19
Jan
Why SOPA + PIPA spell trouble
Look at their cute wee faces. That’s the Music Alliance Pact team in the montage. I co-ordinate this lot, and each and every one of them are as passionate about the music scene in their countries as I am about mine.
The Music Alliance Pact (MAP) shares free music on the internet once a month through a network of blogs in more than 35 different nations. What we do is 100% legal. All the blogs obtain written permission from the copyright holder before they submit a track for inclusion in MAP and the mp3s are hosted by individual bloggers, which gives us full control over the links we upload. For each month’s edition, I collate these tracks into one zip file which is uploaded to MediaFire, giving readers the choice of downloading MAP songs individually or collectively.
This is a wholly transparent and legitimate process, yet three Music Alliance Pact compilations fell foul of a United States copyright law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) last year.
The compilation for the March 2011 edition was removed by MediaFire under instruction from Seattle-based independent record label Tooth & Nail Records, who filed a DMCA takedown notice and complained that the copyright of Underoath, one of the acts (a “Christian metalcore band” according to Wikipedia) on their roster, had been infringed.
I checked the United States entry for that month’s MAP and was left puzzled when I saw that they had not chosen a song by them or any other Christian metalcore band. In fact, the only mention of Underoath was in the text that accompanied the Singapore submission, in which they were cited as an influence of Caracal, the Singaporean band chosen for March 2011.
Easy mistake to make…. IF YOU HAVE NOT BOTHERED TO LOOK AT WHAT IT IS YOU ARE ACCUSING OF BREAKING THE LAW.
Tooth & Nail Records ignored my email reply.
A few months later, two more MAP compilations were removed after MediaFire received DMCA takedown notices from a sinister-sounding company called DtecNet (“a market leader in supplying our customers with specialized software solutions to track and prevent piracy on their digital content and online business”), operating on behalf of CBS Corporation.
“We have a good faith belief that this material is not authorized by the Rights Owner, its agents or the law,” they warned MediaFire. So MediaFire removed the links. Hmmm, that’s strange, I could have sworn the Music Alliance Pact had permission from all the rights owners.
Here’s how it happened: the June 2011 compilation was removed because DtecNet thought the Danish band Why Don’t We Love Lucy was actually the CBS-distributed TV show I Love Lucy; the August 2011 compilation was also deleted because DtecNet figured that South African band MacGyver Knife must in fact be the CBS television series MacGyver.
Easy mistake to make…. IF YOU HAVE NOT BOTHERED TO LOOK AT WHAT IT IS YOU ARE ACCUSING OF BREAKING THE LAW.
DtecNet also ignored my email reply.
Spot the difference #1
Spot the difference #2
If you think the furore about SOPA and PIPA is just a lot of fuss being made by piracy sympathisers then you couldn’t be more wrong.
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) are effectively souped-up versions of the DMCA copyright law, which was originally passed by Bill Clinton’s administration in 1998. DMCA has been abused to the extent that it’s now standard practice for companies to use robot algorithms to identify what it reckons are copyright-infringing links then send out thousands (there were 1,757 MediaFire links in the CBS complaint) of takedown threats at a time, safe in the knowledge that MediaFire, Blogger et al will instantly delete them, no questions asked.
In case you need reminding, it was a DMCA takedown notice filed by Columbia Records that caused The Pop Cop website to be taken offline and deleted in 2010 by Google’s Blogger service, its previous host. That DMCA complaint concerned an mp3 link that hadn’t been active for more than two years. Google, who have been vocal in their anti-SOPA stance, didn’t give a damn.
If you think the power of DMCA has been exploited, just remember that SOPA and PIPA – the two United States congressional bills intended to thwart the online piracy of copyrighted music, films and TV shows – will be a hundred times worse. This video explains why:
6 Responses to “Why SOPA + PIPA spell trouble”
January 20th, 2012 at 03:13
Did you sue them like it says in your email? it would be nice to see them pay for once.
Nice vid, thanks for puting it up.
January 20th, 2012 at 09:15
I didn’t, Aldana. Suing an American company from Britain isn’t as easy (or as affordable) as I’d hoped.
January 20th, 2012 at 11:48
can’t wait until you get sued for singing in the shower.
This is a great video. So freaking important.
