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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

#191

Post by thomastjeffery »

always_good wrote: post #137
thomastjeffery wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? There only issue I can think of is upload speed, which is improving for many, and would improve more prevalently if more average users had a clear need.

Well, doesn't your answer of "it's improving for many" admit to the reality that it sucks right now, answering your own question? Besides, even if we have more bandwidth, it doesn't change the fact that p2p would require more of it. Also, if you asked the average person if they want Spotify to be peer-to-peer + use more bandwidth vs centralized + use less bandwidth, do you think they are in a position to care much be…

> it doesn't change the fact that p2p would require more of it.

But P2P doesn't require more bandwidth. It requires more upload bandwidth, which is arbitrarily constrained.

> if you asked the average person if they want Spotify to be peer-to-peer + use more bandwidth vs centralized + use less bandwidth, do you think they are in a position to care much beyond the bandwidth difference? Especially on mobile devices?

Of course not. Spotify is already tailored to the current state of internet infrastructure, which heavily favors centralized content delivery.

Spotify can afford to foot the bill for their content delivery network. That is why it is no longer "better" for them to use peer to peer networking.

> What do I care about making Spotify's operations cheaper at my own expense?

For Spotify or Netflix, or any other site that already has a centralized CDN, there is no advantage.

For everything else, however, P2P is a great way to scale distribution, and the more we do to incentivize ISPs to increase upload speed, open ports, etc. the better.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#192

Post by thomastjeffery »

emodendroket wrote: post #146
QAPereo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the vast majority of history, musicians were not some of the wealthiest members of society, far from it. Music has traditionally been “near free” and only ceased to be during a brief period necessitated by tech. That period has long since ended. I don’t see that an artificial value placed on music, rather than the previous real value set on its distribution, is necessarily a good thing.

How would you feel if someone were applying this argument to software development? At any rate, rich, world-famous artists are the least harmed by changes in the music industry.

Centralized billing is not the most lucrative method for creators.

It's only good for the middleman.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#193

Post by muzikbiz »

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…

Excellent explanation. But to complicated matters further, your description applies mainly to European licensing. The US music publishing workflow is different.

In the US, there is no CMO. After agreeing to a license, music publishers send their composition (word-and-music) catalog information directly to Spotify. There is no requirement that they need to send the associated recording with their musical composition. So the burden is on Spotify to match the composition up with the recording to recognize if the recording's underlying composition is licensed. (The recording is licensed because the actual audio file was sent to Spotify by the label).

So then Spotify needs to tie all this data together. Compositions can be owned by 5 publishers, who are all sending separate catalog files. Again, no requirement to send an unique identifier to tie these all are up. So Spotify does the best it can to associate all this data to figure out if a recording is licensed, but ultimately, they cannot verify millions of tracks. So they make business decisions that carry risk so people can listen to music. They can say, if we have 90% ownership, we will treat it as licensed or some other deviation from affirmatively knowing every copyright owner without a doubt.

So then the music publisher finds a handful of tracks that slipped through and were unlicensed. And they sue. And technically, those tracks were unlicensed, but its not for lack of trying from Spotify. And no music industry player is helping solve the metadata standards or systemic issues. They just lie in wait and sue for money or as a negotiation tactic. And they exploit the "Spotify is ripping off artists" narrative, when in reality, Spotify is working very hard and investing a lot of money to pay out artist and writers properly.

These lawsuits are very dishonest, but legally defensible. There are not in the spirit of any productive working relationship with the MAIN distribution channel of your product!

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#194

Post by thomastjeffery »

wang_li wrote: post #187
cortesoft wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Appl…

>Brick and Mortar stores don't count, because they aren't streaming services, and are not really competing for the same market. I guess I misunderstood your point when you said there was no way to access the product. Even if you want to exclude purchasing music there is a mechanism that's been around for decades: radio.

Radio is not controlled by the listener, and has a lot of commercials interspersed. It's clearly not the same market either.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#195

Post by thomastjeffery »

stordoff wrote: post #111
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.

> many streaming services that have a large customer base And arguably Spotify only has a large customer base because it has the content people want. It's very similar to a chicken and egg problem.

Copyright holders demand control over distribution, which makes smaller competitors less lucrative to rightsholders, so the rightsholders pick larger incumbents, and force smaller businesses to fail via litigation.

The problem is that copyright has an unreasonable amount of authority.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#196

Post by schoen »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #186
schoen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original BitTorrent wasn't aware of network topology at all, so it could randomly use a relatively expensive or congested link just as easily as a LAN connection. You could get better use of network resources overall if you usually preferred to get pieces from peers that are closer to you on the network. I think the BitTorrent company and/or community were studying this issue at some point and so they may have co…

I would argue that in the long run, it is better to demand more bandwidth than is available, so that infrastructure builders can react accordingly.

