less than having a dedicated Internet following. We have lots of examples of musicians in the modern era eschewing radio play entirely, only for radios to beg for licensing rights to play their music. Or successful artists who started their own label or bought-back the rights to their masters. The times have changed quite significantly. The other thing people seem to forget is that many of the original labels were talent agencies. The reason they promote anyone at all is to try and recoup the investment of supporting all of them. You don't have to empathize with record labels, but modern artists can absolutely "scale" without someone artificially inflating their popularity.
bambax 1y ago
> if he wasn’t then he would be fine with removing it Mmm... what? He talks about music. It would be hard to do lectures about paintings, or architecture, without showing anything. How can he demonstrate what he's talking about if he can't play even a very short excerpt of the piece he's commenting?

talove 1y ago

It’s all brinkmanship: if you can’t unilaterally control it, the instinct is to destroy it. I work in tech, but thanks to some stubborn drive for creation my parents instilled in me, I also make music. And honestly, compared to music, even the advertising industry feels cutting-edge. Music is still operating with one foot stuck decades in the past.

croes 1y ago

Music compaines don't care if it hurts the artist. The have masses of licensed music and can afford the income damage caused by copyright strikes.

bambax 1y ago

One answer to this madness is to starve the beast: never buy any music or any content from an established company. Torrent everything. It may not work at all, but at least you can tell yourself you're not helping the bastards.

dokyun 1y ago
+1 for Soulseek
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  It's still better than things like Spotify. I listen to a lot of traditional Irish music and love to do things like shuffling a playlist of all the same tune by different performers. To do that on Spotify I need to search the tune name, then create a new playlist and manually add them all. With my local files I can just grep, even the metadata, and pipe it into a playlist for mpv to play instantly.
rglullis 1y ago
Few people are buying anything in this world where streaming is the norm and the labels make money by cutting deals with the distribution platforms. The solution for me, in this specific case, would be for Beato to act against YouTube and take his channel elsewhere. He has enough followers to be able to start his own Peertube server, find a few sponsors and keep going forever.
- motoxpro 1y ago
  Neither the GP or this comment are viable in the real world. Businesses/creators need continued distribution, see Nike as an example of what happens when you "take your audience elsewhere to monetize them better/more." 1. People buy the other option (in Nike's case they kept going to footlocker and buying other shoes rather than only buying Nike DTC, in Beato's case they would continue to go to YouTube to discover new guitar content) 2. The business can't get new customers because no one is on the new platform (Nike DTC/Peertube) It's viable for a split second (covid, "stick it to Youtube cause they suck") then people just go back to living their lives.

aquir 1y ago

Pirate the music and if you want to support the artist to concerts/gigs and buy merch. These labels are inserted themselves between the fans and the artists w/o any benefit but for themselves.

stavros 1y ago
Well clearly the artists are seeing benefit, otherwise they wouldn't sign up for a label.
saaaaaam 1y ago
Unless you’re a big artist most tours break even at best, but more often lose money. That loss is sometimes supported by the label investing some money because tours can be a good way to market music and find new audiences. A lot of venues also take big commissions on merch, squeezing the profitability on that part of the business. Unfortunately for a lot of smaller artists the economics of touring are not great. 1000 tickets at $25 does not equal $25000 in the artist’s pocket. The artist will maybe get 70% of those ticket sales (the promoter gets a significant cut) and the artist needs to pay her touring costs out of her share. If you’re an artist going on tour with a four piece band, and tour manager/instrument tech then your daily costs are going to be thousands of dollars. Everyone needs to be paid from that split and all the travel, accommodation and food costs need to be paid, and sometimes the cost of local support acts is paid from the artist’s share. The agent who secured the booking gets a percentage, and the manager who looks after the artist’s career gets a percentage. After commissions, $25000 in ticket sales might mean the artist only sees $10000 - before she has paid the costs of the tour. With at least six people to be paid (four musicians and the tour manager plus the artist) and accommodated, fed and moved around, that $10000 really doesn’t go very far. If it’s a band the economics are no different really - all the band members need to make a living while they are on the road. And of course if that’s 300 tickets at $20 rather than 1000 at $25 none of these costs scale down, the musicians aren’t going to take less, hotel rooms aren’t going to drop in price. Pirating the music and going to see the ban play live might actually mean the label says “live brings us no uptick on our recordings, so we are not going to invest in tour support for this artist”.

