Musician Claims $5.2 BILLION In Damages In Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Apple, Amazon And CDBaby

from the also-seeking-alchemy-secrets-and-unicorn-foals dept

The laws surrounding IP can certainly be absurd, and the ever-extending copyright term has turned the phrase "for a limited time" into a joke in search of a punchline. But there's nothing so absurd as those who take these laws into their own hands, find a lawyer willing to represent fools and pursue supposed infringement in court.

Roland Chambers from South Carolina has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Apple, Amazon and CD Baby over 12 original pieces of copyrighted sound recordings and two pieces of original artwork for the album cover. Chambers is looking for Apple to pay the larger amount. In total, the plaintiff is seeking an insane amount of over 5.2 billion dollars.

That's not a typo. Billion. $5.2 billion or a little over $1.7 billion per defendant. How did these defendants arrive at the receiving end of damage claims that rival IP abuser Zynga's market cap? I don't know either, but here are some of the accusations from Chambers' filing. (All punctuation/spelling errors from the original.)

On or about July of 2001, Plaintiff provided Defendant #3 (CD Baby) with five (5) compact disc including 12 original pieces of copyrighted sound recordings and two (pieces of artwork for the album cover.

In consideration for the compact disc, Defendant #3 executed a consignment only contract, which included distribution of the five disc sent only, no reproduction clause, warehouse storage fees if not sold, and no ownership transfer of copyright.

*A true and correct copy of the Note is attached hereto as Exhibit A.

[Quick interjection: there is no Exhibit A. There are only "demand breakdowns" for every defendant. And there's no asterisk anywhere in the filing that might give some indication what "Note" refers to. From where it's placed, one would assume it would be a copy of the contract with CDBaby, but nothing is provided other than Chambers' claims and bad math.]

No payment was reported or issued to plaintiff for any of the five disc.

Plaintiff discovered the compact disc were still selling in March 2014 (beyond the quantity ever legally produced) and in various formats and demanded explanation, as well as payment.

CD Baby was to distribute disc and not authorized to create any reproductions; however, more than five disc exist today, and CD Baby is only definitely aware of the whereabouts of one (1) disc. A representative states one (1) disc was sold and (3) were likely recycled/destroyed. This leaves one more disc unaccounted for prior to counterfeit units being placed on the market.

From this point, Amazon and Apple are both accused of allegedly selling Chambers' music without authorization (listed as "ringtones" on Apple's damages worksheet) "far beyond the quantity" authorized. Chambers supposedly gave Apple three songs to stream ("to poll the audience"), but Apple went ahead and made his whole album available digitally. Amazon apparently did likewise despite receiving notice several times to remove the material.

Now, here's where things get really bizarre: the "statutory damages enhancement."


The astronomical $1.7 billion is based mainly on Chambers' mistaken belief that statutory damages are awarded daily. If the unauthorized tracks were available for 4,745 days (roughly 13 years), then multiplying that by $30,000 per day gets you $1.7 billion. Of course, statutory damages don't work like that, but it's sort of amazing he didn't go for willful infringement and bring the total damages sought to $25 billion. Why not? It's not like we're talking about real money, real math or a real application of statutory damages here.

Beyond the $30k per diem, Chambers throws in everything else he can think of. There's another $30k thrown on for "cost of statutory damages." There's $1 million per defendant for punitive damages "based on evidence," something which, at this point, is almost completely nonexistent. There's also another half-mil on the spreadsheet for using his two album pictures -- a number seemingly pulled out of thin air and tacked on to the total.

Because Chambers hasn't listed album or song titles in his complaint, it's hard to verify whether or not he actually registered the copyright on his creations. There aren't a ton of copyrights registered to "Roland Chambers," but there's not enough info available to confirm or deny Chambers' right to claim statutory damages.

Chambers is also asking for attorneys' fees to be paid if he wins. Considering the "enhanced" math shown above, I'd be very interested in seeing Chambers' invoices for filing costs and billable hours.

Filed Under: copyright, roland chambers, statutory damages
Companies: amazon, apple, cdbaby

Aussie Security Research Hacks Music Charts, Puts His Own 'Songs' Up Top

from the nothing-to-it dept

It's been known for quite some time that the music charts are subject to being easily gamed. In fact, one of the reasons why the major labels are "the major labels" was they figured out quite early on how to best game the system. Still, it appears that one security researcher down under took a somewhat different route to "topping the charts" down in Australia. As sent in by G Thompson, a guy by the name Peter Fillmore made himself into quite a musician in a very short period of time. Forget "practice, practice, practice." Fillmore went a different route towards learning music and composing and recording his "songs."

