Category: DMCA Abuse

Denmark’s Big Idea: Protect Personhood from the Blob With Consent First and Platform Duty Built In

Denmark has given the rest of us a simple, powerful starting point: protect the personhood of citizens from the blob—the borderless slurry of synthetic media that can clone your face, your voice, and your performance at scale. Crucially, Denmark isn’t trying to turn name‑image‑likeness into a mini‑copyright. It’s saying something more profound: your identity isn’t a “work”; it’s you. It’s what is sometimes called “personhood.” That framing changes everything. It’s not commerce, it’s a human right.

The Elements of Personhood

Personhood raises human reality as moral consideration, not a piece of content. For example, the European Court of Human Rights reads Article 8 ECHR (“private life”) to include personal identity (name, identity integrity, etc.), protecting individual identity against unjustified interference. This is, of course, anathema to Silicon Valley, but the world takes a different view.

In fact, Denmark’s proposal echoes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It starts with dignity (Art. 1) and recognition of each person before the law (Art. 6), and it squarely protects private life, honor, and reputation against synthetic impersonation (Art. 12). It balances freedom of expression (Art. 19) with narrow, clearly labeled carve-outs, and it respects creators’ moral and material interests (Art. 27(2)). Most importantly, it delivers an effective remedy (Art. 8): a consent-first rule backed by provenance and cross-platform stay-down, so individuals aren’t forced into DMCA-style learned helplessness.

Why does this matter? Because the moment we call identity or personhood a species of copyright, platforms will reach for a familiar toolbox—quotation, parody, transient copies, text‑and‑data‑mining (TDM)—and claim exceptions to protect them from “data holders”. That’s bleed‑through: the defenses built for expressive works ooze into an identity context where they don’t belong. The result is an unearned permission slip to scrape faces and voices “because the web is public.” Denmark points us in the opposite direction: consent or it’s unlawful. Not “fair use,” not “lawful access,” not “industry custom., not “data profile.” Consent. Pretty easy concept. It’s one of the main reasons tech executives keep their kids away from cell phones and social media.

Not Replicating the Safe Harbor Disaster

Think about how we got here. The first generation of the internet scaled by pushing risk downstream with a portfolio of safe harbors like the God-awful DMCA and Section 230 in the US. Platforms insisted they were deserving of blanket liability shields because they were special. They were “neutral pipes” which no one believed then and don’t believe now. These massive safe harbors hardened into a business model that likely added billions to the FAANG bottom line. We taught millions of rightsholders and users to live with learned helplessness: file a notice, watch copies multiply, rinse and repeat. Many users did not know they could even do that much, and frankly still may not. That DMCA‑era whack‑a‑mole turned into a faux license, a kind of “catch me if you can” bargain where exhaustion replaces consent.

Denmark’s New Protection of Personhood for the AI Era

Denmark’s move is a chance to break that pattern—if we resist the gravitational pull back to copyright. A fresh right of identity (called a “sui generis” right among Latin fans) is not subject to copyright or database exceptions, especially fair use, DMCA, and TDM. In plain English: “publicly available” is not permission to clone your face, train on your voice, or fabricate your performance. Or your children, either. If an AI platform wants to use identity, they ask first. If they don’t ask, they don’t get to do it, and they don’t get to keep the model they trained on it. And like many other areas, children can’t consent.

That legal foundation unlocks the practical fix creators and citizens actually need: stay‑down across platforms, not endless piecemeal takedowns. Imagine a teacher discovers a convincing deepfake circulating on two social networks and a messaging app. If we treat that deepfake as a copyright issue under the old model, she sends three notices, then five, then twelve. Week two, the video reappears with a slight change. Week three, it’s re‑encoded, mirrored, and captioned. The message she receives under a copyright regime is “you can never catch up.” So why don’t you just give up. Which, of course, in the world of Silicon Valley monopoly rents, is called the plan. That’s the learned helplessness Denmark gives us permission to reject.

Enforcing Personhood

How would the new plan work? First, we treat realistic digital imitations of a person’s face, voice, or performance as illegal absent consent, with only narrow, clearly labeled carve‑outs for genuine public‑interest reporting (no children, no false endorsement, no biometric spoofing risk, provenance intact). That’s the rights architecture: bright lines and human‑centered. Hence, “personhood.”

Second, we wire enforcement to succeed at internet scale. The way out of whack‑a‑mole is a cross‑platform deepfake registry operated with real governance. A deepfake registry doesn’t store videos; it stores non‑reversible fingerprints—exact file hashes for byte‑for‑byte matches and robust, perceptual fingerprints for the variants (different encodes, crops, borders). For audio, we use acoustic fingerprints; for video, scene/frame signatures. These markers will evolve and so should the deepfakes registry. One confirmed case becomes a family of identifiers that platforms check at upload and on re‑share. The first takedown becomes the last.

Third, we pair that with provenance by default: Provenance isn’t a license; it’s evidence. When credentials are present, it’s easier to authenticate so there is an incentive to use them. Provenance is the rebar that turns legal rules into reliable, automatable processes. However, absence of credentials doesn’t mean free for all.

