According to this video there are copyright law changes coming that will affect the YouTube video loophole thousands of people use to post cover songs.
The video is a bit long but it indicates that the changes to the law will have far reaching ramifications for musicians who have been using the YouTube loophole to get around the copyright laws.
It seems that they cover two main points in this video. The first one is that it looks like they may scrap the safe harbor that Youtube uses to algorithmically suggests content on Youtube (rather than storing the stuff on their site), which is still good news for me.
The second section seems to deal with the situation where people just reupload the same videos after a takedown notice has removed it. I think they are saying that essentially Youtube knows this is the same video and should not allow this.
This stuff drives me nuts! Looking forward to the rest of the videos in this series!
Does anybody know a good lawyer who will be able to help me with this (without charging an arm and a leg). I cannot get ANY response from the record companies or publishers or CAPASSO.
Herb, your title is misleading, there's nothing coming yet. This is certainly interesting but right now it's nothing more than opinion. Or are you saying there is real movement on this in Congress?
Various agencies, prestigious organizations and other parts of the government issue recommendations like this all the time and Congress completely ignores them.
Thanks for putting that up, Herb. Lengthy, yes, but I don't know how he could have made it any shorter. Interesting that one of the disputes now centers around the algorithms, the "recommendations." Also, a good object lesson in how a relatively simple matter can become hopelessly complicated just by bringing the lawyers, in this case, a Congress full of them, into the mix. I can't help think that YT brought some of this on itself with publicity caused by its shadow banning, deplatforming, flagrant and subtle censorship, manipulating the view counts, and other things that cause users to question the intent of the algorithms. I mean, we have rules here and people follow them.
There is absolutely traction on the Hill to adjust the DMCA. There were a number of music related issues in committees when COVID hit - obviously all on hold now. I haven't watched the video in the OP, but YouTube videos are in fact on the radar as something that needs to be addressed.
This whole matter seems simple to me. You don’t broadcast what others have written, without their permission and terms. That’s the way things have always been. YouTube allowing covers is no different than bars not paying royalties to songwriters and their organizations.
I realize there are people here making a living doing cover songs in some way. Isn’t that the perspective you have? Songwriters should be given their due when something is broadcast that they wrote?
Technology always forces us to adapt in our careers no matter what the profession is.
As an engineer I have had to adapt and become an expert on things as mundane as Microsoft Word, to complicated multivariate statistical models, to the very fine details of analog to digital signal processing to ejection seat trajectory predictions and tracking to 3D Modeling to questionnaire design and subjective data collection to well a hundred other things. I wasn’t trained in any of these in my hair-loss causing engineering schoolwork. In fact I voluntarily went back to get a multidisciplinary master of science in engineering degree from Purdue University, while I was married and had toddlers in the house - just to keep up with changes.
Most of the good engineers in the industries I have worked in have followed similar paths.
It’s just part of life. The problem is the entertainment industry is very slow to change and people that depend on it for income, particularly those that are self employed, have little protection and means to rapidly adapt.
Some of you have been/are adept at it with replacing the bulk of a band with BIAB and midi and what not. But as has been pointed out, the live music scene is sadly decimated.
So try to get some revenue from YouTube. There has been a little loophole in YouTube for a bit, but there is really no justification for it remaining in place. License to use copyrighted material is just part of The fairness of the scene, is it not?
Who knows what’s next?
There will be some that will guess correctly and they will get rich in some way, some will follow that and make what passes for a living, and some will try to force the old way of continuing and they will get left behind.
This is the way of the world. If it was not, none of you would be able to read these thoughts and opinions.
Ok, if that's the case Roger you should definitely watch this vid. It's done by a copyright lawyer and he reads it aloud while also showing the text on the screen. He'll stop in certain spots to make comments. Pretty detailed and since it is from the Copyright office it should have some weight on the Hill.
Ok, here's thought(dangerous, I know). There's no doubt the rights holders have total control over this and should be protected. Google, Apple, Amazon and anybody else who want's to join that coalition could, by using their vast resources track down and contact every rights holder for every song ever copywritten, published, recorded and whatever else they did with it and ask them for permission to host their material by offering them a deal. It doesn't have to be an exclusive deal, just offering basically what they're doing now. Monetization of a vid using their material based on advertising revunue. Many times there's multiple people and entities involved and if they don't all agree then too bad, no deal and no posts allowed.
Some will say absolutely not and don't talk to me again but I think the majority will say OK with monetization. Anything this coalition doesn't get permission for is totally banned across all free platforms be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all ISP's everybody. That's it, done.
Part of what this Copyright Office recommendation is saying is no more hiding behind "I'm just hosting content, I am not responsible for what users do with it". If that passes then it would be the legal underpinning for my suggestion.
This would be a huge undertaking but the biggest entities in the world have the resources for it if they wanted to do it. It would barely be a blip on their collective balance sheets. Pick a number as to how much this would cost. A billion, ten billion? That's nothing to a coalition like that. If this was announced it would go through the music, movie and general entertainment industry all over the world and people could contact them with a yes or no as well as them being searched out.
The big names, Sony, Universal, Warner etc would go quickly, maybe yes to some of their catalog, others no. More obscure individual owners would take some time but how many times have we all said these huge companies already know all about us? Most could be easily contacted with that question I think.
Again, the owners control this, if they say no that's it. But at least the answer is public, they could have a search function people could use to find out what they can post and what they can't and everybody knows where they stand. No arguments and all these threads about can I post a cover on YT would cease to exist. Yeah, right.
Does this sound like herding cats? Hahahahaha.....
Bob. I like what you say here but I doubt it will ever happen.
“Again, the owners control this, if they say no that's it. But at least the answer is public, they could have a search function people could use to find out what they can post and what they can't and everybody knows where they stand. No arguments and all these threads about can I post a cover on YT would cease to exist. Yeah, right”
If the rights owners would just agree to share then everyone would win. But the music business being what the music business has always been that is not likely to happen in my life time.
Probably the most significant part of the problem is that so many copyrights are controlled by very very large corporations. Unfortunately, the larger the company, the less responsive they are to what they deem to be "small" requests.
Example of this that I'm dealing with currently: I co-wrote a song about 25 years ago that was recorded by a country artist named Trace Adkins. My co-writer and I discovered over the last week that a regional bank chain in TX is using the song on their radio advertisements, but they've never obtained a license to do so....they're playing dumb, saying they "didn't realize they needed one". Sure, right, okay. Both myself and my co-writer were signed with Warner/Chappell at the time we wrote the song, so they own the publishing. I reached out to WC, hoping to put the two parties in touch so that the proper license could be completed and I could get paid.
WC effectively told me that it wasn't enough money for them to bother with. The exact same thing has happened to me on more than a few occasions.
I completely agree with Joanne that it should be easier to get licensing done. That's one of the tasks of the new MLC which was created as a part of the Music Modernization Act. Unfortunately it won't be up and running until the first of the year, and I suspect there will be a lot of bugs, glitches and errors early on because of how rushed the entire thing has been.