Rather than spend years practising an instrument and writing songs, he compiled music from clunky electronic MIDI files and later by applying algorithms that squashed together public domain audio.

He then posted the tracks to a variety of different platforms via CDBaby, apparently including Spotify, Rdio, MOG (from Telstra), Pandora, iTunes and some others -- and then the fun part:

He then purchased three Amazon compute instances and wrote a simple bash script to simulate three listeners playing his songs 24 hours a day for a month.

This move apparently pushed the music up the charts on various systems -- hitting the very top of the Rdio chart for Australia. In response, he released a second album, and saw it jump to the second spot (behind his first album) within a matter of weeks. Any human listeners, not surprisingly, were not particularly happy, and he got flooded with bad reviews, but it didn't much matter. His favorite comment: "I call it troll music." There was also one that said: "it might sound good on cocaine like when it was made, but this isn't music." He did get a single iTunes purchase, though.

MOG and Spotify actually appeared to suspect something was up and cancelled certain accounts. Spotify killed the accounts he had set up to listen (but not the actual music accounts) though he's not entirely sure why -- though he suspects a few things that made it obvious they weren't legit (he didn't try that hard to cover his tracks). With MOG, he suspects it was because almost no one uses the service, so someone probably noticed the anomaly situation pretty quick. Rdio, however, kept the albums up at the top, and even sent out promotional emails to people pushing his albums.

At this point, he created a third album, called A Kim Jong Christmas, which was all just actual public domain music, so that if anyone listened to it, they wouldn't immediately realize it as "noise." As that one shot up the charts as well, users were confused, with one commenting: "There ain't no party like the Korean Worker's Party. But seriously -- what the hell is this doing on High Rotation?"

In the end, he apparently spent a grand total of about $30, but brought in decent royalties. Of course, once the story came out, his music's been pulled from most of these services, though he's started posting it to his own website, though even he admits that he can't listen to it the whole way through.

Of course, this was all done for the purpose of research. He was interested in a variety of things, including the fraud-checking on various music services, how royalties on these services work (he's got some data there as well) and various other things about how to make this kind of setup work. He also noted that when his accounts were suspended, almost no info was given, and he points out that this could also lead to a way for someone to attack a rival musician to get their works taken off of these services without warning or explanation.

The other question that I have is if Fillmore has opened himself up to any legal risk. It looks like he made about $1,000 in royalties, so I could potentially see some companies arguing it was a type of fraud. If he were in the US, I could even see some crazy CFAA charges thrown at him, because that's the sort of crap that happens in the US under the CFAA. Hopefully calmer minds prevail and this is viewed in the spirit it was done: as a research project which popped out some rather interesting results (and some really bad music).

Filed Under: australia, fraud, music industry, peter fillmore, security
Companies: cdbaby, mog, rdio, spotify

How Rumblefish Ended Up Claiming Copyright On A Song Uploaded By The Band Who Actually Held The Copyright

from the overclaiming dept

A few years back, we wrote about the company Rumblefish claiming copyright on public domain works on YouTube and getting them taken down. Recently, the company got a lot of attention for claiming copyright on someone's video because it had some birds chirping in the background, and a very mistaken Rumblefish process not only believed it owned the birdsongs, but then an employee doubled down and refused to back down when challenged on this. The company did eventually admit a big mistake after this received a ton of publicity -- but many of us were still worried about the process that allowed Rumblefish to make such a bogus claim in the first place.

Here's a story of another Rumblefish takedown -- but the details suggest one of the reasons why these things may be happening. John Boydston, from the band Daddy A Go Go, recently contacted us after he discovered that Rumblefish was claiming copyright on a video he had put up on YouTube, for an original song called I Wanna Be An Action Figure. The song was written by Boydston and he holds the sole copyright. It was released on a CD back in 2002. The video was produced (by Boydston again) just last year and posted to YouTube last October. Even so, Boydston received a notice from YouTube saying that music in that video "may have content that is owned or licensed by rumblefish." Boydston filed a dispute over this -- but was told that it would take a month to hear back -- and in the meantime ads might appear next to his videos with the proceeds going to Rumblefish.