Finally, we put the onus where it belongs—on platforms. Europe’s Digital Services Act at least theoretically already replaced “willful blindness” with “notice‑and‑action” duties and oversight for very large platforms. Denmark’s identity right gives citizens a clear, national‑law basis to say: “This is illegal content—remove it and keep it down.” The platform’s job isn’t to litigate fair use in the abstract or hide behind TDM. It’s to implement upload checks, preserve provenance, run repeat‑offender policies, and prevent recurrences. If a case was verified yesterday, it shouldn’t be back tomorrow with a 10‑pixel border or other trivial alteration to defeat the rules.

Some will ask: what about creativity and satire? The answer is what it has always been in responsible speech law—more speech not fake speech. If you’re lampooning a politician with a clearly labeled synthetic speech, no implied endorsement, provenance intact, and no risk of biometric spoofing or fraud, you have defenses. The point isn’t to smother satire; it’s to end the pretense that satire requires open season on the biometric identities of private citizens and working artists.

Others will ask: what about research and innovation? Good research runs on consent, especially human subject research (see 45 C.F.R. part 46). If a lab wants to study voice cloning, it recruits consenting participants, documents scope and duration, and keeps data and models in controlled settings. That’s science. What isn’t science is scraping the voices of a country’s population “because the web is public,” then shipping a model that anyone can use to spoof a bank’s call‑center checks. A no‑TDM‑bleed‑through clause draws that line clearly.

And yes, edge cases exist. There will be appeals, mistakes, and hard calls at the margins. That is why the registry must be governed—with identity verification, transparent logs, fast appeals, and independent oversight. Done right, it will look less like a black box and more like infrastructure: a quiet backbone that keeps people safe while allowing reporting and legitimate creative work to thrive.

If Denmark’s spark is to become a firebreak, the message needs to be crisp:

— This is not copyright. Identity is a personal right; copyright defenses don’t apply.

— Consent is the rule. Deepfakes without consent is unlawful.

— No TDM bleed‑through. “Publicly available” does not equate to permission to clone or train.

— Provenance helps prove, not permit. Keep credentials intact; stripping them has consequences.

— Stay‑down, cross‑platform. One verified case should not become a thousand reuploads.

That’s how you protect personhood from the blob. By refusing to treat humans like “content,” by ending the faux‑license of whack‑a‑mole, and by making platforms responsible for prevention, not just belated reaction. Denmark has given us the right opening line. Now we should finish the paragraph: consent or block. Label it, prove it, or remove it.

Minding the Value Gap: The UK Parliament’s Report on Disinformation and Fake News

It’s been a rough couple weeks for Silicon Valley in Europe.  Hard on the heels of an embarrassing lobbying loss in the European Parliament with the Copyright Directive (aka “Article 13”), the UK Parliament issued a damning report on the failings of social media.  The title tells you a lot:  Disinformation and Fake News.  Headline readers will come away from the news reporting with the impression that the report is about the UK government regulating Facebook due to the manipulation of the platform by Russian trolls using active measures.  If you read the report, even just the summary, you will see that it is the work product of an eight-nation committee and it is targeted at all social media platforms and “user generated content” (or “UGC”).

Unlike US-style regulation that these companies simply ignore and pay the paltry fines, it is unlikely that Google, Facebook and others will be able to simply conduct business as usual in the UK or Europe (Brexit or no)–particularly when you see statements like the following from Tom Watson, the Labor Party’s Shadow Culture Secretary:

Labour agrees with the committee’s ultimate conclusion: the era of self-regulation for tech companies must end immediately. We need new independent regulation with a tough powers and sanctions regime to curb the worst excesses of surveillance capitalism and the forces trying to use technology to subvert our democracy.

Few individuals have shown contempt for our Parliamentary democracy in the way Mark Zuckerberg has. If one thing is uniting politicians of all colours during this difficult time for our country, it is our determination to bring him and his company into line.

Tom Watston BASCA

Considering that the corporate bot farming techniques and the corporate comms version of Marcuse-esque messaging that Google and Facebook used against Article 13 are even more insidious than the Russkie election manipulators who were the focus of the Parliamentary report, it’s all pretty breathtaking.

They’ll Take Us in a Rush

Corporate whack a mole is–or was–the ultimate de facto safe harbor and is at the heart of the value gap.  Two truths were obvious from the moment in 2006 when a lawyer from Google’s recently acquired YouTube told a bar association meeting in Los Angeles that they could either make a deal with her for weaponized UGC on YouTube or play whack a mole using the DMCA notice and takedown–that Google and their shills intended to fight every step of the way (see Ellen Seidler’s excellent take down of the take downs).

First, it was obvious that Google executives intended to enrich themselves building a business on the backs of artists and songwriters who couldn’t fight back (what I call the ennui of learned helplessness), and next that Google intended to use those grey market profits and their vast wealth from public markets in a particularly nasty way that would have made Leland Stanford proud.  Google would simply crush any opposition from any rights holder or competitor who stood up to them.  But most of all that UGC is the ultimate front end for the data profiling back end which is where the real money is made.

This 2006 display of corporate molery had special resonance for me.  I spoke at the OECD’s Rome conference on digital stuff early in 2006 where Professor Terry Fisher and Google lawyer-to-be Fred Von Lohmann essentially laid out the strategy of using UGC to overwhelm the system and the abuse of the safe harbors.  That strategy was at the heart of their humiliating loss in the Grokster case and should be seen as implementing Grokster by other means (recall that Fred did a first rate job of articulating the losing argument before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that carried the day in the 9th Circuit but failed where it mattered in the U.S. Supreme Court).

