COPYCENSE

“Corporate executives are increasingly looking for new sounds to help create an image for a brand, whether it’s a product, a store or a show. It could be music from an emerging artist, or something old and hip, such as Husker Du, but whatever it is, it is likely to be cheaper than the high price of licensing a hit song from a major record label.

“The result is that corporate music buyers are changing the economics of being an independent musician. The once-standard dream of a record deal and radio play is giving way to the reality of restaurants, retailers and automakers scouring the industry for little-known music that can lend mood and edge to marketing campaigns.”

Margaret Webb Pressler. Indie Bands Jump on Brand Wagon. WashingtonPost.com. Dec. 8, 2005.

(Editor’s Note: The Post allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper’s fee-based Archive.)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Real Networks today announced the availability of a web-based version of its Rhapsody music service. Finally, there is a listen-on-demand authorized music service with deep major label catalog that Mac and Linux users can use. I expect Napster 2.0 and Yahoo! will feel competitive pressure to migrate to a cross-platform, browser-based solution, as well.

“What strikes me about this announcement is the implicit rejection of DRM that it represents. After all, while Real touts Rhapsody as primarily a ‘streaming’ music service, everyone knows that it is trivial to turn a ‘stream’ into a ‘download’ by using widely available software tools. Audio Hijack, for example, records Rhapsody streams without any problem on my OS X machine. And everyone knows that Linux users will have new ‘stream-ripping'” applications aimed at Rhapsody before you can say “DVD Jon.” So it seems clear that Rhapsody has managed to talk its major label licensors into allowing them to concentrate on attracting customers, rather than shackling them in a misguided attempt to restrict the music that is already available on P2P networks for free.

“That’s a good sign. We’ve been saying for years now that the music industry needs to pay more attention to fattening the carrot, and less to brandishing the stick.”

EFF Deep Links. Beginning of the End for Music DRM. Dec. 5, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

The Center for Social Media and American University’s Program on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest have developed a Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use (.pdf, 157 KB). The twelve page statement, which was released on Nov. 18, is a fair guidebook that analyzes specific situations that are unique to documentary filmmakers.

The Statement’s preamble says the document is necessary given the increasingly tough copyright restrictions practitioners have faced over the last decade.

Creators in other disciplines do not face such demands to the same extent, and documentarians in earlier eras experienced them less often and less intensely. Today, however, documentarians believe that their ability to communicate effectively is being restricted by an overly rigid approach to copyright compliance, and that the public suffers as a result. The knowledge and perspectives that documentarians can provide are compromised by their need to select only the material that copyright holders approve and make available at reasonable prices.

The preamble further explains that documentary filmmakers also hold copyrights on their work, and that their livelihood often depends on the full and fair exploitation of the exclusive rights they hold in their finished films.

In January, the Washington Post chronicled the effect of copyright burdens on documentary filmmakers when it reported that the award-winning “Eyes On The Prize” documentary was in danger of disappearing because copyright renewal costs made it prohibitively expensive to update or re-issue in its original form.

The series is no longer available in stores and can’t be shown on television or released on DVD until the filmmakers are able to renew the expired rights to footage, photos and music that were used. Old sets of VHS tapes owned by community centers and schools are wearing out. Teachers and librarians seeking new copies can’t purchase them, except for rare ones being sold on eBay for as much as $1,500.

The film is hampered by the same problem many documentary filmmakers are encountering as they wrestle with buying and renewing licenses to use copyrighted archival footage, photos and music. Independent filmmakers must pay for each piece of copyrighted material, and those costs have escalated in the past 10 years.

Center for Social Media. Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use (.pdf, 157 KB) November 2005.

See also:

DeNeen L. Brown and Hamil R. Harris. A Struggle for Rights: “Eyes on the Prize” Mired in Money Battle. WashingtonPost.com. Jan. 17, 2005.

Katie Dean. Bleary Days for Eyes on the Prize. Wired News. Dec. 22, 2004.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

Commentary by K. Matthew Dames, executive editor.

This is the sort of post I absolutely love:

Gift-giving has gotten harder since the Recording Industry Association of America came to town. The cartel of the biggest record labels has made a name for itself by suing families for downloading music, lobbying for massive expansions in copyright control, and including nasty DRM that limits fair use rights on their CDs. It’s hard to support an industry which treats its customers like that!

Still, you believe in playing by the rules: file-sharing has legitimate purposes, but you’re not just going to download a bunch of copyrighted songs without the artists’ permission and then give that as a gift. What’s a music-lover to do?

Luckily, not all record labels are members of the RIAA. A proud handful hold out, refusing to join in the cartel’s backwards way of doing business. Sites like riaaradar.com help you sort the wheat from the chaff.

The gift that is the subject of this post is courtesy of RIAA Radar, a Web site that is “a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).” The tool allows users to search for independent music by artist name, recording label name, album title, or UPC code. I think this is the perfect tool to help consumers implement the boycott against Sony that I have called for in CopyCense‘s ongoing coverage of the Sony rootkit scandal.

RIAA Radar even gives customers the option of accessing UPC information by mobile phone, which means you have no excuse for buying Sony or major label product while you’re on the holiday go.

But, in the end, RIAA Radar resonates with me because I have been buying and collecting music for more than 25 years, and it just so happens that most of my purchases are from independent labels. That has had nothing to do with a major-label boycott (well, at least not until the Sony rootkit debacle), but because I long have known that much of the best available music is (a) distributed by independent labels, and (b) more likely to be created by artists outside the United States (or artists whose musical influences go beyond domestic artists).

Like my Sony rootkit coverage, I will continuously update this post to share with CopyCense readers some of the music in my collection that I enjoy that is not from a Big Music source. This approach also will give me an excuse to resume my music reviews and commentary, which I sorely miss.

See also:

FreeCulture.org. RIAA-Free CDs: A Holiday Gift Guide for Conscientious Music-Lovers. No date.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“One of the more frustrating things about debating copyright issues is that copyright mythology sounds a lot more like the truth than the truth. For instance, many people believe that copyright law gives the copyright holder absolute, immutable control over a work, lasting into perpetuity. The truth — that copyright has built-in limits to protect free speech, scholarship, research, and innovation (the “progress of science and useful arts”) — sounds like a lie. Surely all of that stuff is just bleeding-heart liberal, mushy-minded nonsense?

“Oh, well, actually — no. Fair use exists, and for very good reasons.”

Copyfight. Copyright Mythbusters: Believe It or Not, Fair Use Exists. Dec. 5, 2005.