Major Record Labels Use Lawsuit Against MP3Skull To Try To Backdoor In SOPA

from the another-backdoor-attempt dept

Another week, another attempt by the legacy copyright players to find a way to enact SOPA via the backdoor. As we've been covering quite a bit lately, the Sony hack has revealed how "site blocking" (the key part of SOPA -- which is more accurately described as censoring parts of the internet) is still a major priority for the the legacy copyright industry, and they're exploring all sorts of ways to make it happen, from new lawsuits to new legislation to trade agreements to pressure on third parties to local politicians to the International Trade Commission to attacks on encryption and more.

It appears that the strategy of using lawsuits is now well underway with the major labels all teaming up to sue the site MP3Skull. That site has been around for a while, and is one quite frequently cited by copyright maximalists as an example of a "bad" player in helping people find unauthorized copies of music. At first I wasn't even sure if it was worth covering the lawsuit as it seemed rather typical of similar lawsuits that the legacy entertainment industry has filed against a variety of sites and services. Frankly, I don't know nearly enough about how MP3Skull works to have much of an opinion on the legal basis for the lawsuit, but it does seem odd that the labels are suing in Florida, when they're mostly based in NY and MP3Skull is most likely based in Russia. I'm guessing the MPAA's win against Hotfile in Florida may have something to do with the choice of venues.

But the reason this story is worth covering has little to do with MP3Skull itself. Rather, it's the remedies the labels are asking for: which is basically to have the court issue an insanely broad order that no one can ever point anyone to MP3Skull's websites or in any way help MP3Skull. Basically, the record labels are asking the court to pretend SOPA is the law despite it failing as a law:

...entry of an Order, pursuant to Section 502 of the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 502), 28 U.S.C. § 1651(a), and this Court’s inherent equitable powers, (A) enjoining Defendants and all third parties with notice of the Order, including any Web hosts, domain-name registrars, domain name registries or their administrators, from facilitating access to any or all domain names, URLs and websites (including, without limitation, www.MP3Skull.com and www.MP3Skull.to) through which Defendants infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights;

(B) requiring domain name registries (including VeriSign, Inc.) and/or registrars holding or listing Defendants’ domain names and websites (including, without limitation, www.MP3Skull.com and www.MP3Skull.to) through which Defendants infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights to: (a) disable www.MP3Skull.com, www.MP3Skull.to and any related domain names specified by Plaintiffs through a registry hold or otherwise, and to make them inactive and non-transferable, and (b) transfer Defendants’ domain names to a registrar to be appointed by Plaintiffs to re-register the domain names in Plaintiffs’ names and under Plaintiffs’ ownership;

(C) enjoining all third parties with notice of the Order from maintaining, operating, or providing advertising, financial, technical or other support to MP3Skull and any other domain names, URLs or websites through which Defendants infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights, including without limitation www.MP3Skull.com and www.MP3Skull.to; and

(D) enjoining all third-party distributors of applications, toolbars or similar software with notice of the Order from distributing any applications, toolbars or similar software applications that interoperate with any domain names, URLs or websites through which Defendants infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights, including without limitation www.MP3Skull.com and www.MP3Skull.to.

That's a lot of text, but what it's saying is that the labels want the court to issue an order that the labels can then wave around to basically anyone, saying they cannot provide any services to the site and cannot link ("facilitating access") to MP3Skull. The labels chose their target carefully. It seems unlikely that MP3Skull is going to show up in a Florida court to defend itself if the site really is run by a group of mysterious folks in Russia who haven't revealed themselves. Thus, there's a half decent chance that a judge could just issue a default judgment, and possibly just sign off on giving the labels exactly what they're asking for. This doesn't always happen in default cases, but certainly is more likely when there's no real adversarial hearing to point out how insane and questionable the proposed remedy is.

Courts should generally try to avoid putting burdens on third parties entirely unrelated to the case in question. The labels must know this, but are hoping that without an adversarial process, they can present a very one-sided (and potentially misleading) story, and get the kind of ruling it wants, and then use that as a precedent for as long as they can.

