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Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

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Re: Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

#111

Post by giantrobot »

ghaff wrote: post #56
absrec wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music piracy is almost non-existent post spotify. Streaming service fragmentation and geolocking has resulted in more video piracy but it still is less compared to what it was.

An analyst I know once argued pretty strongly that Napster became popular not because it was free but because it was more convenient than going to the record store and buying a CD. I disagreed fairly strongly at the time. But today? Times are quite different of course but widespread streaming music with a near-universal (at least mainstream) catalog suggests that a ton of people are fine with paying $15/month to not…

> An analyst I know once argued pretty strongly that Napster became popular not because it was free but because it was more convenient than going to the record store and buying a CD.

Some context for the younger HN audience: a CD used to cost $15-20 new and almost no artist in the US sold singles. If you wanted a song you heard on the radio you needed to go to one or more record stores to find the CD and pay your $15. Rarely did you get to sample anything on the CD at the store. So you'd get home only to realize you essentially paid $15 for one stupid song. Hopefully you liked half the songs on the album so you were maybe paying $3 per song you liked. Ripping that CD to MP3 was also more time invested.

Even over a 28.8k dial-up downloading the same song of Napster would only take about twenty minutes.

As the various online music stores showed, money wasn't the main issue with Napster et al. People were fine paying for music so long as it was convenient. By the early 00s buying CDs was far from convenient for how people actually wanted to listen to music. Music streaming is just the latest convenience since everyone has an Internet connected device in their pocket and their "library" is just every song in the service's catalog.

Re: Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

#112

Post by xtracto »

Cypher wrote: post #19
ghastmaster wrote: post #6

This really scares me. The wayback machine is a treasure. I don't know what will happen to it if these cases succeed.

we'll lose it like the great library of alexander

Or like gigapedia : https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2012/3/1/the-disappearing...

Few people remember that. But losing it was such a shame.

Re: Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

#113

Post by echelon »

ghaff wrote: post #84
echelon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright should be an annual fee that increases by year. Year zero through five: free Year six: $500 Year seven: $1000 Year eight: $2500 Year nine: $5000 Year ten: $10,000 Year eleven: $25,000 Year twelve: $50,000 Year thirteen: $100,000 Year fourteen: $250,000 Year fifteen: $500,000 Year sixteen: $1,000,000 Year seventeen: $2,500,000 Year eighteen: $5,000,000 Year nineteen: $10,000,000 Year twenty: $25,000,000 ...

Big publishers would love that sort of scheme. It puts copyright out of reach of basically everyone else.

Maybe my scale is wrong, maybe it's not.

In the above case, big media couldn't afford to drag everything along forever. If every music track over 20 years old cost $25M per year to renew, they'd let tons of it expire into the public domain.

This kind of increasing scale renewal fee forces them to make more impactful works that are worth paying for. If they're truly valued by society, they'll pay the tax to keep them for longer.

It forces everyone to keep creating, which is good for employment and the economy. You shouldn't stop your output.

There's probably some optimal scale that incentivizes everyone to make more, and more of the content to be excellent.

Re: Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

#114

Post by ghaff »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #105
kirksan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IA has been skating on thin ice for a long time. They’ve archived a ton of content I generated over the years, most of it copyrighted. In my case I don’t care, I actually appreciate it since I didn’t keep archives as well as I should and occasionally use IA to find my own stuff. Also, my content is worth approximately 25¢. Others are not so forgiving. What we really need are updated copyright laws that allow for…

>In my case I don’t care If you did, you could DMCA claim it. They'd still archive the stuff, but it wouldn't be publicly available until whenever it'd fall into the public domain. That part of the system seems to work fairly well, except the century it would take for it to fall into public domain.

You probably don't even need to make a DMCA claim. Probably just ask them to take it down. That's pretty much how the IA has operated in general. Mostly just act as if most people don't care (which they don't) and, for most other cases, take any requested actions because it's easier for both sides than a lawsuit.

Re: Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

#115

Post by bigodbiel »

hakfoo wrote: post #97
lotsofpulp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author’s life is too long. Surely, 20 years is far sufficient to incentivize creating media, although I would err on the side of 10 years. The copyright term is automatically too long if my anyone who would benefit from it entering the public domain is dead.

I think we need to completely revisit the ownership model here. Kill copyright entirely. (I would vote for anyone-- up to and including Mike Pence-- who made this a major plank of their campaign) We have at least one corner of the universe where we've defeated scarcity. We can't run out of music. Hell, we can't even run out of a specific recorded performance, if even the most trivial efforts of due-diligence backups…

Like the idea, but tangible arts like paintings or live tours are scarce, unlike digital media. So for these money should be going directly to the organizer (artist, sculpture, troupe, etc). For non-tangible mediums, an endowment would make sense (despite the bickering). I can see an incentive for artists to then produce tangible arts for the monetary rewards, but also our industry already is filled with negative incentives and bickering. Something new would be nice.

