{"id":120048,"date":"2024-12-13T12:09:50","date_gmt":"2024-12-13T17:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/2024\/12\/13\/why-are-300-musicians-fighting-an-effort-to-protect-copyright\/"},"modified":"2024-12-13T12:09:50","modified_gmt":"2024-12-13T17:09:50","slug":"why-are-300-musicians-fighting-an-effort-to-protect-copyright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/2024\/12\/13\/why-are-300-musicians-fighting-an-effort-to-protect-copyright\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Are 300 Musicians Fighting an Effort to Protect\u00a0Copyright?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tHere we go again.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Dec. 9, the technology activist group Fight for the Future announced that 300 musicians signed an open letter denouncing the lawsuit<\/a> that labels filed against the Internet Archive for copying and offering free streams of old recordings under its \u201cGreat 78\u201d project. The letter<\/a> essentially says that labels need to focus less on profit and more on supporting creators, by raising streaming service royalty rates \u2014\u00a0and partnering with \u201cvaluable cultural stewards\u201d like the Internet Archive. <\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Gavel<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Wholesale Theft\u2019: Labels Sue Internet Group for Copyright Infringement Over Digitized\u2026\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tThis is exactly and entirely backward. Labels have to focus on making money \u2014 they\u2019re companies, duh \u2014 and they are always trying to raise streaming royalties in a way that would help them, as well as artists. It would help if streaming services raised prices, which they would have an easier time doing if less unlicensed music was available for free on both for-profit pirate sites and services like the Internet Archive. And one of the worst possible groups to offer advice on such matters is Fight for the Future, which has consistently opposed the kind of copyright protection that lets creators control the availability of their work.<\/p>\n

\n\tMost people think of the Internet Archive, if they think of it at all, as the nonprofit organization that runs the Wayback Machine<\/a>, which maintains a searchable archive of past and present Internet sites. But it also preserves and makes available other media \u2014 sometimes in ways that push the boundaries of copyright. After the label lawsuit against the Internet Archive was shifted to alternative dispute resolution in late July, an appeals court affirmed book publishers\u2019 victory in their lawsuit against the organization for making electronic copies of books available without a license under the self-styled concept of \u201ccontrolled digital lending.\u201d On Dec. 4, the deadline passed for the Internet Archive to file a cert petition with the Supreme Court, making that decision final.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt sometimes seems that part of the purpose of the Internet Archive, which was founded in 1996 by technology activist Brewster Kahle<\/strong>, is to push the boundaries of copyright. In 2006, Kahle sued the government<\/a> for changing the copyright system from opt-in to opt-out. (His side lost in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.) Later, the Internet Archive began buying and scanning books and distributing digital files of the contents on a temporary basis, according to how many copies of the volume the organization owned. (The digital copies became unusable after a certain amount of time.) During the pandemic, it launched a \u201cNational Emergency Library\u201d and announced it would begin lending out more digital copies than the number of physical copies of books it owned. Two months later, three major publishers and one other sued, arguing that this controlled digital lending \u2014 a theoretical model that\u2019s not recognized in U.S. law \u2014 infringed copyright.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Internet Archive argued that it was a library and that its digital lending qualified as \u201ctransformative use<\/a>,\u201d an aspect of the fair use exception to copyright law that in some cases allows copyrighted works to be used for a different purpose. (The thumbnail images seen in search engine results qualify as a transformative use, for example, since they are used to help users find the images themselves.) The copyright exceptions for libraries and archives are very specific<\/a>, though, and it\u2019s hard to imagine how borrowed digital copies of books are so different from the digital books that have become an increasingly important part of the publishing business. The Second Circuit Appeals Court treated the dispute as a straight fair use case \u2014 it barely mentioned the National Emergency Library \u2014 and ruled for the publishers.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Chuck<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tWhy is the Internet Archive Streaming Frank Sinatra and Chuck Berry Without a\u00a0License?