Jeremy Corbyn is taking on Napster

Today was Jeremy Corbyn's big digital plans launch. If we boil it down to 'I don't really understand this sort of thing but it's important so I guess we should do... something' it sort-of-all-works as a first stab.

But the detail. Oh, the detail:

Downloading music for free sounds fine, he says. But this means musicians do not get paid. That is why digital rights are so important. He says he has not produced the last word on policy on this yet.

Yes, much as some aspects of Corbyn's industrial policy are still based on the 1970s, his digital rights policy seems to be fixated on sometime around the first flush of Napster.

One Direction fans struggle with the concept of copyright

We hear a lot from the rich and successful in the music industry about how people breaching copyright is a terrible, terrible thing.

What happens when it's part of the well-heeled music industry doing the infringing, and someone calls them on it?

Why, then the fans pile in.

Ezequiel Scagnetti was surprised to see that Harry Styles was using one of his photos on Instagram.

Not only had Styles not asked, but he hadn't even bothered to credit Scagnetti.

Scagnetti was obviously upset to see his work getting so much praise while nobody knew it was his work, so took to Facebook to complain:

750,000 like - but I don't like it. I'm interested to see who is this guy that published my picture and got 750.000 likes, without even mentioning my name," said Ezequiel on the popular social network.

The One Direction hive mind detected this criticism of Harry Styles, and swarmed into attack.

Like good little corporate citizens, they told Ezequiel he should be thrilled and delighted that his work had pleased Styles; why, they would kill for Harry to share their photos. He should chill.

And if berating the man wasn't enough, they then started to give fake reviews for his photography business.

Oh, and that's not even touching on the homophobic and racist nature of some of the abuse.

"Why don't you sue him" said some; Ezequiel explained, patiently, that this wasn't about money:

#harrystyles maladroitness is not a real reason for me to sue him (you guys invented it), he is not the first publishing my work without permission and without previous agreement.
But you should understand that I have the right to do it if I want. And I have the right to be upset.

I am a rich man, but of another kind of richness, by doing professional pictures, I earn enough to feed my wife and my 2 kids, and that’s all I need.

You see guys, we have different values; success for you is to be famous, to have "likes" in Facebook or to be a pop singer, success for me is raising my family with dignity.

Even more patiently, he explained that it wasn't even about copyright:

Most of you (the ones insulting me) are damned because this: you are not able to understand people who think different than you.

I’m not talking about the lack of knowledge or simple ignorance in subjects as photography, arts, copyright, etc. You are completely lost on those subjects and that’s fine for me, you are kids.

I'm talking about your petty and narrow mind.

You are so narrow-minded that you think that my centre of interest, at my forties, must be a pop band and a -certainly-, nice guy called Harry Styles.

Well... I’m currently following with attention the problem of millions of Syrian refugees living in horrible conditions, dying in the Mediterranean Sea running away from war and terrorism.

I am busy reading some articles about the geopolitical impact of the agreement between USA and Iran concerning the Uranium issue.

But I also worry of the latest terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, Tunisia, Mali, Pakistan, to name but a few, and all this bunch of innocent people dying every day in the hands of insane people.

But you blame me because I did not know who is #harrystyles. Great.

He might not know who Harry Styles is. But, boy, does he know what Styles' fans are like.

Backing up is now illegal

The decision of the High Court to make it illegal again to rip a CD you've purchased for money to play on a device of your choosing we've covered before. There's another sting to the judgement, though, as Consequence Of Sound have discovered. If you store your legally purchased music on your computer, and you back up your hard drive, you're a criminal, chummy:

the Government spokesperson went on to add that, “… It includes creating back-ups without permission from the copyright holder as this necessarily involves an act of copying.” In other words, if you legally purchase digital media online, you are now not legally allowed to back up that information on an external hard drive of any sort. In the long run, that means if your computer were to crash or get stolen, your only allowable course of action would be to re-purchase all your music and movies.

(I'm sure Apple and Amazon would both point out that if you buy through them, your purchase is recorded and free to download again at any time.)

Backing up your computer is now illegal. Good work, everybody.

Taylor Swift makes amends. A bit.

Shortly after Taylor Swift called out Apple on their attempts to make artists cover the costs of the three month Apple Music trials, Jason Sheldon pointed out that the terms she imposed on photographers weren't entirely fair, either.

While Apple crumbled overnight in the face of Swift's attacks, Swift has taken longer to respond to Sheldon but her people have just launched a new contract which goes some way to addressing Sheldon's worries.