Veserv 1y ago

The most ridiculous part of music copyrights is that the DMCA explicitly encodes statutory damages of at least 750$ up to 30,000$, and up to 150,000$ for willful infringement per work [1]. Yet musical compositions are subject to compulsory mechanical copyright licenses at a fixed rate of 12.4 cents or 2.38 cents per minute, whichever is higher [2] for music covers [3] (i.e. same song, different singer/band or even same singer different time). Meaning you can make a cover without permission as long as you pay the copyright holder at the rates specified in the law. So we already have cheap compulsory licensing for musical compositions which caps damages at a 1/6,000 to 1/240,000 of the DMCA rates. We should just have compulsory mechanical licensing for recordings as well. If we really want to get crazy, we could even let copyright holders declare a compulsory licensing rate per work then multiply that by some number to get their intellectual property value and then charge them property tax on that intellectual property. So you can set a high compulsory licensing rate, but then you have to pay more property tax on your income generating property or vice versa. This allows valuable works to be protected to support the artists making them, while allowing less valuable works to be easily usable by whoever wants to. [1] https://uwf.edu/go/legal-and-consumer-info/digital-millenium-copyright-act-dmca-compliance/ https://uwf.edu/go/legal-and-consumer-info/digital-millenium... [2] https://copyright.gov/licensing/m200a.pdf https://copyright.gov/licensing/m200a.pdf [3] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ73.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ73.pdf

atoav 1y ago
As a former film student I can say from experience that licensing rights can be expensive. And how expensive depends on the usage. E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema. Want to play any popular music in your cinema film? The license can easily cost 25.000 € (for film students that is typically more than the budget). Smaller labels make better prices tho and sometimes the artist lets you use it for free (if it is their choice to make).
- jermaustin1 1y ago
  > E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema. Not a criticism, just an addendum for anyone interested: In the US, almost every bar/restaurant/venue is an ASCAP licensee, and it is relatively cheap (around $10/year/occupant for all forms of media), so a venue that wants to play live or recorded music, television broadcasts, etc., and seats 100 people would pay about $1000/year. It's a very good price, and one of the main reasons that at any concert hall or arena, you will hear even huge artists playing covers without having to get them pre-approved.

ggm 1y ago

I read a review by an IPR lawyer long ago who said since music performing rights encouraged artists to record more tunes, in 75 years we'd be drowning in free, and should pay now for the future benefit of growing the size of the free pool in perpetuity. Not surprisingly the same review recommended extending copyright lifetimes not reducing them. Strange.

alfiedotwtf 1y ago

Starsky Carr did a filter sweep while reviewing a synthesizer, and with that got his account shutdown because it was auto-copyright strike. He appealed and luckily it was reversed, but I'm sure others with smaller audiences wouldn't be so lucky.

jimnotgym 1y ago

I watched Beato's video. I couldn't help thinking that making hundreds of false claims was harassment? Any lawyers around?

