posted by
martyb
on Sunday February 12 2017, @04:07PM
from the diamonds^W-copyrights-are-forever dept.
from the diamonds^W-copyrights-are-forever dept.
Beyoncé is being sued by the estate of a deceased New Orleans YouTube star:
Beyoncé's apparent appropriation of New Orleans culture stirred controversy with the release of her 2016 single "Formation" — with its groundbreaking video and the song itself nominated for an array of Grammy Awards this year.
But the family of a murdered New Orleans rapper whose voice is sampled on the bouncy track has spurred a new $26 million lawsuit claiming the celebrated pop singer, who recently revealed she's pregnant with twins, stole the copyrighted material.
Messy Mya was shot and killed in 2010.
[As an adjunct to this discussion, I cannot too highly recommend Spider Robinson's 1983 Hugo Award winning short story: Melancholy Elephants . -Ed]
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Beyoncé Sued for Over $20 Million by Slain YouTube Star's Estate for Sampling a Song
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @04:09PM
As someone on the top of the music industry pyramid, Beyonce is one of the largest beneficiaries of copyright law.
Any blowback she receives from copyright law is just deserts.
(Score: 3, Funny) by linkdude64 on Sunday February 12 2017, @04:58PM
I hope she has decent sunscreen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @07:57PM
She hasn't been found guilty of the killing. It could be a multiple gunshot suicide, like Gary Webb.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @11:41PM
Most people who are in love with the current interpretation of copyright law suddenly think it doesn't apply to them when they're caught, usually because whoever it is that's trying to defend themselves can't afford a team of overpriced lawyers.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday February 12 2017, @04:26PM
According to the link in tfs, the story is called Melancholy Elephants...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:45PM
Also, the sentence reads rather awkward. I assume the ed meant "I cannot recommend xxx highly enough."
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Sunday February 12 2017, @11:19PM
The sentence reads to me like someone with English as a second language. The verb structure is reversed like you would get in Spanish or Italian. But I do understand what they meant and can second the recommendation for both the author and this particular story.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday February 12 2017, @04:37PM
Don't care, unless it happens to get rid of stupid patenting/copyright and patent/copyright trolls and 60000000 year long patent/copyright life...you know... gets rid of stupidity!
Wait. Get rid of stupidity? Where would all the sheeple go?
Beyoncé?
Nope don't care.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday February 12 2017, @08:47PM
Duuuuhhh WUT? [sourcefed.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday February 12 2017, @11:44PM
Wow: is that Mick Jagger or Tim Curry?, lol!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Sunday February 12 2017, @04:43PM
While I'm no fan of Beyonce, this reeks of trolling. The family hasn't produced any music. Any income they may receive from Messy Mya's recording is not affected - indeed, they may well experience increased sales due to the free advertising.
This reminds me of the Tolkein estate, busily monetizing Tolkein's work after all these years. How is this different from patent trolling? A non-productive entity monetizing someone else's invention, while producing nothing of value themselves.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday February 12 2017, @05:10PM
A non-productive entity monetizing someone else's invention, while producing nothing of value themselves.
Is Beyoncé suing Beyoncé? Because, realistically speaking, she is a non-productive entity who produces nothing of value herself.....
Citation needed?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJRnLUI1EZ0 [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeonBmeFR8o [youtube.com]
WTF? Why is she famous? I mean besides any eye candy effect???
WHY?????
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:12PM
Because teens and young adults are impressionable and media is great at selling images. When you call out pop culture you don't suddenly become popular...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @11:36PM
That all depends on whom you compare yourself with.
If you believe everyone should judge every aspect of everyone else's life, then I guess you are entitled to be afraid not to like Beyonce (she and her fans will make fun of you, after all).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @07:46PM
> this reeks of trolling. The family hasn't produced any music. Any income they may receive from Messy Mya's recording is not affected
Look, if I make a painting, a one-off, and keep the rights to the image with no plans to ever reproduce it, and then you come and take a picture and start selling Pepsi using that image, you have not impacted my income stream, but you sure as hell have taken my copyright and made money from it. The point of copyright - if it is to exist, which I'm not saying is the case nor that the current length is sane - is to stop others from using your creative works in ways you don't want.
