The Hollywood Reporter: All of the leading providers of streaming music are now in the scorching hot legal zone involving pre-1972 music after seven lawsuits were filed on Thursday against Apple's Beat Electronics, Sony Entertainment, Google, Rdio, Songza, Slacker and Escape Media Group (operator of Grooveshark).
2 comments:
I am on the fence about these lawsuits. On the one hand, I think that the owners of the pre-1972 music are owed money if digital music providers want to use their music, but on the other if the law that they are citing doesn’t protect that music then they don’t have a foot to stand on in court. Also, it seem as if the plaintiffs won the case at a state level then, the digital music stations could just pick and chose were that certain music available. I do think this is a great time to try to get a federal law past that takes into account how wide spread digital music stations have become as well as the fact that some music is being used without the compensation of the proper people.
This story reminds me of the controversy between Spotify and Taylor Swift, late last year. She felt as though artists weren’t being properly compensated for making their discography available on the site and eventually pulled her entire catalogue. I think the fact that this sort of story keeps coming up, points to a disturbing trend in the way music is consumed by the public.
As much as the issue of digital and intellectual copyright to materials on the internet is in the public eye currently, this article is refreshing turn. In this case, it is large companies that are being sued for using music that everyone knows and is readily accessible and no one assumes that there is anything wrong with using it. But in this case it is large corporations with stakes as media dealers instead of otherwise harmless individuals that are hit with large fines from one of the media corporations that are currently being sued. The specifics of this particular case I don’t think are that important, but it does raise the question of digital copyright artistic intellectual property. When someone says that torrenting is stealing, I have to wonder doesn’t stealing imply that the other person no longer has the thing that you no have, or they don’t have the ability to sell it anymore. Digital ‘piracy’ doesn’t cause any of those things. One could argue that once I have an freely obtained version of something, I am no longer going to pay for the legitimate version, and that is a form of damage, but personally, if it was not available freely, I would not want it at all.
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