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Schroedinger's streaming service just died

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Re: Schroedinger's streaming service just died

#31

Post by Closi »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #28
Closi wrote: post #7

> 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…

> 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? How about a simple purchase of a copy, with its use being limited only by current copyright law? A.k.a, no copying, redistributing, derivative work-making, etc. (Absent fair use cases)

How is this practically different to the current situation? (i.e. what can I do here that I can't do at the moment?)

Re: Schroedinger's streaming service just died

#32

Post by EMIRELADERO »

googlryas wrote: post #4

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…

> 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.

Re: Schroedinger's streaming service just died

#33

Post by mosfetarium »

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.

Re: Schroedinger's streaming service just died

#34

Post by Closi »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23
Closi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Digital data only: You buy it, you can resell it someone else (0); you are not free give additional copies to anyone else (1) Sounds like you are buying a transferable licence? (If this isn't a licence, what would you call it? As presumably once you have 'sold' it, it can still reside on your laptop but you aren't allowed to play it).

It's not a license. It's a purchase of an item that becomes your own possession, and a law that covers what you can do as far as resale (also applies to books). It's not a license because it cannot be revoked by whoever sold it to you.

> It's not a license. It's a purchase of an item that becomes your own possession, and a law that covers what you can do as far as resale (also applies to books).

So once I sell it, if it's still on my hard-drive am I allowed to listen to it in your world?

And if I have it but am not allowed to listen to it, what is that lack of playing-permission called if not 'not owning a license'?

> It's not a license because it cannot be revoked by whoever sold it to you.

Licences can be irrevocable, so this isn't a necessary property of a licence.

Re: Schroedinger's streaming service just died

#35

Post by Closi »

clownbaby wrote: post #25
googlryas wrote: post #4

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…

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.

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.

Re: Schroedinger's streaming service just died

#36

Post by 8bitsrule »

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

Re: Schroedinger's streaming service just died

#37

Post by Closi »

smallnix wrote: post #11
Closi wrote: post #7

> 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…

I understood the point of the post to be about musicians not getting licensing royals.

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.

Re: Schroedinger's streaming service just died

#38

Post by wmf »

googlryas wrote: post #4

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…

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

Re: Schroedinger's streaming service just died

#39

Post by kbenson »

googlryas wrote: post #4

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…

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).

Re: Schroedinger's streaming service just died

#40

Post by texec »

kbenson wrote: post #39
googlryas wrote: post #4

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…

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 percent…

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.
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