This is not the only time that the music business has played this game, more specifically the RIAA. From 1997-2004 I worked a lot in the world of Hip Hop on a regional scale. I did security for clubs and artist and I was a DJ. Before file sharing exploded, the mixtape was the way that people would get exposed to underground hip hop artist, the most popular being 50 Cent but also many others.
So what the industry would do is to send free music to DJ's from both the worlds of mixtapes and radio. They would beg and plead for you to feature their artist on the mixtape. This is coming from both the A&R's that worked directly for the labels and third parties whose whole job was to find popular mixtape DJ's and give them music. They were hired by record companies as well. So anyway, after you released a mixtape, you would give it to a store at a consignment price. In other words, you would give them a box of CD's and they would sell them a set price depending on how popular you were. Then you come back and split the money, of course bigger DJ's would work out a different deal.
So everyone in the industry is aware of this fact and they play along with the so called "street" rules. But the RIAA would come down and bust these stores for selling bootlegs. These are items that would be cosigned by record labels with artist even hosting the tapes but they would still bust the shops anyway. Legally, there was no paperwork so in the eyes of the law they were bootlegged and if it was the police that came down hard, I would have less of a problem. But it would be the RIAA, basically the record companies would backdoor the DJ's and the mom and pop stores.
This is why I am glad that the music business has taken such a big hit. The people are crooks and as far as I am concerned, they is what they deserve.
> So what the industry would do is to send free music to DJ's from both the worlds of mixtapes and radio. They would beg and plead for you to feature their artist on the mixtape.
After the first time, why didn't folks wise up and say "not without a contract allowing us to create and sell compilations"?
They'd probably ask for royalties and then you'd insist on the standard breakage allowance against said royalties plus the other standard terms that they demand from content producers.
Being a music blogger, I feel conflicted about this article. The issue of DMCA take down notices and Google's blind obliging has been a problem for a long time. It has affected many bloggers that do play by the rules. It sucks that Google gets to be the judge and jury in these cases, because really, I doubt anyone at Google cares about who is in the right; they just want to avoid hassles over Copyright.
These and all music bloggers know what they are getting into when they set up their blogs. It is no secret that music piracy is a major issue for the RIAA, and posting mp3s publicly definitely puts you at risk. While there are many bloggers that work hard to promote the music they love, and provide links for users to buy the music legitimately, there are many others that just want to attract traffic by giving away free shit. All of the music bloggers are often put in the same pile either way.
The music bloggers who were affected by these take downs may be playing the poor me game, but did have the power to prevent what happened by self-hosting their blogs, enabling them to truly own and protect their content. I hope this current round of of publicity encourages more bloggers of all types to take ownership over the content they labour over.
There's nothing like truly owning your content, the content providers are dependent on Google to index and rank their site, hosting services to keep their site up and ___domain registrars for ___domain services. DMCA notices can yank any one of the above services making the content nearly non-reachable.
From the article: "the notices that Google relied on to delete the blogs were woefully incomplete. Google should not have acted until it had proper notices from rights holders, including the name of the actual work allegedly infringed. Since many of the notices did not even include this information, there was no way for the bloggers to file a DMCA counternotice"
It's unfortunately what happens when you sign away the rights to it. Happens to authors, too: you can be taken to court by your publisher if you post a PDF free online after selling the publisher the rights to the book.
Wow! So Google simply deleted the blogs without any kind of investigation. It seems irockcleveland had had received many such notices in the past wrongly, they should have checked with the blog owner if the current one was of similar nature .
Regardless of the legitimacy of these claims, it makes me very weary of putting any content on third-party sites at least unless they offer a reliable way to sync it. I don't understand people who put the results of their hard work (blogs, photos, code) on some online service without thinking about backups. (I have my code hosted on Google code, but if I couldn't svnsync the repository to my local machine I don't think I would.)
The kind that guarantees that every piece of audio that's ever created has to have licensing information attached to it and some sort of built-in DRM to enforce it? What about formats like flac, ogg, mp3, etc? Do they just become illegal in favor of the 'better' format?
I certainly don't mean DRM. I'm asking for clarity of license, not some daft enforcement "solution" that prevents users from listening to their own music. And no, I'm not asking for a universal format for all music.
So what the industry would do is to send free music to DJ's from both the worlds of mixtapes and radio. They would beg and plead for you to feature their artist on the mixtape. This is coming from both the A&R's that worked directly for the labels and third parties whose whole job was to find popular mixtape DJ's and give them music. They were hired by record companies as well. So anyway, after you released a mixtape, you would give it to a store at a consignment price. In other words, you would give them a box of CD's and they would sell them a set price depending on how popular you were. Then you come back and split the money, of course bigger DJ's would work out a different deal.
So everyone in the industry is aware of this fact and they play along with the so called "street" rules. But the RIAA would come down and bust these stores for selling bootlegs. These are items that would be cosigned by record labels with artist even hosting the tapes but they would still bust the shops anyway. Legally, there was no paperwork so in the eyes of the law they were bootlegged and if it was the police that came down hard, I would have less of a problem. But it would be the RIAA, basically the record companies would backdoor the DJ's and the mom and pop stores.
This is why I am glad that the music business has taken such a big hit. The people are crooks and as far as I am concerned, they is what they deserve.