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Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

reuters.com

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Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#121

Post by ryanisnan »

spike021 wrote: post #102
agrippanux wrote: post #96

I was one of the original engineers on MP3.com. Shortly after our music locker service debuted, we got sued by all the major labels. I spent 4 months writing tools to pull all the discovery data for their lawsuits. When it was apparent our court case was going south, the major music publishers sued us as well (lead by Harry Fox Agency). I spent another 4 months pulling discovery data for those lawsuits. When those co…

If you don't mind me asking, is there any particular reason you didn't just leave? I'd imagine this fits the kind of situation where you aren't obligated to stay.

$

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#122

Post by stemuk »

saaaaaam wrote: post #106

There is a little (understandable) confusion in some of the comments here. The issue here is not that Spotify is infringing copyright (so it’s nothing to do with BitTorrent etc) but rather that Wixen says that it has not been paid correctly for the mechanical exploitation of the copyrights it administers. This is complex for several reasons. First of all: the recordings in question have without doubt been legitimatel…

Great explanation, thanks for taking the time to write this down!

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#123

Post by wang_li »

cortesoft wrote: post #104
wang_li wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that the authors/rights holders of the music really should get the majority of the revenue. The underlying technology is of little interest to the end user. Who would really install and pay for spotify if the entire library consisted of a two minute track of street sounds from Los Angeles and thirty seconds of doorbells? Basically no one. Nobody really cares about the technology, what they want is the m…

Yes, but without the underlying tech, there is no way for the end user to access that content. So the question is, which is more scarce? The infrastructure, tools, and millions of paying customers using your streaming service, or the music itself? There are a lot of music producers and publishers. There aren't many streaming services that have a large customer base and the tech to service it.

> Yes, but without the underlying tech, there is no way for the end user to access that content.

iTunes Music Store, Amazon MP3 downloads, and actual brick and mortar record stores beg to differ.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#125

Post by bogomipz »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #26
turc1656 wrote: post #14

This doesn't shock me at all. I recall a while back reading how Spotify allegedly started their service with downloads from The Pirate Bay: https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...

Which is evidence that copyright hold back innovation.

Copyright is exactly how a a musical artist is able to turn their creative output into an asset on which they can make a living from. The copyright is the very thing that allows an artist to sell and license their recorded work. An artists record company buys tor licenses he copyright to the master recording from them.

There will always be weasels and bottom feeders that seek to exploit but do you really believe copyright has somehow held back musical innovation? It was this copyright that enabled a business model that brought recorded music to the masses.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#126

Post by cortesoft »

wang_li wrote: post #123
cortesoft wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but without the underlying tech, there is no way for the end user to access that content. So the question is, which is more scarce? The infrastructure, tools, and millions of paying customers using your streaming service, or the music itself? There are a lot of music producers and publishers. There aren't many streaming services that have a large customer base and the tech to service it.

> Yes, but without the underlying tech, there is no way for the end user to access that content. iTunes Music Store, Amazon MP3 downloads, and actual brick and mortar record stores beg to differ.

Brick and Mortar stores don't count, because they aren't streaming services, and are not really competing for the same market.

The other two count (although Apple Music and Amazon Music Streaming, not the music store and downloads), but I didn't say there was only ONE distributer, just that there were only a few.

A good distributer, with a wide audience, is able to take a big cut and not have producers run away. Apple is able to take 30%, and so is Steam. If it was so easy to make an alternative, people would do it. The network effect is strong.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#127

Post by akvadrako »

bogomipz wrote: post #117
intopieces wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spotify has previously claimed that streaming is not "reproduction" and is more akin to "performance"... and they (may) have those licenses. Doesn't having an offline mode run counter to this claim? That's clearly reproducing it. It once lived as a copy on their servers, now it lives as a copy on their servers and on the subscriber's device. I could see, however, the argument going this way: a true reproduction is…

>"Doesn't having an offline mode run counter to this claim? That's clearly reproducing it." I agree with this. Even if it only lives an encrypted cache you are effectively doing a bit by bit reproduction when you offline sync. They do expire once the user hadn't logged in for some amount of time, I believe it's something like after 30 days of not logging in or refreshing a token. Before streaming when someone bought…

That's an implementation detail - which is not what copyright is about.

Even radio is on the receiving end reproduced bit by bit, copied multiple times and stored in some kind of memory, which could be analog or digital.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#128

Post by akvadrako »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #84
thomastjeffery wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, indenting comments makes them frustrating to read on mobile. The generally preferred method on HN is to begin the line with a > and optionally wrap the quote in * (asterisks) to make it italicized.

> The generally preferred > method on HN is to begin > the line with a > The problem with ">"-style quoting, is that the markup doesn't recognize them. Nor does it preserve the preceding newline. So if you are quoting anything more than a one-liner, you get a mess.

That's why the italics. Anyways, HN formatting sucks.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#129

Post by notatoad »

DrJokepu wrote: post #116
cortesoft wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think only music owners are allowed to post to YT, so they don't need a license like Spotify would.

But you see, the thing is with commercial music is that the music owner is not a single entity. There is a composer, if there are lyrics there is a lyricist, if it was translated then there is a translator, if it’s a cover or remix there is an arranger, there is a publisher that published the music, there might be a sub-publisher, then there is a record label… One of the main reasons behind the existence of this comp…

Isn't this the reason vevo exists? youtube pays a single royalty based on playback and leaves it to the uploader to split it up between all the interested parties.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#130

Post by lathiat »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #93
cbhl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify cleaned up a lot in 2014. They used to be peer-to-peer, and they'd give "free" service to employees of certain big tech companies because they could take advantage of the upload bandwidth of the big tech offices. They culled the P2P tech in 2014 and went to a standard server-client model. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...

It's sad to see that peer to peer is not utilized more, since it scales so well. The overbearing copyright propaganda has given BitTorrent a bad name, even though it has so many other uses.

I get the feeling that a lot of p2p efforts fail because of patents.

For example I understand the reason Facetime calls don't go phone-to-phone and instead go through a server is because of a patent [troll]. I'm curious to see how WebRTC fits into that.

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