[HN Gopher] Schroedinger's streaming service just died
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Schroedinger's streaming service just died
Author : samizdis
Score : 89 points
Date : 2022-06-23 06:10 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pluralistic.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (pluralistic.net)
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Good news about the Four Tet decision. He's been a consistently
| high-quality, highly-innovative EM creator for over 20 years.
| Hopefully getting 50% of the streaming and download take instead
| of 13% will rock that industry.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61871547
| googlryas wrote:
| Is this just wordplay? When you click "Buy now", are you just
| buying a license?
|
| Is "ownership" just a byproduct of physical goods? If I say I own
| a record, the proof is basically in the pudding. But how do I
| prove I own an MP3 file? I'd probably need to do something like
| show a receipt for it. But then again, what if I have shown that
| receipt to 100 people I've sold "my" copy of the MP3 file to?
| With physical reality, exact duplication is difficult, and is
| already covered under those existing laws.
|
| It seems like computing was big on licensing, even when tech was
| nascent and there wasn't clearly reams of money to be made in it,
| there must be a reason for it.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It depends on whether you consider the difference in royalty
| rates to be just wordplay.
| Closi wrote:
| > It depends on whether you consider the difference in
| royalty rates to be just wordplay.
|
| Royalty rates are a completely different issue to the text
| shown when you are purchasing - but wouldn't you expect
| different royalty rates for different types of product/media
| as an artist?
|
| As in, if I sell a vinyl record of your new single for $10
| with your photo on the front and plaster it all over the
| record shops (with high distribution and manufacture costs)
| that the fee might be different than what I pay you for a
| $0.99 MP3 download (lower price but zero incremental cost),
| and that the $0.99 download fee might be different to the fee
| that the artist would charge for a live broadcast (highly
| dependent on licence context)?
| googlryas wrote:
| No, certainly not. It does seem wrong for one group to claim
| one thing, and then another group to claim a different thing,
| both of which serve their own financial ends and not the
| actual content creators.
|
| Having said that, I was mostly talking about the difference
| between licensing and buying from a consumer's perspective.
| There are still a ton of restrictions which come with
| "owning" something, but those are just ignored by the author
| because those were laws passed by a legislature and not a
| license term by a private company.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > But how do I prove I own an MP3 file?
|
| Ownership of digital assets is determined by physical possesion
| and legal ownership of the storage medium in which those assets
| are.
|
| The only exceptions to this rule are in copyright law
| (regulating what you can do with a copy you own) and personal
| data laws such as GDPR.
| antihero wrote:
| I own my files because you cannot take them from me. That is
| all that there is to it.
| clownbaby wrote:
| And then, along came the blockchain and NFTs... one receipt per
| purchase??
|
| This obviously doesn't help the streaming services, but, this -
| or something similar would help solve the quantum entanglement
| of digital music.
| Closi wrote:
| This metaphor is really not appropriate. We are really just
| talking about the definitions for 'Sale' and 'License' in a
| contract which we haven't been given access to read.
|
| NFT's don't solve this, unless we are talking about making
| licenses transferrable, but the author seems pretty clear
| that any form of license isn't acceptable in their eyes.
| lxe wrote:
| I can't believe how long this battle has been going on. It's been
| decades since the whole music industry reshuffle, and both
| artists and consumers continue to get shafted.
| xbar wrote:
| Given a two-decade gap between 12% and 50% artist revenues, it
| seems like a series of label-oriented class actions should
| begin brewing, to the tune of tens of billions.
| jonplackett wrote:
| > eat its cake and have it, too
|
| Someone been watching Manhunt
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Except as noted in the linked BBC coverage, Four Tet's case was
| settled out of court (because he could not afford to fight it)
| and thus establishes no legal precedent for other artists to
| leverage.
| scoofy wrote:
| >Four Tet
|
| Wow... Haven't heard that name in a long time. Saw him at the
| MFA in Boston so long ago i can barely remember. Great artist,
| I'm glad he at least showed it could be a reasonable line of
| argument.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yeah, there's no chance that this golden goose could ever be
| killed in a modern democracy. If the companies would still be
| profitable paying 50% royalties, then the 38% difference
| between that and 12% royalties represents the amount the
| industry will be able to spend (without thinking about it for a
| moment) to bribe politicians, create fake public-interest
| organizations and think-tanks, and settle cases like this.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| > to bribe politicians, create fake public-interest
| organizations and think-tanks
|
| In other words to fool you, the voter. But if you've been
| fooled, how do you know these things? Are you acting on your
| knowledge and voting against those corrupt politicians and
| against those who agree with the propaganda? How does nobody
| else know this?
| mbfg wrote:
| in another world, it is still alive.
| mosfetarium wrote:
| I feel like this issue is brought on by the fact that it seems
| like copyright law hasn't been properly reexamined for the modern
| era. I support the notion that the ideal model is people pay the
| rightsholder in order to enjoy the media, and offering resale of
| pure-digital media instead leads to some weird "You make money
| based on the peak simultaneous number of owners, rather than the
| number of people who consumed it", which just doesn't make any
| sense to me as an economic model.
|
| So yeah, you see labels calling the user purchase one thing, in
| order to make it line up with the intent of the consumer
| relationship, then on the royalties they call it a different
| thing to make it line-up with that intent. I don't feel the
| publishers are violating the _intent_ of these relationships at
| all, it 's just that copyright law being extremely out of date
| requires stupid language games. The correct solution is to re-
| examine copyright law to either establish that the intent is you
| pay the rightsholder to get access for you as a distinct
| individual, or that the intent is that you are purchasing
| resalable access, and be done with this nonsense.