During a very spiffy dinner that probably cost enough to have provided fresh water to a million in South Sudan, Professor Fisher told the slightly boozed up crowd of bureaucrats how the world was going to work with UGC.  I was very likely the only one in the room who knew enough about Fisher and Von Lohmann and about Google’s tactics to really get the message.  I whispered to my dinner partner, “They intend to take us in a rush.”

And so they did.

Platforms Are Fit for Purpose but Their Purpose Isn’t Fit

The Parliament’s report on Disinformation and Fake News is a strong rejection of Silicon Valley data miners like Google, Amazon and Facebook.    (You could say a latter day Big Four, but the Big Three won’t let there be a fourth in the best traditions of the Big Four.)

Google is a thought leader among the aristocracy of Silicon Valley’s real-time data miners and subsidizes many other pundits who support its business model in a variety of ways.   It’s not surprising that Facebook followed the path that Google blazed with YouTube since Google got so rich doing it.

In many ways, Facebook is the ultimate UGC profiteer–and blissfully chose to largely ignore the moral malaise that UGC will inevitably bring with it.  Zuckerberg, Paige and Brin ignored these problems because The Boys Who Wouldn’t Grow Up were making too much money–and getting away with it.  The fundamental problem is that these companies care more about enriching themselves than they care about who their users are or the content their users generate–as long as users keep generating.  It is that greed that underlies the studied lack of control designed into Google and Facebook.  It’s not that bad guys exploit a design flaw–it’s that the platforms work exactly as planned.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with the failure of Google and especially Facebook to manage their platforms to prevent bad actors from using the very tools that enriched the Silicon Valley monopolists for very odious disinformation campaigns.

Despite repeated warnings, governments have allowed these nation-state level actors to play their whack a mole game so freely that by the time democracy itself was on the line it has been difficult to regulate the monopolists.

Until now–or so we hope.  The UK Parliament’s Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has rendered its final report on “Disinformation and Fake News.”  While the report nominally focuses solely on Facebook, lovers of democracy should welcome the broader hope for both its methods as well as its findings.

The International Grand Committee

The Select Committee’s methods are refreshing:

We invited democratically-elected representatives from eight countries to join our Committee in the UK to create an ‘International Grand Committee’, the first of its kind, to promote further cross-border co-operation in tackling the spread of disinformation, and its pernicious ability to distort, to disrupt, and to destabilise. Throughout this inquiry we have benefitted from working with other parliaments. This is continuing, with further sessions planned in 2019. This has highlighted a worldwide appetite for action to address issues similar to those that we have identified in other jurisdictions….

[A]mong the countless innocuous postings of celebrations and holiday snaps, some malicious forces use Facebook to threaten and harass others, to publish revenge porn, to disseminate hate speech and propaganda of all kinds, and to influence elections and democratic processes—much of which Facebook, and other social media companies, are either unable or unwilling to prevent. We need to apply widely-accepted democratic principles to ensure their application in the digital age.

The big tech companies must not be allowed to expand exponentially, without constraint or proper regulatory oversight. But only governments and the law are powerful enough to contain them.

Let’s hope so.  In the face of well-financed resistance by some of the biggest corporations and the most devious robber barons in commercial history since the days of the Big Four railroads, our governments and law enforcement have pretty much failed so far.  That’s how we got here and that’s how the problem evolved well past private attorney general-type remedies.

The public attorneys general need to mind the value gap.  Hopefully the European governments have the spine to stand up and show America how it’s done.

 

 

Holding the Line on Tradeoffs for Statutory Damages

It is very likely that we will hear about a move to make significant amendments to the Copyright Act at some point before the beginning of campaign season in 2018.  There are a significant number of copyright-related bills that have been introduced in the House of Representatives in the current session, so brace yourself for an “omnibus” copyright bill that would try to cobble them all together Frankenstein-style.

A Frankenstein omnibus bill would be a very bad idea in my view and will inevitably lead to horse trading of fake issues against a false deadline.  Omnibus bills are a bad idea for songwriters and artists, particularly independent songwriters and artists, because omnibus bills tend to bring together Corporate America in attack formation.

MIC Coaltion
The MIC Coalition

When you consider that Google and Facebook are part of Corporate America (not to mention Apple), the odds of the independent songwriter and artist, but really any songwriter and artist, just holding onto the few crumbs they currently have crash and burn.  The odds of actually righting wrongs or–God forbid–getting rid of the legacy consent decrees that protect Big Business vanish into the limit.

