How Dare Anyone Help Promote A Song Without First Paying Money!
from the take-a-step-back... dept
The latest over-reaction by the folks at the RIAA is apparently to shut down a site that was hosting “machinima” music videos. Machinima, of course, is the use of video game settings to create movies and has been quite popular among some for a while. One of the more popular machinima concepts is to create a music video using characters in a game (there were a bunch of Star Wars ones that got passed around for a while). However, the RIAA has flipped out that someone might make their music more enjoyable without first paying up, and has one of the major sites hosting these videos to shut down. It would be extremely difficult for the RIAA to make a case that they’re actually sustaining any kind of loss due to these videos. If anything, it’s quite likely the opposite occurred — because the amusing nature of these videos often introduced new listeners to songs they had not heard before. The RIAA should be encouraging this type of creativity, which would attract more interest for the songs and musicians they’re supposed to be promoting. The people making these videos are usually huge fans of the songs in question, and are doing what they can to generate more interest in them. However, it’s the knee-jerk reaction from the industry to assume that any time a song is used or heard, they (not the musician, but the record labels) need to get paid. Update: Thanks to Will for pointing out at least one other similar site that was taken offline as well. Update 2: The RIAA now says it had nothing to do with this, and that the DMCA takedown message is fake.
Comments on “How Dare Anyone Help Promote A Song Without First Paying Money!”
Unfortunately ...
Copyright law does not encourage creativity. It was meant to permit the creator of something’s original to own every copy of it for a limited time. But now, it is the cornerstone of an intellectual property regime that regards speech and other forms of expression as commodities. The only goal of this regime is to make a profit and anything that cuts into their expected profits is accused of “stealing” from them. But if something was stolen then that would mean that the owner was missing it; and the Constitution does not guarantee expected profits.
Re: Unfortunately ...
The idea for the artist to make money via copyright was so that they could live off the money while creating more new things. It was simply to keep good artists from being “starving” artists, thus encouraging creativity.
What is unfortunate is that the only artists that do come out with “second acts”, usually make money by rehashing the same crap they did in the first album, while the starving artists actually become creative.
I've always wondered how long it would take...
I’ve always wondered how long it would take for the RIAA to catch on to the fact that people are blantly including copyrighted music in with game videos that they’ve created.
If the game video creator had used music from the game itself, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but videos like Warthog Jump including copyrighted music is really not much different than sharing the songs directly (all you have to do is close your eyes while the video is playing and it sounds exactly the same).
They lose out on all sorts of promotion opportunit
I recently purchased the entire series of “Keen Eddie”, which was a very short-lived (7 episodes to be exact) somewhat interesting television series that aired in the summer on Fox.
At the very bottom of the box in fine print was a note saying that music from the series had been changed. I can only assume this was done to avoid paying royalties to various bands who’s 2 second clips of their music was used to enhance the show.
The music they replaced it with was pretty-much terrible and didn’t even have the same mood/feel of the original episodes.
Ironically, I could tell you the scene and the song they replaced because in the fourth episode the soundtrack was so interesting that I hit the web site and purchased the artist’s CD.
Perhaps in some of the episodes I am seeing for the first time on this DVD I would have doled out money to enjoy the music as well had they left it alone. Too bad for them …
turns out...
The RIAA is aparently claiming they never sent this site a takedown notice. They are saying someone used an old takedown notice from something else and sent it to the site. Might be BS, but either way it sucks for them.
Why would you puss out like that and immediately shut down your site without first checking to make sure the notice is legitimate?