rsp1984 1y ago

It gets even crazier when compared to other IP law: Engineer makes an invention: Write 30-Page patent application. Multi-year patenting process with USPTO, pay 1000s of $ if DIY, 10x that if using an IP law firm. Multiply by 4x if going international. With luck, patent gets issued 3 years later. It protects you for 25 years, but only if you have deep pockets for an IP lawsuit in case someone does copy you -- and with uncertain outcome. Artist releases a song: automatically enjoys 100+ years of protection, even for minor samples, hooks, melodic elements. Lawsuits are easily won as long as you can prove you are the copyright holder. I have my theories about how we ended up in this state of affairs but no jurist with a sliver of common sense can seriously claim that this is fine.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Borealid 1y ago
I think it's worth mentioning that with a patent, nobody else is allowed to use the patented idea. This holds even if they have never heard of you before, and were entirely unaware your patent (or your version of the patented concept) existed. You are granted a monopoly. With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours. Someone unaware of your work cannot infringe your copyright. You do not have a monopoly on anything, you are just protected against someone deriving their work from yours directly. This difference probably factors into how easy it is to win a lawsuit: for a copyright infringement, you need to show they made a copy. You wouldn't be bringing suit in the first place if there were substantial doubt in that area. It also factors into how easy it should be to get a patent vs a copyright: a patent closes off much, much, MUCH more idea-space than a copyright.
- falcor84 1y ago
  > With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours. That is patently false for music - a songwriter's claim today that they never heard a slightly similar hook from 40 years ago generally doesn't hold in court.

neilv 1y ago

If some legislator or public interest lawyer would like to fix some of the DMCA shortcomings or abuses, I think Rick Beato would be a good poster child for legitimate fair use. Beato does high-quality, knowledgeable videos that make IMHO legitimate educational use of short audio clips, interleaved with discussion. No one can listen to a Beato video to get the experience of the full song, and the Beato video plausibly promotes people wanting to listen to the full song.

Doxin 1y ago
Another good example of what should clearly count as fair use is the 3BSkyen channel on youtube[0]. The guy does analyses of animated media and has a habit of turning 5 minutes of media into an hour or more of analysis. He cuts and rewinds and replays stuff constantly. No one in their right mind is going to watch a 3BSkyen video instead of the original. There is no competition between them. And yet for a lot of IP he can't show the media he's reacting to because it'll immediately and automatically get claimed. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@3BSkyen https://www.youtube.com/@3BSkyen

userbinator 1y ago

Of course there's the other big elephant in the room: AI music. Not being copyrightable, I've already seen a few YouTubers use it to avoid copyright strikes.

AstralStorm 1y ago
Until it accidentally hits filters, and then how can you prove the AI did it and did not incidentally plagiarize some original piece? It's the opposite of a solution.

strken 1y ago

I don't understand why false DMCA claims don't result in legal consequences for the people or companies making them.

rglover 1y ago

Labels would make a fortune if they just set up an online license request store. Any track in various lengths for various prices. Once you pay, you're granted a license. Could take a few minutes for a podcaster to search a song, buy a license for the right length, and you're done. Have a URL that displays a license and instruct creators to put that at the bottom of their video/audio description. Then, any bots can scan for the license URL, verify its key as valid, and move on if the license is valid. Charge affordable prices (e.g., $1 per second) and make it easy to use. This would take very little time at all and even if it's dirty, the catalog data and mp3s should exist for most stuff. Add a "this track can't be licensed" when data is missing and offer a "let me know" signup.

cainxinth 1y ago
I have a friend who is a music supervisor. Navigating the web of rights and relationships necessary to license music is as much art as science. Sometimes it’s as straightforward as you describe (minus the convenient online platform), but from his telling, it more often involves a lot of begging, pleading, and favor trading. Also, podcasters rarely pay for licensed music. There is a ton of high quality royalty free “sound alikes” these days.
strunz 1y ago
That defeats the whole point of this issue. These uses are fair use, they shouldn't have to license anything. You can't teach music without playing it, Youtube is just allowing rights holders to make claims without any evidence or punishment for being wrong.
- rglover 1y ago
  Fair use is the problem. It's too ambiguous and as a result lawyers can play the games they're playing. My solution is dirt simple, keeps everybody happy, and quits wasting time pretending we're living in 1998.

camgunz 1y ago

This is because whatever Google tech is checking for this stuff is too simple right? Or, maybe it's too aggressive because of music industry contracts?

stevage 1y ago

Maybe it's time for Beato and others to start boycotting music owned by UMG?

mvdtnz 1y ago

> But feature a barely audible 8 1/2-second clip of music underneath audio dialogue, and you could have your entire podcast career evaporate overnight. Genuine question - is it really this severe? Or is this an exaggeration?

pmkary 1y ago

The man is almost always right about everything.