Of course, what certain elements of Big Tech would really like to do is push all licensing of music into one organization that they could then control through consent decrees or other government regulation and supervision by exercise of the massive lobbying and litigation muscle of the MIC Coalition and DIMA.  While I realize that may actually sound anti-competitive, it is typical of monopolists to use the antitrust law to destroy competition (as Professor Taplin has taught us).   That’s certainly what has happened with the PRO consent decrees–reduced competition and lower royalties.  Not to mention such a licensing organization would collapse under its own complexity.  This is probably why the Copyright Office envisioned a “Music Rights Organization” that would combine the PROs and mechanical rights licensing but provided the relief valve of an new opt-out right so that songwriters could escape the madness.  (“Under the Office’s proposal, except to the extent they chose to opt out of the blanket statutory system, publishers and songwriters would license their public performance and mechanical rights through MROs.”  Copyright Office Music Licensing Study at p. 9)

If you want some ideas about the kinds of property rights that Big Tech wants the government to take away from songwriters and artists, just read Spotify’s most recent filing in the songwriter litigation in Nashville where their lawyer tries to define away mechanical royalties (unsurprisingly, the lawyer is a long-time protege of Lessig).  Why?  Because they are being brought to a trial by their peers on statutory damages for copyright infringement and the potential for having to pay the songwriters’ lawyers due to a statutory right to recover attorneys fees.  (Statutory damages for copyright infringement has long been an attack point of Big Tech and we get a preview of where they want it to go in Pamela Samuelson’s “Copyright Principles Project”–essentially abolished.)

One way or another, the Big Tech cartel (which includes all the companies in the MIC Coalition and MIC Coalition member the Digital Media Association which itself has members like Spotify and, curiously, Apple) is very likely going to go after statutory damages and try to create yet another “safe harbor” for themselves with no burdens–a “friction free” way to infringe pretty much at will because the actual damages for streaming royalties will be pennies.

If the cartel succeeds in eliminating statutory damages and attorneys fees awards, this will truly make copyright infringement litigation toothless and entirely eliminate the one tool that independent songwriters and artists have to protect their rights.  It will neuter massive copyright infringement as alleged in all of the Spotify class actions, not to mention cases like Limewire.

Oh, you say–did you just switch from song copyrights to sound recording copyrights by referencing Limewire?  Yes, I did–because that’s exactly what I predict the DIMA and MIC Coalition have in mind.  Why do I say this?  Because that’s what these companies are backing in the radioactive Transparency in Music Licensing and Ownership bill (HR 3350).  And if you blow up all the current separate bills into one omnibus copyright “reform” bill, the pieces may reconstitute in forms you didn’t expect.

But realize that in almost all the many copyright bills currently before the House of Representatives, the other side is trying to bootstrap unjust harm into a negotiation chip to shakedown creators.  And it’s not just pending legislation–the shakedown is especially observable with the millions of notices of intention to rely on statutory mechanical licenses for songs filed with the Copyright Office.  That’s a nice song you got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it.

Big Tech’s basic negotiation method is to rely on a loophole, bootstrap the loophole to build up the pressure on people who can’t fight back, then run the shakedown to get concessions that should never be made.  This is what Google has done with the DMCA and is the same shakedown tactic on mass NOIs taken by Google, Amazon, Pandora, Spotify, and others–but curiously not Apple.  Somehow Apple has made it work with the most successful digital music platform in history.

Let’s go down the issue list:

Bootstrapped Issue

 Fix

Bill
Pandora and Sirius stopped paying artists for digital royalties on pre-72 recordings—because of loophole based on federal copyright protection for sound recordings Start paying artist royalties on classic recordings made before 1972 CLASSICS Act
Terrestrial radio created a loophole so they don’t have to pay performance royalties to artists on sound recordings; stop artists from opting out Start paying artist royalties for broadcast radio (with protection for noncommercial and small broadcasters) Fair Pay Fair Play Act, PROMOTE Act
Big tech suddenly started using a loophole to file millions of “address unknown” NOIs with Copyright Office after indie songwriters filed class actions Require Big Tech to use existing databases to look up copyright owners or don’t use the songs or recordings. None
No “central database” that has all songs (but no requirement to actually look up anything), requires double registration If songwriters and artists don’t register, then no statutory damages Transparency in Music Licensing and Ownership Act

Blown up into parts:

–Avoid raising mechanical royalty rate or paying artist royalties on terrestrial at all

–How to use the lack of the mythical “central database” as a bright and shiny object to avoid paying royalties and shirk liability for not doing copyright research, an absurd position for companies that owe much of their wealth to their unprecedented ability to profile people around the world and “organize the world’s information”

–Avoid paying statutory damages

–How to avoid paying royalties that should have paid anyway (pre-72, terrestrial, mass NOI) through distorted interpretations of the law or even safer harbors

–Avoid an obligation to actually look up anything (new databases)

–Use any work they want if all they have to pay is actual damages and no attorneys fees

–Keep songwriters and artists from opting out

–Create biggest black box possible

It should be apparent which way Big Tech is trying to push the creative community.  It is important for creators to understand that any legislative concession that the MIC Coalition or DIMA win against songwriters or artists they will then turn around and try to extract in the next shakedown–authors, photographers, film makers, all the copyright categories.

It is in everyone’s interest to support a healthy creative community that will continue to engage fans and do enough commerce to create value for the tech monopolies.  But–it is crucial to understand that it doesn’t work the other way around.

The purpose of the creative community is not to create value for tech monopolies.  It is to support compelling artists and help them engage with fans, and sometimes it is art for art’s sake alone.  If those artists throw off some commercial gain that the tech monopolies can turn to profit themselves, fine.  But creating profit for these monopolists is not the goal of artists.

