The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal court Wednesday to “reject bogus copyright claims” from the music industry that could meant that you could get charged a performance fee every time your cell phone rings in public.

According to EFF:

As part of a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone companies, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) has told a federal court that each time a phone rings in a public place, the phone user has violated copyright law. Therefore, ASCAP argues, phone carriers must pay additional royalties or face legal liability for contributing to what they claim is cell phone users’ copyright infringement.

In an amicus brief filed Wednesday, EFF points out that copyright law does not reach public performances “without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage” — clearly the case with cell phone ringtones. If phone users are not infringing copyright law, then mobile phone service providers are not contributing to any infringement.

While ASCAP is targeting phone carriers, you know who would foot the bill.

“This is an outlandish argument from ASCAP,” said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. “Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law if they forget to silence their phones in a restaurant? Under this reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copyright violation for you to play your car radio with the window down!”

What do you think? Should musicians get a penny every time a phone rings – or should ASCAP forget about nickel and diming people and look for better ways of helping musicians make money?

Image: nayshe??64 is having problems with her compute

This video captures Michael Masnick’s Learning From What’s Working: Success Stories From The Music Commerce Frontier.

Masnick is the founder of TechDirt – a technology blog that has been a vocal critic of the music industry’s approach to technology, especially DRM and its opposition to P2P file sharing.

You can safely skip the first 2 1/2 minutes – but the rest is must-view material for musicians.

Masnick relies way too much on the example of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and other musicians that were established by the traditional music industry.

More interesting are Masnick’s examples of the creative and bizarre ways musicians are connecting with fan.

Give it a view and leave a comment with your thoughts!

Moby

argh. what utter nonsense. this is how the record companies want to protect themselves? suing suburban moms for listening to music? charging $80,000 per song?

punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business. maybe the record companies have adopted the ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ approach to dealing with music fans. i don’t know, but ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ doesn’t seem like such a sustainable business model when it comes to consumer choice. how about a new model of ‘it’s better to be loved for helping artists make good records and giving consumers great records at reasonable prices’?

i’m so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music.

the riaa needs to be disbanded.

$2 million for sharing three albums worth of songs is clearly insanity.

Using your public user ID to share music illegally, covering up your tracks by replacing your computer’s hard drive, lying about it and then not settling out of court when you’ve got no case is insane, too.

There are going to be a lot of musicians that say they don’t want to be any part of this insanity.

If Moby really wants to make the RIAA irrelevant, though, he should follow the example of Nine Inch Nails, whose free albums releases and Creative Commons licensing have led to huge sales.

DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) talks about the history of media and thoughts about media in culture.

He discusses and demonstrates the unexpected side effects of free speech, law, and copyright while showing the power of remixed art.

Miller always has interesting ideas and is a great advocate of free culture, but don’t expect him to connect all the dots!

via UNCChapelHill

Die Mensch Maschine got rebuffed by a court in Germany, which told electronica pioneers Kraftwerk that Moses Pelham did not violate their copyrights by using an unauthorized sample of one of their songs, Metal on Metal, in one of his productions.

The ruling overturns an earlier decision against Pelham.

Judges in Berlin said the two second extract did not infringe copyright, as Pelham’s song was substantially different.

While the decision is a victory for people that want to creatively remix and recycle culture, it also increases the likelihood that Kraftwerk’s songs, or your songs, are going to be used as the backing track for a lame, derivative hip-hop track. 

What do you think of this decision?

via BBC

Image: yamchild

French dance gurus Justice offered a little lawyer-bait in an interview with MTV, revealing that they didn’t bother to clear many of the samples they used on their debut album, Cross. 

Speaking to MTV, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay confirmed what many fans have suspected for a while when they said: “we sample really small bits of things that nobody can recognise”.

“If you listen to Genesis, the first track, there are samples of Slipknot, Queen and 50 Cent, but they are such short samples no one can recognise them. The ones from Slipknot, for example, are just tiny bits of the voice.”

Justice did make sure that the obviously lifted material was legit. ”On the album, we used three big samples that we had to clear,” they confirmed.

It’s safe to assume that they didn’t clear their statements with their lawyer, either.

In it, Vega talks about her song Tom’s Diner getting remixed, illegally, by DNA:

We were backstage at the Arsenio Hall show when my manager told me that some boys calling themselves DNA, in England — Bath, to be specific — had taken “Tom’s Diner” and put a dance track to it. They had “re-mixed” it. (I don’t remember what we called that type of music back then — house? rap? hip-hop? It wasn’t “disco” or “thrash-metal.”) My manager, Ron Fierstein, told me that A&M and Polygram were considering taking legal action against them for copyright violation.

