> 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?
Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
111–120 of 125 posts
Re: Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
#112The 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 sa…
> 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 That's not from the DMCA. Those statutory damages were there long before the DMCA. (Also, they can be reduced to $200 in the case of innocent infringement). The DMCA did add some new statutory damages for violations of the new rights…
> First, the money you pay the copyright owner under a compulsory license is not damages. It is royalties.
The rates for compulsory licensing cap your compensation and thus provide a reasonable cap on your compensatory damages.
> Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work.
The most infamous cases were lawsuits against individuals for their individual per-work downloads, or per-work uploads regardless of the number of copies distributed [1][2]. From the perspective of the individual who is unlikely to create more than a handful of copies per work they intend to consume, per-work is largely indistinguishable from per-copy. So, if they made a single copy of a work, which is the most likely case, they are liable for 750$ per-work, yet if musical recordings were subject to the same statutory compulsory licensing as musical compositions, they would only be liable for 0.124$ per copy, a nearly 6000x difference between compensatory and statutory damages for their single copy of a work.
Of course, it could be reasonable to have statutory damages as a punitive measure to dissuade copyright infringement, but the Supreme Court has ruled that punitive damages in excess of a 10:1 ratio with compensatory damages is almost certainly unconstitutional in a lawsuit [3]. That is not binding on Congress with respect to law, but it is certainly troubling that we have decided that music copyright infringement is so heinous as to demand a nearly 600x greater punitive damage ratio compared to what is already at the limits of what is considered constitutional when no specific ratio is specified.
[1] https://www.dcba.org/mpage/vol210209art3
Re: Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say I come up with the idea of using a fan to blow a balloon into the air. I get a patent with the claim "a device made buoyant in air and propelled by forced wind". Someone else comes up with the idea of blowing a dust bunny into the air with their breath. Their idea, which has nothing at all to do with my idea and is certainly not a copy, infringes my claim because what they are doing matches what I've claime…
> With a copyright, their additional creativity would have made their work not infringe. But not generally. You can't sell a new Hogwarts-based book with Harry Potter characters. This is both due to copyright and trademarks. But already copyright blocks derivative works even if there's additional creativity with a new plot.
You can't sell a Harry Potter book, but you can sell any number of Magical School for Wizards books. They can use similar themes to Harry Potter, similar pacing, even similar artwork styles.
They just can't copy the characters, significant chunks of text, or images.
That's the difference between a copyright and a patent in a nutshell: you copyright an implementation of an idea, while you patent the idea itself.
Re: Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess (a) with what money and (b) with what time. Unless you are Taylor Swift, people wont watch the exact same content on a different platform just becasue you told them to when it exists on the one they like. More importantly (c) why? Instead of building up someone else's business/platform for free (and put yourself in the same position as you already are). This is why people sell a product. Online courses, have…
> with what money You can run a Peertube instance costs for less than $100/month, distribution included. And that's if you insist on running your own. > with what time. People publish to multiple platforms already. Adding another one is the least of the concerns. > Unless it's a purely moral argument, in which case, I can respect that, but it's not a good business decision. I for one can only respect someone if their…
> I for one can only respect someone if their decision puts their principles before their business. That's what "Skin in the Game" is all about. Beato can make all the fuss he wants against BMG, but I have no sympathy for him if his actions only goes as far as his dependency on YouTube/Google allows him to go.
I view Beato's stance as rational: he's picking one battle over the other rather than engaging on multiple fronts at once. He's only one man. He has limited social capital, and the conversion rate favors him spending that capital in a sphere of influence that resonates with his audience, fans, and industry contacts and associations. He knows where his bread is buttered, and due to his success and notoriety he may get away with biting the hand that feeds him, but he's a caged tiger as much as he's a cage-bird.
Beato wants to effect change in a specific way. To broaden the scale and scope of his grievance, he would dilute his own impact. I trust that Beato has given these issues some thought as a working artist, as he has a vested interest in helping himself, but he can already negotiate preferred rates because of his built-in audience and pull. His desired relief would benefit all artists working in America, not just Beato himself. To be drawn into a battle on two fronts would be a tactical error. He's wise to focus on the battle he has a chance of turning the tide of. Others have already engaged on the front you advocate for, and those others are better situated to engage there.
This is Beato's fight, as he drew the battle lines. He can't be sidelined so easily by bystanders, like us in the comment section, because us folks don't have skin in the game like Beato does.
Re: Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
I know you aren't the same person as above but the person above wrote
> they used to invest in artist development. Now they don't. Most spend very little on promotion
You seem to be claiming they are providing value.
It they aren't providing any value then artists should not sign up. If the are providing value then it's up to the artist whether or not that value is worth it.
Radio? who listens to radio now-a-days?
Re: Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They can't put themselves between and the consumer. Of course they can. If they smell money and sell, they can change it to whatever they want. It's just a client for now . It's like arguing for Skype back then based on tech aspects. It's P2P! Yes, P2P until it wasn't. Youtube wasnt distribute in tech, but was in marketing and if you were there around 2007-10, you remember it was much less social-media-ified and fe…
The code is open source and FOSS. They could try a bait-and-switch and they would see a dozen forks 30 minutes after the announcement.
Consumers don’t use protocols, they use branded software. Hence why Microsoft’s “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is/was so effective.
Re: Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
#117If 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…
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.
Re: Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
The burden of proof of infringement is on the plaintiff in either case. If you have an obscure patent nobody has ever heard of, you can win the suit by showing that the defendant had the same idea you did - you don't need to show their work derives from yours. If you have an obscure song nobody has ever heard (or even an unpublished one!) you are going to have a difficult time proving infringement for a similar riff.…
They got George Harrison for a different song that had a similar melody. Don’t think it was identical, though would have to investigate.
Harrison's song was "My Sweet Lord", the song allegedly infringed was "He's So Fine" by some girl group in the 1950s or 1960s. It shouldn't be hard to hear either one. My recollection is that the songs did some pretty much alike.
Re: Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wor…
> 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.
It's clearer than you think. Did Dua Lipa hear an obscure Florida reggae band's tune that isn't available on any major platform to listen to any more? It took some time, but eventually the court agreed she'd never heard the song she supposedly copied:
Re: Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
They got George Harrison for a different song that had a similar melody. Don’t think it was identical, though would have to investigate.
Harrison's song was "My Sweet Lord", the song allegedly infringed was "He's So Fine" by some girl group in the 1950s or 1960s. It shouldn't be hard to hear either one. My recollection is that the songs did some pretty much alike.
The melody, not the song lyrics.