Whether or not MP3Skull itself broke the law (and it's certainly possible the site did), everyone should be extremely concerned about the excessive remedies being sought and the way the labels are looking to get a judge to effectively pretend that an extreme version of SOPA is already the law.

Filed Under: copyright, russia, site blocking
Companies: arista, atlantic, capitol records, elektra, emi, mp3skull, riaa, sony music, universal music, warner music group, zomba

Once Again, Political Speech Is Silenced By Copyright/ContentID

from the because-that's-how-it-works dept

This seems to happen every political season. When he was a Presidential candidate, John McCain got annoyed at YouTube taking down political videos based on copyright claims. During the last Presidential election, a Mitt Romney TV ad featuring President Obama singing an Al Green song was taken down via a copyright claim. And now, 2016 Presidential candidate Rand Paul has discovered that his announcement speech from Tuesday morning has been taken down. This wasn't a DMCA takedown, but yet another case of YouTube's over-eager ContentID doing the job: Apparently the announcement kicked off with an anti-Wall Street country song, "Shuttin' Detroit Down" by John Rich, whose copyright is held by Warner Music Group.

Of course, Rand Paul has been sort of a mixed bag on copyright. He was one of the first Senators to speak out against SOPA/PIPA in 2011. But, not long after that, he and his father Ron put out a weird internet freedom "manifesto" that appeared to argue for much stronger copyright laws, and which argued that the public domain was an evil "collectivist" threat that was against basic property rights.

Of course, it would be nice if this little incident led candidate Rand Paul to support fixes to copyright law and the DMCA, but as some are pointing out, assuming this really was a ContentID takedown, changes to the DMCA wouldn't much matter -- since ContentID is a private solution, outside of copyright law. That said, it was put in place, in part, to help keep YouTube from getting sued over copyright claims, so a fixed DMCA might lead to a better ContentID offering. Unfortunately, despite a history of copyright and ContentID being abused against political candidates, it still hasn't really resulted in them taking a real platform stand on the problems of copyright law today and how it impacts free expression. It's unlikely that Rand Paul is going to really take a stand on this, especially given that weird manifesto from a few years ago.

Filed Under: contentid, copyright, dmca, john rich, rand paul, shuttin detroit down, takedown, youtube
Companies: warner music group, youtube

Labels Finally Realize It's Better To License Music To Baidu Than To Fight It

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

We've been following the record labels fight with Chinese search engine giant Baidu since it began in 2005. The labels kept claiming that Baidu was infringing on their copyrights by helping people find music. And while there were some questions about just how deeply involved Baidu was (including accusations that it didn't just link to mp3s, but may have hosted them knowingly as well), the company kept winning in court.

It appears that three of the big four record labels have finally realized, six years later, that rather than continuing to fight this fight, it's better to license the music and be done with it. An organization representing Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music has agreed to license their music to Baidu, who will make it available as a part of a licensed service. It'll be interesting to see if there are any crazy restrictions on this, but kudos to those three record labels for finally (way too late) realizing that this was always a business model issue, not a legal problem.

Filed Under: china, copyright, licenses, music
Companies: baidu, sony music, universal music, warner music group

Warner Music Group Employee Charged With Stealing $700,000

from the now-that's-theft dept

What is it with recording industry folks getting charged with actual theft these days? First we had folks from the Spanish music collection society SGAE charged with a complicated scheme to divert money from artists to themselves. Then we had the story of IFPI execs doing something similar. Now comes the news that a single employee at Warner Music, Andrew Robertson, whose job was "equipment buyer," may have stolen somewhere around $700,000 over a four year period. The scam involved "the creation of fictitious vendors and over-charged items," in which he diverted the funds to a personal account. Even more ridiculous? The guy didn't even seem to work very hard to cover his tracks. That "fictitious vendor"? It was called A.I. Robinson... and used Robertson's own home address. Tip to Warner Music: perhaps instead of worrying about "piracy" so much, you should pay attention to the folks actually stealing money.

