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https://fossforce.com/2019/04/whats-wrong-with-the-music-modernization-act/
Pretty much everyone in the music industry agreed that the rate setting process for both mechanical and streaming royalties was antiquated. Having a central location for storing publishing and master ownership information for all recordings — as well as for obtaining digital mechanical licenses — would be ideal. There also needed to be payments to heritage artists whose music is broadcast on satellite services, and a clear system for paying producers and engineers for their share of the master recording income derived from performance.
The MMA promised all that and more. The changes it brought about, however, came with a price.
The Music Modernization Act: What Is It & Why Does It Matter?
The Music Modernization act, or "MMA" creates a formalized body, run by publishers, that administers the "mechanical licensing" of compositions streamed on services like Spotify and Apple Music (we call them DSPs). It changes the procedure by which millions of songs are made available for streaming on these services and limits the liability a service can incur if it adheres to the new process. It funds the creation of a comprehensive database with buy in from all the major publishers and digital service providers. This would be the first of its kind that has active participation from the major publishers, representing a vast majority of musical works. It also creates a new evidentiary standard by which the performance rights organizations ASCAP and BMI can argue better rates for the performance of musical works on DSPs.
[...] There will be meaningful criticism of this bill. But at the end of the day, this is a good thing for our business. A consensus amongst the music community and agreement with the DSPs. Two notions that, before this bill, lived in the realm of fantasy. And a real nuts and bolts solution to, what a year ago, seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle.
So how about it fellow Soylentils? What do you think about this proposal?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pipedwho on Wednesday April 24 2019, @08:32PM (10 children)
What is actually needed is a single database that contains all works that claim copyright. This way at least payment/royalty systems know who to pay. If you don’t register your work for inclusion (like the old days) then no copyright for you.
It should extend to all copyrights, not just music recordings. Ie. books, printed music/lyrics, pictures, etc.
Then it can talk about things you can’t have in a ‘license’ along with standard license templates so entrenched players can’t lock out new publishers/dsps/etc.
And finally, reasonable copyright durations based on continual reregistration. None of this life+75 years crap.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 24 2019, @09:08PM
Run it with blockchain! But seriously, such an idea sounds fine but it should be developed and run by the Copyright Office, the subunit of the Library of Congress that already exists to do such things.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @09:26PM (1 child)
The database might be a content addressed system, ipfs, torrent. The claim of authorship ideally from crypto sig, possibility of protecting a pair of hashes of the work instead of the data itself, for what you don't want/can't publish yet. As for the duration of copyright, make the AUTHOR (or his heirs for max 20 years) and not the publisher the only one to be able to claim damages from piracy. If the author gains nothing because he had a bad deal, the publisher can't sue.
From this dumpster of data, indexes could be made to ID songs. Indexes would substitute streaming services. If i find a song through an index I am more than happy to pay for their service if that is a service. Access to a lowfi preview should be free. The original file should be itself unencumbered, but the PLAYER would make the playback lawful by micropaying in advance, differently depending on context - your position, personal play discounted, theater play dependent on how many people, whatever), micropayment indexes would yield public data for charts and stuff.
This will never happen as it cuts out basically any intermediary. And we are in a byzantine post-capitalist (fake-capitalist because capitalism never actually happened) world.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday April 25 2019, @04:52PM
In the case of a work to which hundreds of people contributed, who is the author?
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday April 24 2019, @10:46PM (6 children)
I'd suggest a proviso to it: Allow a short period of copyright protection before first registration with this database (say 10 years max).
I'm not going to want to register every single photo, blog post, fanfiction etc. with any database. The bureaucracy and workload (for me and the database maintainers) would be impractical. But equally, some of those may be good enough to warrant protection in the long term.
During that initial period, I could decide what creations of mine are worth protecting (the "keepers"), once it becomes clear which ones I can / want to profit from. And you could allow registration before the deadline if you want, to avoid last minute rushes.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Thursday April 25 2019, @12:28AM (5 children)
Not really an issue if you don't 'publish' all these things you're not sure about and keep them to yourself. Same rules as today would apply if someone steals your shit and tries to claim it themselves.
For low effort material, like photos, the protection and method of entry should be relative to the effort required to make the work in the first place. If you take a year to make a movie, the effort/cost/protection should be commensurate. If you smash out 1000 photos in a day, then it's likely only a few are worth publishing anyway. So you're not going to publish the lot of them, and the cost of registration shouldn't be too bad. Cost could even be on a sliding scale, where the first few years are free for X number of works (to stop people spamming the database). With penalties for pushing in things you didn't create, or are deemed not worthy of registration (ie. spam). With automated systems, the entry process could be made extremely low effort once you've registered yourself as a creative entity.
I'm sure they could handle a grace period, during which time, if you didn't register it but felt the need to publish anyway, then anyone using it during that time does it freely. And if you don't register within 12 months, or you intentionally publish it, then it reverts to public domain.
Basically, if something isn't worth anything to you, why should the public have a system in place protecting stuff you don't care about. That is exactly what we have today with all the 'abandonware' kicking about. Including all the TV shows, books, etc that you can't even legally use because either you can't find the copyright owner, or the 'publisher' isn't actively making it available.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday April 25 2019, @03:41AM (2 children)
For photos, the metadata in image files should provide enough copyright identification.
It should be forbidden to remove such copyright metadata in the course of image processing.
(There will probably be exceptions for fair use and the like)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @04:39AM
You guys seem to labor under the idea that copyright exists to give The People more stuff to enjoy (like it reads in the law text). However the matter of the fact is it's sole purpose is to give Disney more of your hard earned money, forever and ever.
If the purpose was to make more stuff available, there would be a government Department of Public Domain that would each year distribute the new works which just entered public domain. But no, instead we get copyright term extensions. It's not a contract if there is only one side present at the negotiations. It's an edict.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Thursday April 25 2019, @06:16PM
That would imply every single image gets to be copyrighted. I’m saying that registration provides a way to properly expire works that are abandoned by the creators of no longer hold sufficient value to remain protected. Just throwing down metadata perpetuates the same problems we have today. This applies to all forms of digital and analogue media.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday April 25 2019, @06:26AM (1 child)
Not publishing your work immediately is a bit foreign for many users of MyFace and InstaTweet, etc.
Whether that work deserves protection? YMMV.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Thursday April 25 2019, @06:27PM
Remember back in day when media needed to (for whatever reason) get a signed release before publishing pictures of people. That doesn’t seem to apply to instaface and the like. Neither should copyrights. If people don’t care about publicising private information, why should they maintain a copyright on it. Maybe that’ll make people be a little more prudent about what they post to myface.
Now exposing or perpetuating private information is a separate issue to copyright.