The new contract does make clear that the camera people keep copyright on the pictures and will be credited if Swift or her team choose to use them on social media but it's still pretty restrictive.

High Court has just turned your iPhone into a crime scene

Remember when back in 2014 the government realised that having a law against people ripping their own CDs to put on digital players was absurd, and tidied up the law?

The High Court has reversed that change, and believes that if you own a CD and wish to listen to the music on your iPhone, you will meekly go online and pay for the thing all over again:

The ruling says that governments can't make exceptions to copyright law without compensating rightsholders for the "harms" from the changes; because the UK government didn't demonstrate that ripping CDs doesn't cause harm to rightsholders, and because it didn't impose a levy to compensate for "harms," the legalisation of ripping (which, incredibly, only took place in the last Parliament) is now invalid.

Yes, lawyers from the Music Industry have convinced judges that when Person A slips Now That's What I Call Music 56 into their drive, if they weren't doing that, they'd be somehow buying the tracks instead.

Obviously, it's a stupid decision, made by a legal system that has apparently never met a person, but it's also a ruling that will be completely ignored. It's not as if prior to 2014 people looked at their pile of CDs, looked at their iPod, and thought "well, if only the law recognised that I own the music and the only distinction is whether the digital playback is instantaneous or later, I could pop those on my device."

And it's probably for the best that the world will ignore this rule - the police force has been so hollowed out under Theresa May's rule that they can barely manage to turn up to a crime in progress, much less pop round on the rumour that someone has put their Clean Bandit single on their Galaxy G4, so it's going to make scofflaws of most of us.

But if the law was applied, the logical behaviour would be to say 'if I have to pay twice, well, screw that. The more flexible choice is to go with digital, so I shall stop buying CDs altogether, and instead go with cheaper digital versions. But hang on, as I'm not buying a physical album I only need to buy the two tracks I really want. Actually, come to that, why am I going to buy anything? I can just use my Spotify account if all I want to do is listen digitally."

Effectively, the big brains of the Music Industry have gone to court to argue that the added value of their premium product be outlawed. Maybe the judges aren't so out of touch - perhaps they've just come up with a smart way to fine an industry for its vexatious lawsuit.

Yahoo adds download button to Tumblr; adds trouble to users

As Yahoo struggles to remember why it bought Tumblr, and shakes it to see if the previous owners left any money down the back of it, it's tried a new idea: since the start of the month, it's popped a little download button on audio posts, to allow visitors to not merely enjoy audio on the page, but to take it away with them, and put it on their devices.

Hey, that's wonderful functionality. Right?

There's a bit of a problem, though. The music industry has never been happy with people posting copyrighted stuff to Tumblr; adding a download button has turned a small transgression into a major problem.

Sure, it's always been a violation of the terms and conditions, and posting music you don't hold a licence too has carried a threat of account deletion, but apparently not coincidentally linked to the download button appearance, the music industry has started to get militant with Tumblr abuses. Stewardessme sums up the situation:

For years, Tumblr allowed us to upload music (up to five audio posts a day) because it substantially increased Tumblr’s user base and user “activity,” therefore increasing Tumblr’s value to its eventual buyer, Yahoo, and to the advertisers Yahoo is so eager to court. Now Yahoo/Tumblr is letting us take the DMCA fall for it, reminding us yet again that we aren’t the customers, but the product being sold to advertisers.

And, of course, because the music industry is using an automated machine, the sort of mistakes we've seen all over the internet are happening:

http://inaraoftyria.tumblr.com/post/111060807046/hey-jeremy-banks-hey-ifpi-no-you-do-not-own-my

If Tumblr is good at anything, though, it's good at forming support groups. And the community is coming together to help people who might be worried that having stuck a couple of Imagine Dragon tracks onto their blog could result in their entire Tumblr existence being wiped out. So there's a lot of activity like this going on:

http://iron-siren.tumblr.com/post/111058041597/resources-for-those-concerned-about-ifpi-takedowns

The lack of clarity about what's happening from Yahoo has generated a massive rumour mill, making things worse - people whose blogs are based on song titles or lyrics are panicking that they might be wiped as a result. That seems unlikely - a douchebag too far even for the copyright industry - but it'd be nice to see someone confirm that. Because, ah, it would be no rock and roll fun if that happened.

Canadian copyright cops apparently less bothered about other people's copyright

Canipre, the dreadfully-named, self-appointed copyright industry authority in Canada, appears to be lifting content for its website without attribution, observes Michael Geist:

Yet what Canipre does not say is that a blog associated with the company may have been engaged in copyright infringement for many months. The blog – copyrightenforcement.ca – is run by Barry Logan, the company’s Managing Director, Operations (I received an email from Mr. Logan last year that listed the site as his blog address). In addition to posting releases from Canipre and information about the TekSavvy case, the site has posted dozens of full-text articles from media organizations around the world.