Instead of creating fake problems to try to extract concessions that further undermine creators like offering ice in winter, the tech monopolies like Google, Spotify, Amazon and Pandora should identify real problems and work with us toward real solutions–and not a loophole-driven shakedown.

 

 

Spotify’s “Fake Artist” Issue and Other Problems at Scale

Spotify just can’t seem to catch a break in the artist community.  A story broke on Vulture evidently based on a Music Business Worldwide post alleging (and I’m paraphrasing) that (1) Spotify commissions artists to cover hits of the day and (2) there’s a lot of sketchy material on Spotify that trades on confusing misspellings, “tributes” and other ways of tricking users into listening to at least 30 seconds of a recording.  Which means that Spotify isn’t that different than the rest of the Internet.  (Thank you DARPA, the people who gave you the Internet.  And Agent Orange.  The real one.)

Spotify of course has issued a denial that I find to be Nixonian in its parsing.  Let’s not go crazy on this, but here’s the first part, according to Billboard:

“We do not and have never created ‘fake’ artists and put them on Spotify playlists. Categorically untrue, full stop,” a Spotify spokesperson wrote in an email.

Nobody said Spotify “creates” “‘fake artists,'” and the accusation was that the fake artists were on the service AND on some playlists, not just playlists.  The allegation is that Spotify commissions recordings.

“We pay royalties — sound and publishing — for all tracks on Spotify, and for everything we playlist. [If Spotify commissioned the fake tracks, they would also “pay royalties”.]  We do not own rights, we’re not a label, all our music is licensed from rightsholders and we pay them — we don’t pay ourselves.”

Notice the switch to “rights holders” which would include either publishing or sound recordings.  If Spotify commissioned fake artists they would not need to “own rights” and they could easily have “licensed” the fake artists recordings.  Cover songs would require an…ahem…NOI for the compulsory license.  And the commission payment could go to the artist as a buyout so Spotify would “pay them”.  If the object was to increase traffic for their ad supported service, commissioning recordings would both increase traffic AND reduce the prorata share of advertising revenue by making the denominator larger for everyone with a  revenue share during that accounting period.  I don’t want to go too far down that rabbit hole, but there are some odd loose ends.

Leave the holes in Spotify’s denial to the side.  The core problem identified by the Vulture post is the same for Spotify as it is for Google, YouTube, Facebook, all the other Internet companies that require “scale” to succeed, and which are, one way or another, hell bent on being monopolists.  The second part of Spotify’s denial in Billboard could apply to this lack of monitoring:

“As we grow there will always be people who try to game the system. We have a team in place to constantly monitor the service to flag any activity that could be seen as fraudulent or misleading to our users.”

Maybe that “team” could have a role in “monitoring the service” for tracks before the recordings get on the service rather than after.  Noah built the Ark before the rain.

It must be said that it sounds a bit implausible that Spotify would commission this type of recording to avoid paying artist royalties on the fake tracks.  Such an affirmative act would require a commercially tortured logic because the royalty offset on those specific tracks would be so tiny that the cost of the commissioned recordings would have to be very, very low.  One guy with Garageband in Mom’s basement kind of low.  How much the prorata revenue share would be reduced is hard to know from the outside.

But even if Spotify doesn’t hire studio musicians to perform “fake hits”, it appears that they are allowing a lot of sketchy recordings onto the service.  One might ask how those recordings get there in the first place.  I would bet that the explanation is pretty much that nobody bothers to check before the recordings are posted (or “ingested” in the vernacular, if you can stand that word).

So while there is a major difference in degree of harm, there isn’t a great deal of difference between what seems to be happening on Spotify with sketchy recordings and the links to illegal materials that the Canadian Supreme Court just blocked on Google Search, promoting the sale of illegal drugs for which Google paid a $500,000,000 fine and narrowly avoided prison, ISIS recruiting for which Google lost a chunk of market cap (at least for a while), human trafficking on Craig’s List and fake news on Facebook.  Each of these services operate at scale and they seem to have the same problem:  No one is minding the store and there are no or poorly enforced standards and practices that are only enforced after the harm has occurred.

The other trait that all these companies have in common to one degree or another is that they are all at least dominant if not monopolies in their markets.

Remember–on May 12, 2014, Spotify’s director of economics Will Page gave a presentation at the Music Biz Conference in Nashville.  As reported by Billboard, Will Page gave the audience a good deal of evidence of Spotify’s domination of the online music market:

Spotify claims to have represented one out of every ten dollars record labels earned in the first quarter….Page’s claim shows the speed at which subscription services are gaining share of the U.S. market. According to IFPI data, all subscription services accounted for 10.2 percent of U.S. recorded music revenue in 2014. If Spotify had a 10-percent share in the first quarter, it’s safe to say the overall subscription share is well above the 10.2 percent registered last year.

Much of Page’s presentation seemed aimed at Spotify skeptics in the audience. While explaining how streaming “is no longer an outlier in the business,” Page noted Spotify has launched in 32 of the 37 countries where streaming is the primary digital source of revenue. Page also pointed out that Spotify is half of the $1.5 billion global subscription streaming market. In the U.S. market, Spotify made up approximately 90 percent of last year’s growth in subscription revenue, according to Page.