I like the overprovisioning concept fine, but it's going to be pretty expensive to overprovision for the possibility of high-speed connections between all random pairs of hosts everywhere in the world regardless of geography. We'll probably have to persuade a lot more people to value this degree of connectivity ideologically, because demand for it isn't really getting expressed much right now.

I don't want to sound like a Bellhead here, but the packet switching infrastructure that's been built out has embodied some assumptions about its likely patterns of use. To change those patterns of use a lot (which I'd like to see too) probably needs more infrastructure. Even things like ADSL are a problem here. I agree that path asymmetry doesn't feel at all healthy for the Internet -- it feels like it's baking in producer and consumer roles -- but there are a few counterarguments that may give us some pause:

* It's never been cheaper for people who specifically want to provide services to others to rent servers in colocation facilities. It's getting cheaper every year. So, maybe people who care to do so could just rent some servers. (Of course, this might give them less autonomy because there are more people who can decide to kick them off or shut them down, and they might still not have the infrastructure to distribute media that they produce at home to the servers they rent. On the other hand, running things at home may make anonymous publishing harder because the associated broadband service is usually tied to a physical address by the ISP.)

* There's never been a huge amount of expressed demand for symmetric network connections, even when they've been available as an option. (Maybe this is different in different countries?) The economic division of network operators into "eyeball networks" (major net traffic sinks) and "provider networks" (major net traffic sources) seems to be getting sharper over time. The network operators themselves might have an economic incentive to try to get their users to equalize the traffic in both directions -- especially in terms of arrangements around settlement-free peering -- but they haven't managed to change most users' habits very much this way.

* I think of myself as a very pro-decentralization Internet user, yet whenever I run "ifconfig wlan0 | grep bytes", my download volumes consistently dramatically outpace my upload volumes, even though I have a symmetric broadband connection both at home and at work! So apparently I'm not being the change I want to see in the world.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#197

Post by thomastjeffery »

munificent wrote: post #90
foepys wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a controversial stance but I too don't understand why patents are generally limited to 20 years but creative copyright is granted until 70 or more years after the death of all participating authors. If you cannot make money off of your work within 20 years, it's highly unlikely that this will change.

> If you cannot make money off of your work within 20 years, it's highly unlikely that this will change. Is your argument that if I can't make money off my own creative work in 20 years, anyone should have the right to give it a shot after that, even if I'm still around? That sounds pretty shitty to me. I'm all for copyright expiring, but I'd hate to lose the rights to my own work while I'm still living.

Your argument is that if you come up with an idea, and spend 20 years failing to profit from it, I shouldn't be allowed to give it a shot.

That sounds a lot more "shitty" to me than the alternative.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#198

Post by gt_ »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #145
gt_ wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elaborate

Many Disney stories (including Snow White) are copied from earlier works by authors unaffiliated with Disney.

Copied? Snow White was a groundbreaking feat of animation brilliance, a result of tireless effort, craftsmanship and detail that experts widely agree rivals any animation project produced to date. It was literally the first feature-length color animated film with sync audio ever produced, and you’re cutting it down for it’s screenplay being inspired by a fairy tale? This is no weakness. This is consistent with filmmaking tradition and the nature of humanities efforts in general. The line is not a sharp one, but in terms of Snow White, if I understand your accusation correctly, your point is lost.

I am open minded but, with all due respect, it appears you might not be aware of some critical truths of how art gets made.

Either way, what do you suggest?

We probably generally agree on the topic at hand. I am saddened seeing many early films eroding which have yet to be digitized because they are not accessible.

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#199

Post by thomastjeffery »

bogomipz wrote: post #125
thomastjeffery wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 copy…

Copyright has been abused to the point where it is more of a detriment than it is worth.

There will always be weasels and bottom feeders that seek to constrain every other individual in the world from extending an artistic work or idea, even generations after his or her death; but do you really believe copyright/patent law has somehow pushed forward innovation?

Re: Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

#200

Post by thomastjeffery »

saalweachter wrote: post #143
andrepd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we should obey the law because it is the law?

See, the "an unjust law should not be obeyed" rhetoric works better when the principle being upheld isn't "I want to be entertained for free". I can get behind the "the information wants to be free, man" line when we're talking about overpriced textbooks and academic journals and bytecode for tractors, but when it comes to entertainment, I have a hard time caring. I don't think producers have a fundamental right to c…

Civil disobedience is not constrained to the most directly onerous legal abuse.

The "an unjust law should be obeyed" rhetoric works... never.

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