January 20th, 2012 at 12:29
There is a way around all this. A central website where each musician can submit their separate tracks to the world. Anytime the track is downloaded, the musician gets a royalty, say $0.10 usd, so a band including Bass, Guitar, Drums, Singer, etc. each submit their individual tracks, then via the website, they can combine the tracks into their song. Every time the song gets downloaded, a $0.20 usd royalty gets loaded. Royalties can be issued monthly.
In theory, a single Bass Guitar player could be part of thousands of global songs due to one really cool bass track submitted. It is all digital, so each track is a fingerprint, can’t be resubmitted/copied by another user.
January 20th, 2012 at 23:10
posted a link to the above to some Americans and Bob Leftsetz picked it up.
From: Postcard
Subject: Re: Why SOPA + PIPA spell trouble
To: Postcard
Message-ID:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”us-ascii”
Late last night, I got an email of thanks from Lefsetz for sharing and in this
latest missive he includes The Pop Cop/MAP story.
See below. It’s clipped at the very end.
Sent from my iPhone
Begin forwarded message:
> From: “Bob Lefsetz”
> Date: January 20, 2012 1:51:42 AM EST
> Subject: Phenomenal Explanation Of SOPA
>
>
> http://bit.ly/zDdkJy
>
> “Just consume, don’t produce, don’t share.”
>
> The content industries don’t want a distinction between what’s legal and
illegal, that bit them in the ass already, with the Home Recording Act of
1992, wherein it was declared legal to make your own mixtapes, even share
them. That horrified them. So they changed their game, they decided to go
after the sharing itself.
>
> That’s what SOPA and PIPA are all about.
>
> And the way they’re going to achieve their goal is to put the burden of
policing upon Google and Yahoo and the other portals/search engines that
provide links. If the cost of policing is high enough, they’ll just outlaw the
practice. Entirely.
>
> There’s a great analogy at the beginning of this clip. A story about a
bakery in Brooklyn that allowed customers to bring in their kids’ drawings so
they could be imprinted upon cakes. Only one problem, kids like to draw
cartoon characters, the ones they see in movies and on television. And this is
copyright infringement. So what did the bakery do? Instead of having someone
make a judgment as to the legality of each drawing, they outlawed the practice
entirely. Now you can still get an image on your cake, but it has to be one of
the authorized ones the bakery provides.
>
> But maybe your kid drew a fish because he likes fish and he’s never even
seen “Finding Nemo”. He can’t get his fish on a cake because the bakery is
afraid of infringement, they’re not even gonna make that judgment. Google is
gonna outlaw links to all sharing because it’s just too damn expensive to
figure out what’s legal and what’s illegal. So you’ll just consume
pre-approved content, manufactured by the usual suspect music and movie
companies. You can’t create your own because it might infringe and Google
doesn’t want to make the wrong decision and it takes too much money to make a
decision, so you can create your music, but it won’t be findable, the search
engine can’t take that risk.
>
> And if you think the above is blown out of proportion, you don’t understand
how the content companies think.
>
> They want control. The Internet is their worst nightmare. It allows anybody
to create. And under the rubric of preventing you from mixing up your content
with theirs, they want to outlaw sharing completely, they don’t want you
making music and movies, they just want you to buy theirs. This is the concept
of scarcity that made them so much dough, this is the past they’re trying to
jet us all back into by crippling the Internet. As Clay Shirky says in this
video, they want to “raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where
people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to
amateurs.”
>
> They think we’re dumb. They’ve got no idea the Internet is all about smart.
They want us to believe in the nincompoops on “The Jersey Shore”, not some
egghead with degrees who’s actually thought about all this and isn’t in it for
the short term money and fame.
>
> TED talks are a burgeoning resource. The brand stands for intelligent
insight. Take the time out to watch this presentation, you’ll get it, you’ll
be horrified, you’ll send it to all your friends.
>
> P.S. You might be unable to do this under SOPA. For fear that you might be
sharing copyrighted material, your ability to share at all could be crippled,
because it would cost too much for the linking service to determine whether
it’s legal to share the content or not.
>
> P.P.S. Read this story: http://bit.ly/z7NLLZ This is what they want, guilty
until proven innocent.
>
>
> –
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> –
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January 23rd, 2012 at 04:02
More power to the people
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