For example, last week it posted the full text of a 1200 word article on TV piracy from the Wire Report, an Ottawa-based telecom publication. The article resides behind a paywall limited to subscribers and is listed as “exclusive content.” In fact, reposting full-text articles from other sources is a regular occurrence on the site. Posts in December feature articles from the Huffington Post Canada, Business Insider, and CNET. Earlier posts include full-text articles from the Hollywood Reporter, StreamDaily, Reuters, the Canadian Press, Global News, Vancouver Sun, and the National Post. Some of the posts include articles that strip out reference to the author (Chronicle Herald, CBC) and others include no attribution whatsoever. The site also uses photos from the articles, often without attribution.

Of course, it might be that copyrightenforcement.ca have got all their paperwork in place and just don't bother to mention it on their website. It's possible. But Canipre do have form for taking material and reusing it without permission. When caught using material without the proper licence last time, Logan suggested it was a good thing because it showed, somehow, that the "system worked". Perhaps he's just trying to prove that again?

Citizens should have lessons in copyright morals and ethics

MP for Hove Actually Mark Weatherley, who somehow has been entrusted with advising David Cameron on matters relating to intellectual property, wants kids to be taught copyright morality in schools:

In a 51-page report that was just released Weatherley stresses the importance of copyright awareness and education, especially for the younger generation. This is needed as respect for copyright has declined in recent years and some even believe that sharing copyrighted material without permission is not a big deal.

“There is … a certain level of tolerance for the idea that IP infringements could be considered legitimate. Some believe that illegal activity online is a social norm, with no moral implications,” Weatherley writes.

“We are at risk of an entire generation growing up with different levels of respect for IP and copyright in particular. Should this social contract disappear, there could be longer-term consequences beyond the immediate, short-term negative impacts experienced by the creative sector,” he adds.

We would quote some chunks of his report, but, hey, let's respect the guy's right to be wrong in private, yes?

The idea of schools having honest education about the morality and ethics of the copyright industry isn't all bad - getting teenagers to explore the reasons why copyright used to expire after a sensible period, and debating the consistent push back of that expiration as MPs like Weatherley do the bidding of multinational corporations could make for lively lessons and an aware populace.

However, what Weatherley is actually suggesting isn't that the ethics and morality of the copyright industry be taught at all; he just wants lessons based on that awful thing they make you watch at the start of DVDs.

Sidenote: Mike Weatherley, besides being an MP, has found time in his busy routine to be director of a bunch of companies associated with MPLC, a company that exists to "help" people with copyright licences. You might think that this exciting hinterland means that Weatherley is something of an expert in the field, which he is sharing with the rest of the coalition. Equally, though, you might wonder if this means he might not have started his report with the most open of minds.

Good news! You can stop hiding your iTunes folder when the cops come round

Did you know that it was still, technically, illegal to copy a CD you had bought onto your computer as recently as... jesus, up until last Tuesday.

But now, you are free to take a CD or a DVD and rip it to your digital device.

Providing you're not going to share it with someone else.

And providing you'd paid for that disc in the first place, of course.

And by bought, that's a proper, manufactured copy - not if you slipped Slippery Jake two quid for a CD with "ALL THE BEETLESBEATLES ALBUMS" scrawled on it with a Sharpie.

You might want to hold on to the receipts, in other words.

Anti-piracy campaign produces list of sites where you can make out like a bandit

The anti-piracy people are publishing a list of websites which offer large swathes of unlicenced music and film:

Here's how the IWL is designed to work: the creative industry bodies provide the initial list of infringing sites, which is then "evidenced and verified" by the City of London Police's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), providing a list of undesirables for advertisers to avoid.

PIPCU claims that the pilot resulted in 12% less advertising from "major household brands" on the identified sites. "If an advert from an established brand appears on an infringing website not only does it lend the site a look of legitimacy, but inadvertently the brand and advertiser are funding online crime," said the unit's boss Detective Chief Inspector Andy Hyde.

Now, obviously, if the list was made public, what the diligent work would have done would be offer people keen to get their hands on an m4v of Anchorman 2 the best places to look.

So they're not making the list public.

That's problematic, though - it means the police are circulating documents accusing websites of criminal activity without allowing those site owners a chance to defend themselves, based on a list originally produced by the copyright businesses in the first place. It's not clear what "evidence" is gathered by the City of London police, and it's surely wrong for police evidence to merely be accepted as proof without testing this in an open justice process.