\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\t\u201cFair use is an important part of the law, and no one would disagree,\u201d says Maria Pallante<\/strong>, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, the trade group that handled the lawsuit. \u201cBut this this was a gross distortion of fair use \u2014 they wanted to normalize that it\u2019s OK to reproduce millions of works.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe label lawsuit \u2014 Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Concord sued under the auspices of the RIAA \u2014 could end up being just as straightforward. (Kahle is also personally named in the lawsuit, along with other entities.) The Great 78 Project makes 400,000 recordings digitized from 78 rpm records available to stream online. The idea is to \u201cmake this less commonly available music accessible to researchers,\u201d according to the project\u2019s web site<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe reality, the labels\u2019 lawsuit alleges, is that among the recordings available are Bing Crosby\u2019<\/a>s \u201cWhite Christmas,\u201d Chuck Berry<\/a>\u2019s \u201cRoll Over Beethoven\u201d and Duke Ellington\u2019s \u201cIt Don\u2019t Mean a Thing (If It Ain\u2019t Got That Swing),\u201d all of which have considerable commercial life on streaming services. \u201cThe Internet Archive\u2019s \u2018Great 78\u2019 project is a smokescreen for industrial-scale copyright infringement of some of the most iconic recordings ever made,\u201d RIAA chief legal officer Ken Doroshow<\/strong> said in a statement. The Internet Archive did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Internet Archive seems to be appealing both of these cases to magazines, making the case that the $621 million RIAA lawsuit threatens \u201cthe web\u2019s collective memory\u201d (Wired<\/a><\/em>) and the \u201csoul of the Internet\u201d (Rolling Stone<\/a><\/em>). Maybe. But neither book publishers nor labels object to the Internet Archive\u2019s actual archive of the actual Internet. In both pieces, Kahle positions himself as a librarian and a preservationist, never mind that \u201cWhite Christmas\u201d doesn\u2019t need preserving and that the Music Modernization Act has a provision that allows libraries to offer certain unavailable pre-1972 recordings if they follow a process. (The labels\u2019 complaint says the organization didn\u2019t do this; Kahle told Rolling Stone<\/em> that \u201cwe talked to people, it wasn\u2019t a problem.\u201d) The fact that some of the recordings are scratchy, which Kahle and his allies make much of, is legally beside the point.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Music<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tGlobal Music Copyright Value Soared to $45.5 Billion in\u00a02023\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tIt\u2019s reasonable to hope that the labels don\u2019t put the Internet Archive out of business, because the Wayback Machine is so valuable. But it\u2019s also reasonable to wonder why Kahle let the Internet Archive take such big legal risks in the first place. If the Wayback Machine is so important, why distribute books and music in a way that could be found to infringe copyright, with the enormous statutory damages that come with that? Unless, of course, that\u2019s actually part of the organization\u2019s work in the first place.<\/p>\n

\n\tSome of these issues can get pretty abstract, but the way they\u2019re settled could have serious consequences in the years to come. If one wanted to assemble a collection of scanned books in order to train an artificial intelligence, one might go about it in exactly the way Kahle did. Same goes for old recordings. Indeed, artificial intelligence companies are already arguing that mass copying of media doesn\u2019t infringe copyright because it qualifies as \u201ctransformative,\u201d and thus as fair use. There is no evidence that the Internet Archive copied books and recordings for this reason, but it\u2019s certainly possible that the organization might have wanted to set precedents to make it easier for AI companies to argue that they use copyrighted work for training purposes compensating rightsholders.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe letter from Fight for the Future points out that \u201cthe music industry cannot survive without musicians.\u201d But there\u2019s a chance that the kind of large-scale copying of music that it\u2019s convincing musicians to defend could represent a first step toward the technology business doing exactly that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Aller \u00e0 la source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here we go again. On Dec. 9, the technology activist group Fight for the Future announced that 300 musicians signed an open letter denouncing the lawsuit that labels filed against the Internet Archive for copying and offering free streams of old recordings under its \u201cGreat 78\u201d project. The letter essentially says that labels need to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musique","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120048\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}