These numbers suggest that while Spotify may have a significant share of overall U.S. recorded music revenue, Spotify is clearly dominant if not a monopoly in the global subscription market with its now 100 million plus users and probably is at least dominant if not a monopoly in the U.S. music subscription market.

So how does Apple address these problems?  If you consult the iTunes Style Guide, you’ll see that iTunes expressly prohibits the use of search terms or keywords in track title metadata (like “Rock Pop Indie Rock”) or an artist name (like “Aerosmith Draw the Line).  Audio files have to match track titles on each album delivered.  “All track titles performed by the same artist on an album must be unique, except for different versions of the same track that are differentiated by Parental Advisory tags.“  And most importantly, perhaps, “the name of the original artist must not be displayed in any artist field on the track level or the album level.”  Why these rules?  One reason might be that Tunecore has encouraged their users for years to use covers as a way of getting noticed in searches on music services (with suitable admonishments to not “trick” fans).

Let’s face it–there’s only one way to keep your service clean.  Don’t let the bad stuff on in the first place.  You may think that it should be self evident that allowing sketchy recordings, ISIS videos or human trafficking on your service is a bad thing.  You may think that it should be self evident that allowing someone to change a letter in an artist’s name to trade on their reputation is a bad thing–not that different from typo squatting.  You may think that it is self evident that promoting the sale of illegal drugs is a bad thing.  And you may think that anyone who wants to engage in commerce with the legitimate commercial community, much less the artist community, wouldn’t allow these travesties into their business.

But you would be wrong.  Probably because you don’t worship at the alter of the great god Scale.

 

 

 

Five Things Congress Can Do to Stop Tens of Millions of “Address Unknown” NOIs

Copyright reform is on the front burner again after the passing of the  Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act by a vote of 378-48.   But there’s another problem the Congress needs to fix that won’t require legislation in the short run:  The mass filing of tens of millions of “address unknown” notices under the archaic compulsory license for songs.

I’m going to assume that readers know the general background on the millions of “address unknown” NOIs filed with the Copyright Office under a loophole in the Copyright Act (Sec. 115(c)(1)).   If that is Geek to you, see my recent paper on mass NOIs for more complete analysis (or previous posts on MTS for the armchair version of the story.   The first distinction to remember is that we are only concerned in this post with song copyrights and not the sound recording.  This story implicates songwriters and publishers, not artists and record companies, and it only applies to the government’s compulsory license for songs, a uniquely American invention.

In a nutshell, Amazon, Google, Pandora, Spotify and other tech companies are serving on the Copyright Office tens of millions of “address unknown” notices of intention to obtain a compulsory license to make and distribute recordings of certain types of songs.  Under what can only be called a “loophole” in this compulsory license, a service can serve these “address unknown” NOIs on the Copyright Office if the owner is not identifiable in the Copyright Office public records.  The Copyright Office stands in the shoes of the “address unknown” copyright owner to receive and preserve these notices.

On the one hand companies like Amazon, Google, Pandora and Spotify say that they can’t find these millions of song owners, while at the same time at least some of the same companies brag about how comprehensive and expensive their song databases are (like Google’s Content ID) or their agents puff up the agent’s own massively complete song databases as “the worlds largest independent database of music copyright and related business information.”  And yet, these same companies and their agents can’t seem to find songwriters whose names, repertoire and contact information are well known, or whom they already pay through their own systems or through their agent.

The Database Double Loophole Trick

Here’s the loophole.  First, the loophole requires a very narrow reading of Section 115(c)(1) of the Copyright Act, a 40 year old statute being applied to NOIs served at a scale the Congress never intended.  If the song owner isn’t found in the public records of the Copyright Office, even if the digital service or its agent has actual knowledge of the song copyright owner’s whereabouts, the digital service can say they are not required to look further.

Even if you buy into this willful blindness, these digital services may not be looking at the complete public records of the Copyright Office.  The only digitized records of the Copyright Office are from January 1, 1978 forward, and my bet is those easily searchable records are the only records the services consult.  That omits the songs of Duke Ellington, Otis Redding, The Beatles and five Eagles albums not to mention a very large chunk of American culture.

The Copyright Office records from before 1978 are available on paper, so the pre-78 songs are still in the public records (which is what the Congress contemplated in the Copyright Act).

The identifiers are just not “there” if you decide not to look for them.  However, it is not metaphysical, it is metadata that exists in physical form.  This is the “double loophole”.

The Double Triple:  New Releases

Another category of song copyrights that will never be in the public records of the Copyright Office in their initial release window are new releases with recently filed but not yet finalized copyright registrations.  The Copyright Office itself acknowledges that it can take upwards of a year to process new copyright registrations.  This allows “address unknown” filers to bootstrap a free ride on the back of Congress during that one-year period.

No Liability or Royalties Either:  Trebles All Round

Once a company serves the “address unknown” NOI on the Copyright Office, songwriters are arguably compelled by the government to permit the service to use their songs.  Filing the “address unknown” NOI arguably allows the service to avoid liability for infringement and also–adding insult to injury–to avoid paying royalties.  If the NOI is properly filed, of course.