If you come and set up a* lemonade stand on my lawn on days when I'm not home, do I have the right to say no, you cannot use my property like that without my consent? Even though I'm being hurt in no way?
If so, then while copyright is law, the Mya family is perfectly right in what they are doing.
Bradley13, please when considering issues like this try 1) perspective-taking, and 2) to think of edge cases in social situations the way that QA or coders do for software. The zero, -1, asdfa-garbage, and infinity points are useful.
Posted AC since I'm hoping Bradley13 (and others) might change their behaviour, but I don't want their behaviour towards me to change!
*a zero lawn impact stand ;)
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Sunday February 12 2017, @09:52PM
On the other hand, if someone had a zero-lawn-impact lemonade stand that did not affect you or your lawn in any way, but you find out**, would you then sue for monetary damages? If so, is $20 million appropriate?
I would expect that if they are truly copyright holders that under copyright law they could truly forbid Beyonce from using that sample. There might be some damages involved, but not on the order of $20 million.
On the other hand, if they see an opportunity to cash in, asking for $20 million seems right on target.
You know, I've never heard of a copyright case in music where the song in question was a total dud that didn't get any sales.
(admitted: those wouldn't be that newsworthy, so there is a strong selection bias.)
Oh, it doesn't sound like patent trolling. The "Blurred Lines" vs Marvin Gaye estate was that: Blurred Lines clearly invoked the groovy feel of songs of a certain era, including that song by Marvin Gaye. Equally clearly, they were not the same song. Since the Marvin Gaye estate won, they basically now have a "copyright patent" on that style of music.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday February 12 2017, @10:17PM
Had Beyonce properly negotiated a license with the family for the voice, would the family have reasonably asked for $20 million, or 1% of profits, or whatever? Then yes, $20 million is appropriate.
If someone made a dude, then a 1% profit license wouldn't have paid off anything, so of course there's no point in making a copyright case since you still have to pay legal fees.
The point is, if someone illegally makes money off of your copyright, you should get a share of the profit since that money would have been due you had the offender gotten a commercial license from you legally in the first place.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Monday February 13 2017, @10:56AM
You think a single song released only a year ago would have made so much money that 1% of the singer's profits would amount to $20 million?? So the singer would've made $2 billion out of that one song in the course of one year? Really??
<Hypothesis time>
Some website imagined/estimated Beyonce's yearly income at $54 million. (e.g. here [paywizard.org]). That sounds okay to me, but hell, let's just double that to get a higher upper bound. So we've put an upper bound of $108 million on Beyonce's income per year. (Note that wikipedia lists her net worth as $265 million, so this yearly figure is way too high)
Now Beyonce tours, sells other songs, and probably does other things to make money. But let's pretend that this one song was responsible for 10% of her imaginary ludicrous amount of yearly income in 2016 (even though it was less than 10% of the album it was released on). In that case, Beyonce's income for this one song would be $10.8 million.
Now that's the year of the song's release. With enormous luck, its financial viability would halve every year (no, it'd go way faster, but okay). So that's 10 million + 5 million + 2.5 million + 1.25 million + ... Basically, it never makes $20 million in that scenario.
(The distance remaining is cut in half precisely, so there's always half of what this year contributed "left").
</Hypothesis time>
But enough with the hypotheticals. According to this list [pajiba.com] (and also this list [therichest.com]), Happy Birthday (1893) is the most profitable song by a very comfortable margin. A $14 million margin even. Happy Birthday garnered $50 million. Over the course of 120 years. By requiring every restaurant in the USA to pay for singing it. And since this is by sisterS, they'd have to split the $50 million in two.
The 2nd highest earning song on both lists is White Christmas (1940), with estimated earnings of $36 million. The songwriting credits go to Irving Berlin, but a substantial part of the revenue is generated by the version of Bing Crosby. So, best case, the whole profit is split amongst only these two folks: an average of $18 million a person.