Thankfully, the process didn't take that long. Within a day of filing the dispute claim, YouTube sent Boydston an email telling him that "rumblefish has reviewed your dispute and released its copyright claim on your video." So, at the very least, that's an improvement over the birdsong situation.

So, what happened? Boydston searched around for a while to actually find a contact at Rumblefish and had a short email exchange where he was told that the "system is working the way it should." It turns out that Boydston signed the band up with CDBaby to be his online distributor. They offer his music off of the CD Baby site, but also distribute it to tons of other properties, like iTunes, Amazon and various streaming services. And... it turns out, mixed in with a long list of music stores and streaming sites, is Rumblefish. The company is supposed to help potentially license the song to others, with a cut of the proceeds going back to Boydston (I assume after Rumblefish and CDBaby take their cut). So part of that is that Rumblefish automatically registers all such music with YouTube's ContentID, and sets it to "monetize." That, of course, leads to the silly result that any time an indie artist who uses CD Baby puts their own work up on YouTube, Rumblefish may end up claiming the work as its own (though, in theory, some of the proceeds would eventually get back to the author). Unfortunately, this is not clearly explained at all.

CDBaby does let its musicians opt-out of each individual service, and having gone through this whole experience, Boyston has decided to uncheck Rumblefish, and no longer allow them to claim his own music on YouTube.

Filed Under: contentid, john boydston, takedown
Companies: cdbaby, rumblefish

Historical Note: The Day Steve Jobs Dissed CDBaby

from the quality-songs dept

Derek Sivers recently had a wonderful post over at the Music Think Tank blog about the day Steve Jobs "dissed" him in a keynote speech. The full story is absolutely worth reading (Sivers, as always, is a wonderful story teller), but the short version is that a bunch of folks who represented independent musicians were invited to Apple soon after the original iTunes store launched (with mainly major label music). They weren't told they were meeting with Steve Jobs, but he showed up, telling them that the plan was to get "every piece of music ever recorded" into the iTunes store. Apple folks then showed everyone in the room how to upload tracks, and Sivers seemed disappointed that he wouldn't be able to just use the tracks they already had available, but would have to re-rip and re-enter data:

Then they showed the Apple software we’d all have to use to send them each album. It required us to put the audio CD into a Mac CD-Rom drive, type in all of the album info, song titles and bio, then click [encode] for it to rip, and [upload] when done.

I raised my hand and asked if it was required that we use their software. They said yes.

I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as lossless WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist themselves, ready to send to their servers with their exact specifications. They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.

Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that’s what Apple needs, OK.

After the meeting, Sivers wrote up the notes he took from the meeting and posted them to his blog... only to get angry messages from people at Apple about how the meeting was confidential (something Sivers claims he was never told). Either way, they got the contract from Apple, signed it immediately, and got to work. In realizing they had to rip and upload 100,000 CDs all over again, and that it was going to be costly, they asked CDBaby musicians to pay $40 to get their songs onto iTunes. Because of the iTunes activity, all the other major music services also asked for all of CDBaby's music as well -- Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, Napster and eMusic. Apparently 5,000 musicians paid the $40 and CDBaby started ripping all those CDs.

They ripped and ripped and ripped... and at some point realized that Apple had never returned the contract. Months went by. Sivers contacted Apple... and nothing. Finally, five months later, Steve Jobs did a keynote where he announced that iTunes was doubling the number of tracks available, from 200,000 to 400,000... and in the middle, he made a crack about how they were trying to be selective, focusing on quality, rather than quantity, and specifically noting that anyone could just pay $40 to have music uploaded to competing sites, but that Apple only wanted the best. Sivers realized: "Whoa! Wow. Steve Jobs just dissed me hard! I'm the only one charging $40. That was me he's referring to." You can see the clip below: Sivers took this to mean that, despite Jobs' original statements about wanting all songs in iTunes, this meant he no longer wanted independent music. Following the speech, he sent around a note telling everyone he was refunding the $40 fees, giving back the $200,000 -- much of which had been spent.

The very next day? CDBaby received the signed contract from Apple with details about how to upload their 500,000 tracks.

Filed Under: itunes, music, steve jobs
Companies: apple, cdbaby