In current practice, a mass “address unknown” NOI is usually a single notice of intention filed with a huge attachment of song titles with the required fields, such as this one Google filed for Sting’s “Fragile”, the anthem of the environmental movement (which was clearly filed incorrectly as the song was registered long ago):

sting-fragile-google-noi

The number of mass “address unknown” NOIs being posted by the Copyright Office on an almost daily basis suggests that tech companies now view mass “address unknown” NOIs as the primary way to put one over on songwriters and the Congress, too.  Companies like Amazon, Spotify, Google, Pandora and others are using this heretofore largely unused loophole on a scale that flies in the face of Chairman Goodlatte’s many hearings in the last session of Congress on updating the Copyright Act.

This “address unknown” practice also undermines the efforts of Chairman Goodlatte and Ranking Member Conyers to modernize the Copyright Office.  Indeed, based on the very lopsided vote on HR 1695 the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act, it is clearly the desire of the overwhelming majority of Members of Congress, too.

March Spotify NOI Filings

What Can Be Done?

Congress can play a role in in providing immediate relief to songwriters by stopping the mass “address unknown” NOIs or at least requiring the Library of Congress and the Copyright Office to take steps to verify the NOIs are filed correctly.

At the moment, the government takes away property rights from the songwriters by means of the compulsory license without taking even rudimentary steps to assure the public that the “address unknown” NOI process is being implemented correctly and transparently.

Here are five steps the Congress can take to rectify this awful situation.

  1.  Stop Selling Incomplete Data:  Congress should instruct the Library of Congress to stop selling the post 1978 database until due diligence can be performed on the database to determine if it is even internally correct.  It appears that many if not all the mass “address unknown” NOI filers use the LOC database to create their NOIs.  It is also highly unlikely that this database will include new releases.  Congress can simply instruct the Librarian to stop selling the database.loc-prices-databases
  2.  Stop Accepting “Address Unknown” NOIs With Compressed File Attachments: Congress should instruct the Library of Congress and the Copyright Office to immediately cease accepting “address unknown” NOIs with compressed files as attachments for what appears to be a single NOI.  These compressed files are so large in most cases that songwriter can never uncompress them on a home computer to determine if their songs are subject to “address unknown” NOIs.  Google in particular is a major offender of filing huge compressed files.  Each compressed file contains tens of thousands of song titles.Google March NOIs
  3.  Require Accounting Compliance with Copyright Office Regulations:  Long standing regulations require that anyone relying on an NOI must file mostly and annual statements of account reflecting usage of the songs subject to the NOIs.  The tech companies serving mass NOIs are not rendering these statements and thus fail to comply with the transparency requirements of Copyright Act.  All of the “address unknown” NOIs served during 2016 are out of compliance with the regulations, and all “address unknown” NOIs served in the first quarter of 2017 are likewise out of compliance.  Congress should instruct the Copyright Office to require monthly and annual statements of account be filed with the Copyright Office for anyone who has relied on these NOIs as required by the regulations.  All statements of account should be certified in the normal course as required by the regulations, and made available to the public by posting to the Copyright Office website.
  4. Require the Library of Congress to Create a Searchable Database of NOIs:Congress should instruct the Library of Congress to create a single database maintained online that is maintained by an independent third party and is searchable by songwriters in a manner similar to a state unclaimed property office.  That database needs to be updated on a regular schedule.  Given the size of the compressed files served to date, it is essentially impossible for songwriters to determine if NOIs have been filed on their songs.  This is particularly true as the NOIs are served on an effectively random basis, so even if songwriters were able to search, they would essentially have to search all the time.
  1.  Pay Royalties Into A Permanent Trust Account:  Given that it is highly likely that the mass NOIs filed to date have a significant number of errors, it is also likely that songwriters will become entitled to payment of royalties retroactively if these errors are ever caught.  Therefore, the Congress should require that royalties should be paid to a trust account maintained at the Copyright Office and held in perpetuity like a state unclaimed property office.  Of course, it is equally likely that the song copyright owners will be entitled to terminate any purported license under 17 USC Sec. 115(c)(6).  These payments should be based on actual usage and not black box.  This is another reason why the statements for “address unknown” NOIs should be public.

What started in April 2016 as a trickle of NOIs from a handful of companies has now expanded exponentially.  Based on Rightscorp’s analysis in January 2017, some 30 million “address unknown” NOIs had been filed–and that did not include the dozens of “address unknown” NOIs filed by Spotify in March 2017 alone which themselves likely total over a million songs.

NOI Table
Top Three Services Filing NOIs

April, 2016-January 2017

 Number of NOIs Per Service
Amazon Digital Services LLC 19,421,902
Google, Inc. 4,625,521
Pandora Media, Inc. 1,193,346

It is rapidly becoming standard practice for tech companies to try to pull the wool over the eyes of the Congress by leveraging an apparent loophole and they are doing it on a grand scale.

As we have seen with everything else they touch from the DMCA to royalty audits, the tech companies will continue this loophole-seeking behavior until they are forced to stop.  Since no one at the Library of Congress seems to have the appetite to right this wrong, the Congress itself must step in.

Ultimately Congress should fix the loophole through legislation, but in the meantime most of the harms can be corrected overnight by policy changes alone.