Sure, 'making it hard for pirate websites to profit' sounds great.

But when you realise that means 'private corporations and police working together to undermine websites on the basis of a secret list' it starts to become a little more sinister.

South Korea takes public domain content back into copyright

Another victory for gloabalisation: In order to allow Australian businesses to swallow up South Korean assets ("to seal a free trade agreement"), the two countries have agreed to harmonise their copyright rules.

Currently, in Australia, copyright is "life of author + 70 years". In South Korea, it's "life of author + 50 years".

Guess which direction the harmonisation is running. Go on, guess.

Yes, great news for the corpses of South Korean artists: their ability to earn money while they're decomposing has been extended another 20 years.

A mouldering corpse in Suwon said "this is brilliant news. Obviously, having had all my flesh long since eaten by worms, I have to spend a lot of money on clothes to keep my skeleton warm. I look forward to getting royalty cheques long into the future. Does this still apply if the North invade?"

Beastie Boys try to shift themselves back onto wrong side of history

It's easy to forget these days that when they first burst into the world, ripping VW badges from cars and putting women in cages, the Beastie Boys weren't universally adored.

So discovering that GoldieBlox have taken one of their shittiest, most sexist moments and turned it into a girl-positive, pro-engineering advert is going to be embraced by the band as a chance to further distance themselves from their youthful missteps, right?

Oh... apparently not:

Along with Universal Music, the Beastie Boys sent a letter to GoldieBlox threatening a copyright infringement claim. GoldieBlox decided to strike first, and has filed for a declaratory judgment in California, saying that their version is a parody and it's protected fair use.

You know what? If I owned the copyright on a song which suggested a woman who wasn't interested was "probably gay" and dreamed of "girls to do my laundry", I think I'd be delighted to see that someone had come along and fixed that for me.

BPI, RIAA ignore licence terms on their website until it's pointed out to them

Interesting: copyright farmers the RIAA and their remote-controlled UK equivalent the BPI have been caught using code on their websites which violates the licences of that code.

TorrentFreak has been poking about in the source:

The websites of music industry groups RIAA and BPI also use infringing code.

On both sites we found open source JQuerys scripts that are released under the MIT license. This license permits any person or organization to use, copy, modify, merge, distribute, or even sell copies of the software. There’s only one condition users have to agree to; that the original copyright notice stays intact.

Ironically, the scripts used on the RIAA and BPI websites have the copyright licenses removed.

BPI uses the depreciated template script jQuery.tmpl.min.js, and as can be seen below, yesterday there was no reference to the MIT license or the copyright holder listed at the top of the file.

Oddly, after TF contacted the RIAA, the copyright line appeared magically on the RIAA and BPI sites.

Smiths shuts down This Charming Charlie

So the amusing mash-up of Smiths lyrics and Peanuts frames is being hounded off the web, because copyright:

The Smiths’ licensing company (Universal Music Publishing Group) has started requesting posts be removed from This Charming Charlie. So far 6 posts have been removed, and it is increasing every hour. If you like the page, please save copies of the comics to your own computer. I will repost the images on my personal site.

To be fair to Universal Music, there's clearly a fundamental threat to their business because I've certainly stopped buying Smiths records now that I can read a single line of a song in a speech bubble coming from Linus' mouth. Obviously.

No moment in the sun, beyond the sun, for the sun

Carl Sagan had wanted to include Here Comes The Sun on the disc of music that was put onto Voyager.

EMI, being EMI, refused on copyright grounds. Perhaps they were afraid The Beatles had signed before contracts stipulated "throughout the known universe"; maybe they feared that you put a track from Abbey Road on a record being floated into space, before you know it, ET would be down the car boot knocking out collections of Greatest Hits.

To be fair, though, it might be better for the universe that EMI said no. Imagine a hyper-intelligent race, billions of miles away, coming across Voyager, working out how to play the disc, and starting with that song. There's a good chance they'd assume it was a warning that a massive star was on a collision course with their planet, isn't there?

[hat-tip to @bowbrick]

Warner Chappell faces unhappy returns

Warner Chappell has had a nice little business going over the last few years, collecting money from the rights it owned to the song Happy Birthday. Even Nancy Reagan singing it to Ronnie once got a terse demand for cash dispatched to broadcasting networks.

