Copyright

This is insane--this guy made a chiptune cover album based on "Kind of Blue", and got slammed (to the tune of over $30,000) for the pixelated album cover art:

http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

But this is important: the fact that I settled is not an admission of guilt. My lawyers and I firmly believe that the pixel art is "fair use" and Maisel and his counsel firmly disagree. I settled for one reason: this was the least expensive option available.

this makes me so frustrated and angry. there are young lawyers out there who say that they're dying to work on a case like this pro bono, precisely because they want to go down in history as the ones who argued the breakthrough fair use case. but you only ever hear about these decisions after people have been crushed and forced to settle out of court for tens of thousands.

How is the following definition of parody in fair use guidelines not exactly what the artist did?

Parody

A parody is a work that ridicules another, usually well-known work, by imitating it in a comic way. Judges understand that, by its nature, parody demands some taking from the original work being parodied. Unlike other forms of fair use, a fairly extensive use of the original work is permitted in a parody in order to “conjure up” the original.

Wow. The photographer who sued him lives in a palatial 72-room, 35,000-square-foot, six-story house in Manhattan:

http://nymag.com/realestate/vu/2008/09/50481/

I'm also intrigued by his "where would you draw the line" query. Left column second from bottom is still vaguely recognizable if you squint, but so far removed from the original that any sane judge/jury would hopefully tell Maisel to take a hike.

http://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh310/yodelagogo/kindofbloopresized.png

This is really bumming me out. I love Kind of Bloop.

did this get a physical release with an actual cover or was he sued over a jpg?

I think it was a download-only release. But he did charge for it.

He charged for it ($5) but Amazon gets a cut (because they handle the payment through their system) and Miles Davis' label/company/whatever gets a cut, and he's giving whatever money that's left to the people who made the covers

Fascinating article on how Springsteen and others are soon eligible to recover ownership of their recordings

Are recording artists independent contractors or label employees?

Are recordings works for hire owned by the labels or the property of the artists?

And then there's this question which has been on the table for decades: "Do record producers, session musicians and studio engineers also qualify as “authors” of a recording, entitled to a share of the rights after they revert?"

And I love this remarkable quote: “I’ve had the date circled in red for 35 years, and now it’s time to move,” said Rick Carnes, who is president of the Songwriters Guild of America and has written hits for country artists like Reba McEntire and Garth Brooks.

"How the Legal Fight Over 'YMCA' could Change the Music Industry"

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/how-legal-fight-ymca-could-224469

this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14829373

a big piece i wrote for wired on your new copyright bot overlords:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/streaming-videos-robotic-overlords-algorithmic-copyright-cops/

woot

Lawsuit over "Happy Birthday To You": http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jun/14/happy-birthday-lawsuit-copyright-warner

Is the headline "Hapy Birthday To Sue" yet?

what is going on here

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/26/florida-pre-1972-copyright-oldies/

Florida being Florida?

Honestly I don't shed a tear about this, do artists (or in most cases their descendants) really need to keep getting paid on 50-year-old records?

Also, I'm pretty sure this is misreported and it's just for performance rights, not for all copyright in the recording. It doesn't mean you could make bootlegs of a 1971 recording and sell them.

so, if I understand this correctly, sampling always requires consent from whoever holds the rights to a specific recorded performance but recording a cover of a song does not require consent (however I guess some royalty money will go to whoever has the... publishing rights?)

but to use a cover recording in a movie/theatrical production/commercial requires consent from whoever holds the publishing rights?

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-classic-rock-riffs-loophole/

Led Zeppelin won at the 2016 trial, but the matter isn’t resolved, and the stakes seem to have actually grown. Malofiy appealed, and in September, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered a Stairway do-over trial for procedural reasons. At the heart of the judges’ decision was a potentially industry-changing declaration: For pre-1978 unpublished songs, the deposited sheet music “defines the scope of the copyright.”

That ruling set off second appeals by both sides. Led Zeppelin asked for the original verdict to be upheld. Malofiy asked the entire appeals court, and not only three judges, to decide on the narrow issue of deposit copies. In early June, the San Francisco appeals court voted to have a rare 11-judge panel rehear the case in September, suspending the earlier appeals decision. The only topic on which the court has asked the parties for briefs so far is the primacy of deposit copies. The litigation has broader implications, undergirding a high-profile New York case in which plaintiffs are demanding more than $100 million for the alleged theft of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On for Ed Sheeran’s hit Thinking Out Loud .