Filed Under: andrew robertson, stealing
Companies: warner music group

The Ridiculous Demands The Record Labels Want For Music Lockers

from the you-have-to-be-kidding-me dept

As there's been lots of talk lately about music lockers and whether or not they need to get licenses, it's great to see Michael Robertson, who runs the music locker MP3Tunes, provide a little background on just a few of the ridiculous demands from the record labels when it comes to music lockers. Remember, again, that music lockers are all about people taking the music that they already have, placing it on a different hard drive (a remote hard drive) and being able to stream (or possibly download) it. There's a very strong argument (and one that Robertson is fighting for in court) that the record labels really have no say in this matter whatsoever. There are no specific additional rights that they need to license here. The people already have the music, and it's just a question of where the hard drive is and how long the wire is between that hard drive and the listener.

Of course, the real issue is that (yet again) the record labels are more afraid of unauthorized copies than they are of trying to provide actual value to users. And that has become clear in the demands from the labels, including the insane argument from Universal Music that only specially marked files with digital receipts should be allowed in music lockers. That is, if you have legally purchased CDs and legally ripped the music from those CDs... too freaking bad. As someone who still buys most of my music on CD, that's pretty ridiculous. They're telling me that I can't store my legally purchased music on a server of my own choosing?

To combat this they [Universal Music] want only songs with digital receipts to be able to added to lockers. For some time UMG has been demanding that online music retailers embed personal information in every song they sell. They call it UITS. iTunes has been inserting email addresses into every song while other retailers like Napster are using a unique receipt number....

All songs without a proof of purchase would be assumed to be unauthorized and not accepted into the system. Songs ripped from CDs would not have unique identifiers and wouldn't be loaded. Any song purchased prior to retailers inserting personal identifiers or from retailers who have yet to personalize every song would also be excluded. (To date, Amazon's MP3 store does not put any unique identifiers in songs despite UMG's demand that they do so.) Promotional songs download online would also not work.

Of course, that's a complete nonstarter, and would make music lockers almost useless for most users, even those of us who do, in fact, legally purchase our music. Sony Music apparently has a slightly different concern, but an equally dumb idea:

Sony believes users will share lockers by visiting each others houses and syncing in each others music. To combat this Sony wants loading to happen from only one computer. Each locker owner would have to designate a single location from which they could upload songs. Users could load music from either their laptop or desktop or office computer but not all three. Their belief is that this will prevent friend to friend file sharing.

Can you imagine what a headache that would be? It kind of defeats the whole purpose of the music locker. It also would create a huge headache for any music locker service in terms of dealing with customer complaints and customer support when someone buys a new computer and dumps the "officially designated" uploader machine. It's a concept from someone who doesn't understand how people use computers these days.

And then there's Warner Music Group, which is so afraid of file sharing that it wants to make sure it can track you down and sue you if you use your locker in a way it doesn't like apparently:

Most worrisome to Warner Music Group is that users may setup multiple lockers and the distribute the extra lockers to friends. Imagine if a locker owner setup a locker at Apple and Amazon and then gave their less used locker away or maybe even sold it. What WMG would like to see happen is that a central locker authority would administer all locker assignments. For awhile they were pushing Catch Media as the solution. More recently they may have relaxed their demands in this area and insisted that locker identities be uniquely tied to a valid credit card or some other such verified identity.

This is so typical of the big record labels. Rather than looking at ways to provide more value and recognize how the world works, all they do is seek restrictions and annoyances. To be honest, I've still been hopeful that they'd eventually come around and figure out how to adapt, but these days I'm finally realizing that maybe they really do need to die off.

Filed Under: licenses, music lockers, restrictions
Companies: sony music, universal music, warner music group

What Would Happen If Napster's Co-Founder Owned Warner Music?

from the questions,-questions dept

An interesting possible scenario arose last week, when it was reported that Sean Parker (recently fictionally immortalized by Justin Timberlake in the movie The Social Network), who was a co-founder of Napster with Shawn Fanning, is considering a bid for Warner Music Group, which has been fishing around for a buyer. Of course, Parker's money mostly comes from Facebook (and I assume, some from Plaxo), rather than Napster. And if there is a bid, it appears Parker would just be one of a few investors involved. But it certainly raises questions about what kind of impact there might be. Would Parker actually look at business models that really embraced file sharing? Or would he view things differently? It certainly would be interesting to watch...