Except... maybe they don't own the rights at all. Filmaker Jennifer Nelson was asked to pay to include the song in a documentary she was making. But rather than hand over the cash - USD1500! - she started to dig. And she's not sure the song belongs in copyright:

Nelson's company Good Morning to You Productions Corp claimed: "Irrefutable documentary evidence, some dating to 1893, shows that the copyright to Happy Birthday to You, if there ever was a valid copyright to any part of the song, expired no later than 1921". Their class-action lawsuit, filed on 13 June, directly challenges Warner/Chappell's ownership of the song, whereby the publishers collect thousands of dollars every time a film, TV show or musical act buys a licence to perform it.

It could be expensive for Warner Chappell if a judgement goes against them - they'll have to return all that cash they've been raking in for years; and it could be as much as fifty million dollars.

Sky Broadband casts itself as wheezy cat; Pirate Bay proxies as mice

Sky Broadband has started to block access to Pirate Bay proxy sites, in a bid to inspire the creation of other Pirate Bay proxy sites ("defeat unlicensed file sharing once and for all").

Bookmarks: Napster, iTunes and beyond

In the Wisconsin Law Review, Mike Masnick explains why the war on Napster didn't only fail to stop piracy, but also put the brakes on innovative new companies working in online music. In short: Had the RIAA been less keen to kill Napster, perhaps Apple wouldn't have ended up stealing their business:

This should have been obvious from the fact that people would flock to these new services, yet failed to show up to the record labels’ own attempts to innovate or provide something new. However, as soon as any service showed any kind of promise, even if “licensed,” the labels would seek to kill the golden goose by claiming that the rates were unfair, and the innovators were making money unfairly off the backs of the copyright holders (by which they meant the labels, not the musicians, of course).

Take, for example, the brief heyday of music video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. For a year or two, the recording industry fell head over heels in love with these games, because people were playing them quite a bit, and they were (briefly) willing to pay a slight premium to get access to music from well-known bands and musicians. Rather than build on that, the industry did two things: it focused all of its attention on those kinds of games, absolutely flooding the market and making people get sick of the game genre, and demanded much higher royalties.

The viewpoint seemed to be that there could be almost no benefits for the innovators. Nearly all of the benefits had to accrue to the labels, or it would be seen as a problem. In fact, the one exception that got through was iTunes, and that was quickly seen as a “problem” by the labels, even as it was dragging them, kicking and screaming, into the marketplace for digital music. The view is one of an extreme zero-sum world, where if someone else is benefiting, it must mean that the labels were losing out. They didn’t even hide this view of the world. Doug Morris, then head of Universal Music (now head of Sony Music) explained to a Wired reporter that investing in new innovations that weren’t paying money upfront meant that “someone, somewhere is taking advantage of you.” As laid out in the article, Morris was uninterested in technology, and didn’t even know how to hire a competent technology person, so his focus was on making sure everyone paid up immediately. Anyone making money in the music world without first paying a massive cut were dubbed “thieves.”

Pirate Bay calls copyright cops on themselves

Some lovely work by the Pirate Bay in Finland. The Finnish copyright police have built a parody of their site, and the Bay have called the copyright police:

“While The Pirate Bay may have a positive view on copying, it will not stand by and watch copyright enforcing organizations disrespect copyright,” Pirate Bay’s Winston says in a comment.

“CIAPC is like an ugly high school bully without friends. It’s time to take a stand. Cyber bullying is a serious matter to us all,” Winston continues.

Boing Boing points out that the Pirate Bay can't help but come out ahead on this:

I love that even if they lose, it will establish the case for a parody exception to Finnish copyright law, which The Pirate Bay supports and which CIAPC vehemently opposes.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Merlin threatens to do to MySpace what Merlin did to Morgana

Merlin, the group which negotiates rights deals on behalf of thousands of small and medium-sized labels, is accusing MySpace of using songs to which it has no right.

Merlin's deal with MySpace expired about a year ago, and yet, oddly, over 100 of its labels have still got their music being used by the site. The New York Times reports that MySpace is blaming its members:

Neda Azarfar, a spokeswoman for Myspace, said the company had decided not to renew its contract with Merlin, and that if songs from its member labels were still on the site, “they were likely uploaded by users” and would be removed if requested by the label.

Really? MySpace "users" did it? Why not blame something more likely to actually exist, like "a unicorn did it"?

But if we accept that Azarfar is guessing correctly - and wouldn't you have checked, rather than guessing, if it had been you? - isn't this a pretty terrible line for MySpace to be putting out to the music industry partners it desperately needs to court?

MySpace: a place where people are sticking any old copyright-breeching material online, and we don't really keep an eye on what they're doing.

Now, remind me what the RIAA usually says about such business plans.