The irony is there may be no winning outcome for Led Zeppelin. As Page’s testimony showed, the harder his lawyers push for strict readings of the copyright sheet music, the more they weaken the protection for Stairway.

A Eurocourt case from 2019 involved Kraftwerk and a sample from their track "Metal on Metal". For two decades the band have gone through the German courts against Moses Pelham over a song "Nur mir" that he produced in 1997.

The case went to the EUROPEAN COURT OF JUSTICE over the very important 2 seconds that were sampled – judges agreed that it wasn't legal, and that EU law wouldn't allow even shorter unauthorized samples.

- https://completemusicupdate.com/article/european-court-provides-clarity-on-sampling-rules-in-long-running-kraftwerk-case

And that was the conclusion of the EU court’s Advocate General Maciej Szpunar when he published an opinion on the Kraftwerk case last year. He wrote: “A phonogram is not an intellectual creation consisting of a composition of elements such as words, sounds, colours etc. A phonogram is a fixation of sounds which is protected, not by virtue of the arrangement of those sounds, but rather on account of the fixation itself”.

^ ^ new kraftwerk lyrics

But the real winner is the F-word, which is now a recognized legal term in EU documents, unless this writer was just paraphrasing

But what about the artistic freedom of the sampler that the German Constitutional Court was so concerned about? Well, the ECJ has put some constraints on its main ruling. In particular, if the sampler fucks with the sample so that it is unrecognisable in the final track, well, that’s fine. Because, it seems, sampling isn’t artistic enough to be protected by artistic freedoms, but fucking with samples is. – (Chris Cooke, CMU)

The real lesson is, don't ever sample a group from the '60s or '70s, it isn't worth it.

EXHIBIT A:

Kraftwerk - "Metall auf Metall"
https://youtu.be/JlatOPOMlyA

EXHIBIT A, again:

Sabrina Setlur - "Nur mir"
https://youtu.be/_KQLxP-UX_Y
(Somehow the music video has survived for 12 years on Youtube, where most others from the '00s were deleted. For copyright infringement.)

These Hipgnosis guys really buying up songwriters’ catalogs:

https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/blink-182-tom-delonge-hipgnosis-1203459579/

https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/timbaland-hipgnosis-songs-1203372008/

But why? They want to hang up a lot of album covers in their office?

Hipgnosis cofounder Merck Mercuriadis said: “Ask any of today’s greatest creators who their biggest influences are and the one name that appears on everybody’s list is Timbaland. Blink 182's Tom DeLonge.”

Haha. Here’s a whole thing about it — publishing rights as evergreen commodity: https://variety.com/2019/music/opinion/master-rights-futures-greed-is-good-nick-jarjour-column-1203358588/

The Kraftwerk v Pelham lawsuit is back before the BUNDESGERICHTSHOF, but unexpectedly the 22-year case is set to go on for even longer – weeks or months, God. It's not like Germans to overcomplicate matters

Snapshot from yesterday:

https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/d6f01afb-5bd4-418f-a873-c670070259fe_w948_r1.77_fpx87_fpy37.jpg

...It's cool that there are two girl Kraftwerks now, while Moses Pelham's lawyer is Andre Rieu for some reason.

Public Domain Day 2020: These 95-Year-Old Works Are Now Free to Use

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/akwd7b/best-of-public-domain-day-2020

This is rad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/19/23689879/ai-drake-song-google-youtube-fair-use

If Google agrees with Universal that AI-generated music is an impermissible derivative work based on the unauthorized copying of training data, and that YouTube should pull down songs that labels flag for sounding like their artists, it undercuts its own fair use argument for Bard and every other generative AI product it makes — it undercuts the future of the company itself.

If Google disagrees with Universal and says AI-generated music should stay up because merely training an AI with existing works is fair use, it protects its own AI efforts and the future of the company, but probably triggers a bunch of future lawsuits from Universal and potentially other labels, and certainly risks losing access to Universal’s music on YouTube, which puts YouTube at risk.

Nilay doesn’t seem to understand the DMCA. YouTube’s not at a risk for being sued; the lawsuit would involve the claimant and the content uploader. The person he asked at Google clearly tried to explain this to him.