Filed Under: ownership, sean parker
Companies: facebook, napster, warner music group

Choruss Changes Its Tune; Splitting With Warner, But Many Questions Remain

from the but-now-what? dept

I had been meaning to write up this interview with Jim Griffin, of the infamous Choruss, from Knowledge@Wharton, because it caught my eye that he opened the interview by saying: "Warner owns Choruss; it incubated Choruss. Choruss is now becoming an independent company with Warner still involved." That caught my attention because others within the industry had been telling me that the big record labels haven't been impressed by Choruss at all and very few expected it to go anywhere -- in part because of the Warner connection. But it wasn't really clear what that meant. Now, Jon Newton, over at P2Pnet highlights that Griffin is claiming that Choruss' whole strategy is changing. First, he claimed that Choruss was being "re-established" as "an independent entity, neither owned nor operated by any music rights holder." And, from there, suggested the whole thing is different:

Choruss will no longer pursue limited campus experiments; We believe we've learned what we need to know to deploy Choruss. We learned this in negotiations with schools, meetings with teams of students working on Choruss, bargaining with record companies and publishers, meeting with their many associations, arranging for music clearances and much more.

Working with Warner was very helpful. We received priceless advice and legal counsel. We learned that students want to pay for music, but they want that service to traverse network borders, not stop at those borders. We know students want to share and bring live and commercially unreleased music to the public, and we want to help them. We also know that working together on music projects raises competitions concerns, whether real or perceived.

Now, this is all somewhat odd. After all, last summer, Griffin told the press that tens of thousands of students had already signed up for the program -- which confused us, because we couldn't find any of them. A few months ago, we went looking again and still couldn't find them, even as we were told (again) that starting in early 2010, universities would be using Choruss. And now we're being told that the whole university thing is gone? Did it ever actually exist?

On top of that, of course, Griffin promised to answer questions from the Techdirt community last May, and despite multiple promises to come through, we've still received no answers. I guess now that the story's changed, some of those questions don't apply any more. But the whole Choruss thing is looking more and more like a lot of smoke and mirrors -- just as originally predicted. Lots of talk, but if you try to pin Griffin down on details, you get the runaround. Every time we tried to pin down what it was specifically, Griffin would send angry, insulting emails to me, insisting I shouldn't talk about it until the experiments were done. So, now these experiments, which don't appear to have ever happened, are done -- does that mean we can talk about it? Or will we still be told to stay quiet?

Well, either way, I'm going to talk about it... because I'm still confused. "We learned that students want to pay for music?" Really? That's not at all what I've seen. Students are willing to pay for lots of things with scarce value, but I've seen little indication that they want to pay for something that's abundant. Some will, but very few want to.

Choruss' mission is clear: Make it faster, easier and simpler to pay for music. We focus on flat-fee, unlimited download and access models, both for group purchase and for individuals.

This was an idea that may have made sense a decade ago, but I'm not sure it will any more. However, if Choruss can actually make this work, more power to Jim and his team. I just think that boat has sailed. Focusing on getting people to buy music is sort of missing the big opportunity, which is working on having music make other stuff more valuable, and selling that other stuff.

But, of course, the much bigger question is how will Choruss accomplish any of this. Later on he talks about a price point below $5/month, which certainly is good -- if possible. But we've seen subscription services and the industry's demands have always made the price much higher. Will the industry really sign on to an all-you-can-eat music service with no DRM and no limitations for less than $5/month? I'm skeptical.

All in all, this still sounds like a pipedream. There are no details. No official partners. No customers. Just a plan to offer music for cheap. We've heard that before, and none of the record labels were willing to sign on. Why will it change this time?