@katenash Shows that Permissionless Innovation is Just A Trumped Up “DMCA License”

Small business people dealing with big business people always have the same fear–what if they just stiff me.  You know going in that there are some big businesses that simply factor into their financials that the businesses will get away with stiffing a percentage of their contractors with claims of unsatisfactory work daring the small business to sue.  Claims that may be trumped up, so to speak.

Some–not all surely, but some–Silicon Valley companies have taken this “pay them when they sue” mentality to it’s logical conclusion under the guise of the faux “DMCA license” based on sheer bargaining power.  At least the real estate developer stiffing contractors on trumped up claims did actually hire the contractor with a promise to pay.

The Silicon Valley version of “pay them if they sue” is wrapped in the cant of Valley Boy catechism and the leap of faith to “the machines made me do it” or “disruption” resulting in the gospel of “permissionless innovation”.  That’s the trumped up theory that allows the “disruptor” to just take the contractor’s labor and materials without negotiating a contract or paying a dime and then saying “so sue me” and my $20 billion valuation.

UK artist Kate Nash recently called out Snapchat in a viral tweet for profiting themselves from a trumped up license

David Lowery called out Facebook for essentially doing the same thing starting the “#F*CKTHEZUCK” hashtag.

Remember–Snapchat and Facebook, two massive Silicon Valley darlings, have NO licenses and REFUSE to negotiate.  (Google does get licenses for some of its platforms like YouTube but is also busily serving millions of NOIs on the Copyright Office to use songs without paying royalties and also gaslighting the UK music industry with yet another meaningless “voluntary” code of conduct for the billions of takedown notices Google receives for search that Google refuses to fix.)

Kate Nash has put her finger on the key factor in the greatest income transfer of all time–it’s not that the music is free because it is without value, it is free because it is stolen using a trumped up legal theory based on loophole seeking behavior in a legacy statutory construct.  Nobody ever intended for the “safe harbors” to be used to trump up a nonexistent “license held in place by unequal bargaining power.

As Beggars Group Chairman Martin Mills said in his keynote at Canadian Music Week:

[An] imbalance I want to talk about is the safe harbour provisions, and similar terms in other countries. They were introduced, with some foresight, by the legislators in the USA framing the DMCA, to provide a notice and take down procedure for unlicensed content. But the legislation has been distorted into a protective wall behind which cyberlockers and torrent sites, and companies such as YouTube and Grooveshark, operate.

The original intent was to protect reasonable people acting reasonably from falling foul of the law, to enable the digital economy to grow without “ gotcha “ law suits against ISP’s who had no idea that their networks were being used for infringement. They were not intended to provide fortress walls behind which companies could build billion dollar businesses on content that had not been cleared. They were never intended to become a de facto “ licence “.

Kate Nash said it best:  “But where’s my paycheck?”

exposure-bucks

Europe Leads With A Solution to the “Safe Harbor”Problem

Recital 38 of proposed European Commission Digital Single Market reforms:

In order to ensure the functioning of any licensing agreement, information society service providers storing and providing access to the public to large amounts of copyright protected works or other subject matter uploaded by their users should take appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure protection of works or other subject matter, such as implementing effective technologies. This obligation should also apply when the information society service providers are eligible for the liability exemption provided in Article 14 of Directive 2000/31/EC.

The legacy safe harbors in the U.S. legislation commonly called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and its European counterpart are a dichotomy:  The law provides a little latitude to reasonable people acting reasonably, but it also provides a smokescreen for those who are trying to fake their way to one of the great income transfers of all time.

Which players are on which side of that dichotomy?  One easy yardstick is the ISPs who participate in the Copyright Alert System and those who don’t.  CAS members have a real commitment to infrastructure, are not in a line of business that is based on commoditizing other peoples value, and seem to have a genuine commitment to staying within the boundaries of the DMCA safe harbors.

And then there’s Google and its wholly owned subsidiary YouTube.  It’s been 10 years since Google acquired YouTube and it’s an even bigger mess today than it was when it was operated as a blatant infringement machine.  But the real risk about YouTube is that Google has shown other powerful multinational corporations that you don’t want to infringe a little–you want to infringe a lot.

Now we can add Facebook and Vimeo to the list of billionaires who profit themselves by hiding behind the DMCA safe harbors.  These others, especially Facebook, are likely to simply point to YouTube and say if you’re going to shut us down, you have to shut them down, too.

And they have a point.

That’s why it’s so refreshing to see the European Commission taking a selective approach to tackling safe harbor abuse.  While I’m sympathetic to the urge to try to abolish safe harbors altogether, I don’t think that’s fair to the good actors in the ISP space.  Wouldn’t you rather have other ISPs point to the good corporate citizens like AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon as a model rather than Google and Facebook?  (After BMG Rights’ multimillion dollar victory over MIC Coalition member Cox Communications we have to assume that the industry understands where the boundary is, but time will tell.)

A better starting place for reforming safe harbor abuse might be to identify the bad actors and deny them the chance to misuse the law to commoditize the property rights of artists, among others.  Given the lobbying clout that Google and Facebook can bring to bear in the U.S., we’re probably going to have to wait for the European Commission to lead the way forward as they have with antitrust prosecutions of Google.

It should come as no surprise that nations that value their creators are willing to take on rapacious multinationals even as the Googles and Facebooks desperately try to increase the size of their lobbying footprint on the faces of Europeans.