Re: Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

#116

Post by beej71 »

adventured wrote: post #94
beej71 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the publish date plus 20 years not to exceed the life of the author is plenty.

There are some significant edge cases that can plainly make that unfair. Let's say Kurt Cobain dies at 27 (or even younger) without an heir other than a very young daughter. ~95% of his earning capacity might be in the next 15 years, rather than the prior 5 years. The daughter might be cast into relying on charity while everybody else gets to freely commercially exploit his music after his death. ('the US social safe…

I agree that's a potential loss with a 20 year or life term, but I still argue this is a net gain for the world.

Edit: I might be flexible on the life part. But not the 20.

Re: Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

#117

Post by remram »

echelon wrote: post #82
isykt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright should be life of the authors full stop. My dad dug ditches for half his life but I don’t get checks in the mail every time water flows through them.

Copyright should be an annual fee that increases by year. Year zero through five: free Year six: $500 Year seven: $1000 Year eight: $2500 Year nine: $5000 Year ten: $10,000 Year eleven: $25,000 Year twelve: $50,000 Year thirteen: $100,000 Year fourteen: $250,000 Year fifteen: $500,000 Year sixteen: $1,000,000 Year seventeen: $2,500,000 Year eighteen: $5,000,000 Year nineteen: $10,000,000 Year twenty: $25,000,000 ...

Some things make more money than others. A uniform pricing means that Disney can afford to keep their work protected for decades while my non-monetized short stories/illustrations/blog posts will be protected for a year.

How do you even price that per item? Do I pay once for the blog? Once per post?

Re: Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

#118

Post by isykt »

comprev wrote: post #109
isykt wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are people working 3x as hard, why aren’t they negotiating for 3x the pay? It would create an incentive for the business to fire the people only doing 1/3 the work, or else cut their pay by 2/3rds in accordance with the value of the labor. This does not happen because the workers involved don’t have that kind of power. The power imbalance between the two parties is so vast that the laborers have no choice bu…

Management do have a method to legally fire those only putting in 1/3rd of the necessary effort - Performance Improvement Plans.

The managers have that power, not the workers. That’s the key.

Re: Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

#119

Post by pessimizer »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #93
pessimizer wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we'll be free of copyright like Australia must be.

Start on this path guaranteed to achieve the desired results in X years, especially when Australia is not a big player on the global scene.

Australia has ranked choice voting and it has not resulted in Australia making better decisions. I'd argue that in muddling the level of preference between options by overquantizing things, it biases elections towards the status quo and a complete lack of change, and motivates the two main parties to minimize (or eliminate) their differences.

It can be better to pick the one you like most rather than to sort a bunch of candidates, some of which will be inauthentic and strategic, evenly along a continuum. In a field of nine, that transforms the number one candidate from being preferred over the number nine candidate to being nine times better than the number one candidate.

I think there's a reason that Australia requires that you rank all choices. If you don't, it spoils your vote. If you intentionally spoil your vote, that's actually a crime in Australia (don't listen to people who tell you that the least Australia requires is that you turn in a blank ballot; Australia disagrees.) You're not even allowed to ask people not to rank certain candidates. It is a jailable offense:

> In 1986 Albert Langer wrote a conference paper entitled Don't Vote, examining possible electoral strategy for the left, aiming to bring down the Labor government and to target ALP candidates in marginal seats. In 1987 and 1990 there were instances where Victorian voters were urged to take advantage of section 270 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act and give less preferred parties equal last preferences (now known as a Langer vote), so as not to express a choice for either major party.

> As a result of his imprisonment, Amnesty International declared him the first Australian prisoner of conscience for over 20 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer

Ranked choice (and obligatory) voting inflates the support for status quo parties. It's also a way to make that pesky 40% who don't vote because they hate both parties disappear.

Re: Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

#120

Post by ghaff »

giantrobot wrote: post #111
ghaff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An analyst I know once argued pretty strongly that Napster became popular not because it was free but because it was more convenient than going to the record store and buying a CD. I disagreed fairly strongly at the time. But today? Times are quite different of course but widespread streaming music with a near-universal (at least mainstream) catalog suggests that a ton of people are fine with paying $15/month to not…

> An analyst I know once argued pretty strongly that Napster became popular not because it was free but because it was more convenient than going to the record store and buying a CD. Some context for the younger HN audience: a CD used to cost $15-20 new and almost no artist in the US sold singles. If you wanted a song you heard on the radio you needed to go to one or more record stores to find the CD and pay your $15…

>Music streaming is just the latest convenience since everyone has an Internet connected device in their pocket and their "library" is just every song in the service's catalog.

Yeah, mobile probably played a role as well. Even if you have a few TB of music reasonably cataloged on a USB drive at home, that doesn't do you a huge amount of good when you're somewhere where you only have access to your phone or want to have a listen to some newly-released album.

We're also in a situation where if you know someone with vaguely similar music tastes, they could clone that few TB in less than an hour but I honestly don't know how much even that goes on these days. My sense is that most people aren't interested in spending much time to catalog their media.

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