Filed Under: choruss, jim griffin
Companies: choruss, warner music group

Viacom To Record Labels: If You Want More Money For Music In Video Games, We'll Find Other Music

from the when-giants-fight dept

You may remember that Warner Music Group's CEO, Edgar Bronfman Jr., has been beating the drum for a while that video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band should be paying more to use songs in those games. This, despite the fact that having a song in those games helps sell more albums. It's the typical fallacy of the record labels: overvaluing the content and undervaluing the platform or the context. So, what happens when two entertainment industry giants collide in such a debate?

Viacom, owners of MTV, which own Harmonix, who own Rock Band (and originally created Guitar Hero), seems to feel differently about all this than Warner Music -- recently declaring that it wants to pay less for the music in video games, and if the record labels don't like it, Viacom will find cheaper music elsewhere:

As we go forward, we are continuing to focus more on software than hardware, looking to reduce the cost structure associated with Rock Band, being selective in the music titles that we choose for Rock Band based on their cost. The music industry will assist with this category to make sure that it can continue on a profitable basis in the future and then finally we think we have the best games in the category, we'll continue to rollout exciting products.

Filed Under: music, pricing, video games
Companies: viacom, warner music group

Warner Music Shoots Self In Head; Says No More Free Streaming

from the you-can't-be-serious dept

A few years back, it seemed like Warner Music actually had a better handle on where the music industry was heading than its 3 major label rivals. In the last two years, however, it seems like WMG has consistently gone further and further in the opposite direction. It may have hit a new low today with the announcement that it will pull out of all free streaming music licensing offers. Yes, Warner Music just told the one thing that was effectively competing with unauthorized downloads to shove off. Brilliant.

"Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed.

"The 'get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price' strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future."

And thus, WMG will go out of business that much more quickly. That is the model that the market is moving to, and Bronfman and WMG appear to have decided to ignore what the market wants, to cover their eyes, stick fingers in their ears and go down with a ship that could easily be righted. Incredible.

Now, Warner may be a bit gun-shy after its investment in iMeem (a free online music streaming service) became a total disaster, but what Warner doesn't seem to realize is that a big part of why it failed was the ridiculous demands Warner put on iMeem in terms of how much it demanded in payment per stream. The problem is that WMG has totally unrealistic expectations of how much money should be paid per stream, and that's because the company's top execs still don't seem to handle basic economic modeling particularly well. And thus, the company will fail.

You don't compete with "free" by taking your ball and going home. You don't compete with "free" by pretending that old artificial scarcities are coming back after the wall has been broken down. You don't compete with "free" by suing customers. You don't compete with "free" by shunning those who have business models that work. You compete with free by offering a better product and a better business model. WMG is choosing to go in the other direction. Best of luck to them...

Filed Under: business models, edgar bronfman jr., free, licensing, music, strategy, streaming music
Companies: imeem, last.fm, spotify, warner music group, we7

Duh: Raise Music Prices To $1.29/Song; Music Sales Growth Slows

from the like-you-couldn't-predict-that dept

Last year, we warned that treating digital music sales as the savior of the market was a dangerous thing, since there were indications that the market was fragile. In fact, we had already seen that after years of major record labels pleading with Apple to let them raise prices on songs, the initial results suggested a decrease in sales. Well, shockingly enough, it looks like the basic econ 101 concept of price elasticity works in music as well, as Warner Music has finally realized that raising prices of songs to $1.29 has slowed growth in the market. The digital music market, which had been growing pretty rapidly, slowed drastically following this pricing change. Warner Music is claiming that this this is because the market has "matured," but gives no evidence of that whatsoever -- and given the size of the market, that seems highly unlikely. Now, to be clear, the market is still growing, but only at 8% as compared to 20% the year before. And market growth should be expected to decline over time once the market matures, but it's difficult to believe that the digital music market has reached the point of maturity yet. In fact, just a few weeks ago, we wrote about an economic study that suggested that if the labels wanted to maximize revenue on digital sales, they should be lowering prices. But, again, execs at major labels haven't been known to be particularly good with their understanding of economics.

Filed Under: itunes, pricing
Companies: warner music group