So it's safe to say that no single person's contribution to a contemporary pop song is worth $20 million.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday February 12 2017, @10:35PM
The point of copyright - if it is to exist, which I'm not saying is the case nor that the current length is sane - is to stop others from using your creative works in ways you don't want.
The point of copyright (and patents) is "to promote useful progress in the sciences and arts". It of course fails at that in its current configuration (really, 12-15 years should be the general limit, ideally each creative genre should have its own reasonable limit, some less, some more), but it certainly is not nor has ever been meant "to stop others from using your creative works in ways you don't want".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @12:20AM
I see that differently. The material Tolkien left behind were not finished works. Christopher Tolkien put in considerable effort to piece them together, flesh them out, and make them coherent works. I think the work he did added considerably to the material and world of Middle Earth. He's in the coasting mode now as I suspect all the old material has been worked through by now. I was disappointed when I saw The Children of Hurin a few years ago. I took it to be "new" material, but it was basically just pulled out of earlier work.
I see see your point being more like the Jimi Hendrix estate. After Hendrix died, they started just throwing out anything they had into albums. If you look into the discology, you'll see WAY more albums that came out after his death than during his life. A fair number of those don't sound all that great, like they were recorded with someone's cassette deck (which they probably were).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @01:27AM
No, it's not trolling. Neither you nor anybody else has any right to commercially benefit from other peoples work unless they say so.
In Europe we have moral rights associated with authorship. Why assume anybody would want to be associated with the deprived, masonic, globalist shit-show that Jay-Z and his ugly wife represent?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Sunday February 12 2017, @05:00PM
Culture cannot be "appropriated". Culture evolves, changes, is adapted by other cultures, etc. Does New Orleans think "their culture" was created out of nothing?
(Score: 1) by moondoctor on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:08PM
Vanilla Ice begs to differ...
I'm a skateboarder and my culture is appropriated all the time to sell things for companies that dgaf about skateboarding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @10:26PM
back in the 90s. People don't remember just how much it was exploited. Sort of like all the people claiming 'open source' or 'free software' support today, who have nothing to do with it, or only provide dumps of 'waste' projects that even they can no longer manager because it has been rendered functionally useless.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday February 12 2017, @05:38PM
Sorry, I don't like Beyonce. And, sorry, I can't really call a Youtube star an "artist". Maybe I'm just to old fashioned to appreciate either of them, but I can't really care. (Some Youtuber's do some pretty cool stuff, but little of it can be called "art" IMO)
The best takeaway here, is Ed's link to Melancholy Elephants. I've heard the argument before, but somehow, I've missed the story. Copyright law is well and truly fokked, already. It needs to be rolled back to some reasonable period of time. Lower limit, 5 years, upper limit, 30 years, with the "most reasonable" time being 15 years. I'd be happy to argue any number in between my upper and lower limits - anything higher is simply unreasonable. And, of course, anything lower than five years is even more unreasonable. There has to be SOME monetary incentive to keep real artists going, after all.
Has anyone ever wondered what happens when Man begins living on more than one world/habitat? Will the New Worlders have to carry all of our asinine baggage with them to the new worlds? Will aspiring artists on faraway rocks have to submit their work to Earth's authorities before they can claim any copyright (or patent) rights? Will some eerily haunting scrap of music be rejected, simply because some backward barbarian penned something similar, centuries before on a planet that the (new) songwriter has never stood upon?
Melancholy Elephants does talk about infinity, after all. Infinity includes - well - EVERYTHING!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @05:45PM
I can't really care.
Apparently you care enough to make sure everybody knows you don't care.
(Score: 3, Funny) by moondoctor on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:12PM
One of the more fascinating phenomena displayed by Webulus Posteris in the wild.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday February 12 2017, @11:13PM
Actually, Beyoncé can sing with great technical proficiency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjJw-9X5MjI [youtube.com]
It's just that her voice is so bland and generic that she's better off making money off rapping and dancing.
compiling...