I thought, well, let me listen to it — and immediately liked it. It made me laugh. It wasn’t a parody, which is what I was afraid of. The song is the same, my voice is still my voice, the story still the story, even though they left out the very end (they told me later they thought it sounded weird, musically, to keep the ending).

Instead of sending the boys to jail, my manager worked out a deal with them for a flat fee. A&M Records paid the fee, and we retained all rights.

I made the decision to call the remix “Tom’s Diner, by DNA featuring Suzanne Vega” because I didn’t know if the audience would accept the new sound, and I wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t my production. To my surprise, I didn’t have to worry about that as it was accepted everywhere. DNA were surprised to find themselves suddenly classified as an “act,” since they did mostly production.

I had imagined that a few dance clubs would play it, and that would be the end of it. But it was played on radio right away, including the R&B stations, a new experience for me. I even received a plaque congratulating me for having one of the most played R&B songs of 1990. R&B! How cool.

Vega goes on to talk about all the other remixes of Tom’s Diner that this led to, and how Tom’s Diner was used by the creators of the MP3 format to test their compression algorithms. 

It’s a great article, touching on digital media, copyright and the benefits of working with people that want to remix your work. 

Link

Hawtin suggests that digital technology makes current copyright laws obsolete:

“Every track these days should be considered a work in progress,” says Hawtin. “Everything is version 1.0, and anybody should be allowed to take your ideas and add their own ideas to it. We need to be more open about music, ideas and ownership.”

“Artists and labels should still be able to make money from their music when it gets sampled, but there should be a way of tracking how far down your samples go,” he says. “We should be able to scan a track and say 50% of this is original, 20% is from this record, and 30% is from this record.

“Or maybe a sample is only allowed to be regurgitated five times before you lose ownership of that sample or groove,” adds Hawtin. “For electronic music to progress we need to be more open-minded.

“I believe a producer should be allowed to reuse and resample anything they want, in a reasonable manner.”

Hawtin also may soon be putting his money where his mouth is:

“We’re thinking about opening the Minus catalogue up to the public so that anyone who buys a release can have more creative options to manipulate and transform it.”

Hawtin’s views seem reasonable to me – but a lot of artists want to retain control over how their music is used, an who reworks it.

Violent crime is on the rise in the US.

We can’t find Osama Bin Laden in seven years.

Millions of illegal aliens are hiding in the country, gainfully employed. 

And we’re arresting music bloggers. 

A Los Angeles blogger has been arrested for allegedly sharing music online. Twenty-seven-year-old Kevin Cogill was arrested by FBI agents at his home Wednesday and charged with violating federal copyright laws. He is accused of releasing several Guns N’ Roses songs from their album Chinese Democracy before the album’s commercial release.

Cogill was arrested in his pajamas, and government agents recommended that bail be set at $50,000.

What does this tell the world about US law enforcement priorities?

We’re keeping the world safe for big business.

Remember German samplemeister Johannes Kreidler and his piece Product Placements – the song that supposedly smashes 70,200 samples into a 34 second work?

He’s released it and you can preview it above. Special prize to the first person to name all 70,200 samples…..

It’s a lot more interesting as an idea than a piece of music. Kreidler’s using the music to challenge the idea of copyrights and how they relate to art.

Kreidler’s is a provocateur – his film Smoking Fetish, below, pairs found footage with industrial noise music:

Avant Garde samplemeister Johannes Kriedler is using his latest work, product placements, to create a nightmare for GEMA (the German RIAA, and explore the ways that copyrights limit art in the process.

Here’s the text of his announcement:

If you want to register a song at GEMA (RIAA, ASCAP of Germany) you have to fill in a form for each sample you use, even the tiniest bit. On 12 Sept 08, German Avant garde musician Johannes Kreidler will —as a live performance event—register a short musical work that contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA using 70,200 forms.

This doesn’t sound like it would be much fun to listen to – but it’s a great performance piece that challenges the status quo when it comes to the arts.

via Crate Kings

Claire Chanel and Scary Sherman have been keeping busy. First they put together the Jay-Z Construction Set, a complete, downloadable kit for making your own remixes of the latest tripe from Jay-Z. Now they’ve put together a hot collection of noise-filled hits from today’s hottest stars.

Have Sherman & Chanel finally cracked the code and figured out the RIAA’s angle? You be the judge. They’ve collected 10, count ‘em 10 tracks from artists like Aerosmith, Alicia Keys, and the newly single Britney Spears. Oh yeah!

But wait! There’s more!

If you download these RIAA-approved remixes now, you’ll get eleven (11!) more web-only bonus tracks. Each track is the official RIAA Mix! Download them all at RIAAMix.com!

The site is a project of Downhill Battle, a site that documents and promotes music activism against the major record labels, and promotes independent music. The site has two main goals.

• To make it impossible for the five major record labels to use legal threats to stifle musical art. Their plan is to publicly distribute works that are driven underground by the major labels.
• To advocate for common-sense reforms to copyright law that can make sampling legal and practical for artists, and benefiting both the musicians who created source material and sample-based musicians who are using it to create new works. For an informed and vibrant discussion to exist on these topics, sample-based music needs to be readily available. To determine whether current copyright law is serving musicians and fans, the public needs to be able to hear the kind of work that’s currently being suppressed.

The site is distributing an easy BitTorrent installer to help distribute banned works.

Sampling and lawsuits have gone hand and hand for nearly twenty years. In the eighties, musicians went sample crazy, leading to songs that were sound collages of cultural references. This trend ended abruptly, though, when songs like Paul Hardcastle’s “Nineteen” ended up creating legal problems for their creators.

The Creative Commons Sampling Licenses promise to make it easier for musicians to know what they can legally sample. The CC Sampling Licences were launched in December of 2003, and were developed with the help of veteran sample-art group Negativland.

According to Creative Commons, the Sampling licenses will help authors foster a broad range of culture, from photo collage to musical “mash-ups,” that the law currently deems illegitimate, despite its growing popularity and acceptance online. And while embodying the Creative Commons “Some Rights Reserved” model of copyright, the licenses will offer a combination of conditions and freedoms that our current licenses do not.

The Sampling License

The Sampling License is designed to let the author of the work invite others to transform their work, even for commercial purposes, while prohibiting the distribution of verbatim copies, or to be used in advertising.

For example, an artist could take a photo licensed under Sampling, crop it, and use it in a commercial collage, but she could not distribute simple copies of the whole, original photo. A DJ could borrow elements of a licensed song, royalty-free, and use them in an original piece. He could not, however, put a copy of the tune on a file-sharing network.

The Sampling-Plus License

The Sampling-Plus license will offer the same freedoms as the Sampling license, but will also allow noncommercial sharing of the verbatim work.

So, an artist could release her song under a Sampling-Plus license to encourage her fans to trade it on file-sharing networks, then remix or build upon it however they like. But the license would protect verbatim copies of her work from for-profit exploitation by others. Or a photographer could invite the widespread, noncommercial distribution of a whole photo and its resulting transformation while preventing others from simply reselling the photo, unchanged.

Additional information is available at the Creative Commons site.

Now Claire Channel and Scary Sherman (great names) have created the new Jay-Z Construction Set. It’s a CD-ROM that collects 9 remixes of Jay-Z’s Black Album (including the Grey Album). It also has the original Jay-Z a capella vocal tracks, hundreds of samples and breakbeats, and photos of Jay-Z, his rivals, hot cars, and picturesque scenes. In other words, it’s all the pieces you need to make your own Black Album remix, and the cover art to go with it. Who needs the Grey Album, how about a Purple Album, or a Fuscia Album, or a Rainbow Album?

The Construction Set is already huge on torrent. It has turned into one of the hottest downloads, and this is turning into the best free publicity that Jay-Z could get. It’s hard to imagine that record company executives won’t see the value in releasing song components that anybody can remix, considering that this has brought a considerable amount of attention to an album that is otherwise unexceptional.

Interesting things are happening in the music world. The Grey Album is one example. People are interested in being involved in music, and the computers of today are like the cheap guitars of 40 years ago. People are taking the tools they have available and making interesting and not so interesting derivitive work. Instant Music is another example. Cheap laptops and free music software have made it easy for anybody to make music anywhere. This has led to overnight creations like the Dean Mixes. It also makes it easy for anybody to make high-quality recordings on location, approved or unapproved. Expect to see more instant music, and the rise of guerilla location recording.

The Jay-Z construction set is available via torrent. Information is available at the Jay Z Construction Set site. The file you get from BitTorrent is a .zip file. The Jay-Z Construction Set was designed to fit on a CD-ROM. It weighs in at just under 650mb so it should work on any CD burner. The site suggests that users should “Feel free to alter the contents as much as you want. Include your own remixes, add more samples, whatever you want– this project belongs to everyone that touches it!”

It’s hip, funny, and effective in the way it explains how the major labels work, how artists get screwed, and how there is an alternative.

The site has a great photo essay about printing & distributing major label warning stickers. It documents distributing 2,000 anti-RIAA stickers…at Wal-Mart. It’s funny and effective.

The site also provides news on RIAA suing grandmas and kids, artists that have spoken out against the RIAA, and commercial and non-commercial alternatives.