|
| I absolutely don't blame artists for trying though, the labels
| screw them so it seems fair that they should try to screw the
| labels.
| shtolcers wrote:
| ..Or did it?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just don't open the box, please. You'll ruin everything
| Closi wrote:
| > The confiscation of your rights to your digital media depends
| on the fiction that you are licensing the music, not buying it.
| The fact that there's a giant "buy now" button on the interface
| notwithstanding, tech and entertainment companies maintain that
| you are engaged in a licensing deal, like an advertiser buying
| synch rights for a hamburger commercial.
|
| This post makes everything seem needlessly complicated - you are
| buying a licence, there is no contradiction here.
|
| How else would digital media / sale of MP3's work without
| licences? Is the author suggesting that everyone should legally
| be able to freely transfer/distribute their MP3's to anyone with
| no legal limit?
|
| I don't see any alternative to licences mentioned anywhere in the
| post - just lots of handwaving about some sort of wave function
| collapse (where wave function collapse just means a contract that
| has different terms for a digital purchase instead of a physical
| purchase).
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > How else would digital media / sale of MP3's work without
| licences? Is the author suggesting that everyone should legally
| be able to freely transfer/distribute their MP3's to anyone
| with no legal limit?
|
| How about a simple purchase of a copy, with its use being
| limited only by current copyright law? A.k.a, no copying,
| redistributing, derivative work-making, etc. (Absent fair use
| cases)
| Closi wrote:
| How is this practically different to the current situation?
| (i.e. what can I do here that I can't do at the moment?)
| smallnix wrote:
| I understood the point of the post to be about musicians not
| getting licensing royals.
| Closi wrote:
| It's a post that talks about the specifics of what a contract
| defines as a 'sale' and a 'licensing' vs what OP personally
| defines a 'sale' and a 'licencing' to mean, without actually
| sharing how the contract defines 'sale' and 'licencing'
| (which will be explicitly defined in a definitions section).
|
| But IMO because there isn't that much substance there, this
| idea that a 'sale' might have different definitions is
| referred to as a 'quantum state' rather than sharing the
| actual definition of 'sale' used whatever contract they are
| referencing.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > How else would digital media / sale of MP3's work without
| licences? Is the author suggesting that everyone should legally
| be able to freely transfer/distribute their MP3's to anyone
| with no legal limit?
|
| What would be wrong with the same first sale doctrine that
| applies to physical instances of digital media (such as CDs) ?
|
| CD: You buy it, you are free to resell it to someone else; you
| are not free to make copies.
|
| Digital data only: You buy it, you can resell it someone else
| (0); you are not free give additional copies to anyone else (1)
|
| (0) not likely to happen (1) you can of course make your own
| copies, eg. for backup or across devices
|
| Would enforcing such a legal structure be possible? Yes and no.
| Everyone knows that once you could rip CDs, the legal structure
| for that format was already severely challenged by people's
| actual behavior, so there's nothing particularly new there.
| Closi wrote:
| > Digital data only: You buy it, you can resell it someone
| else (0); you are not free give additional copies to anyone
| else (1)
|
| Sounds like you are buying a transferable licence?
|
| (If this isn't a licence, what would you call it? As
| presumably once you have 'sold' it, it can still reside on
| your laptop but you aren't allowed to play it).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It's not a license. It's a purchase of an item that becomes
| your own possession, and a law that covers what you can do
| as far as resale (also applies to books).
|
| It's not a license because it cannot be revoked by whoever
| sold it to you.
| Closi wrote:
| > It's not a license. It's a purchase of an item that
| becomes your own possession, and a law that covers what
| you can do as far as resale (also applies to books).
|
| So once I sell it, if it's still on my hard-drive am I
| allowed to listen to it in your world?
|
| And if I have it but am not allowed to listen to it, what
| is that lack of playing-permission called if not 'not
| owning a license'?
|
| > It's not a license because it cannot be revoked by
| whoever sold it to you.
|
| Licences can be irrevocable, so this isn't a necessary
| property of a licence.
| [deleted]
| fabbari wrote:
| > where wave function collapse just means a contract that has
| different terms for a digital purchase instead of a physical
| purchase
|
| That's not what the article states. The author is saying that
| the same transaction - IE: my 'buying' a track on iTunes, for
| example - is considered a license transfer, between me and the
| record company, and a sale, between the record company and the
| artist.
|
| This superposition of license and sale for the same transaction
| is collapsed into a license - so: no transfer rights, no right
| to make copies, etc. - when the record company it talking to
| me.
|
| On the other hand - when the record company is talking to the
| artist - the superposition collapses to a sale, so the artist
| gets 13% of the value instead of the 50% they would get if it
| was a license sale.
| Closi wrote:
| It's just a sale of a licence.
|
| If I'm a Domino's franchisee, and I pay Domino's a different
| commission for an order placed online vs a customer walking
| into the store, the pizza isn't in a state of quantum
| superposition - that's just making a simple concept overly
| complex by incorrectly throwing quantum words at it. The
| concept is just that different things have different prices
| in the master agreement.
|
| If I'm a movie theatre that happens to sell a DVD of the same
| movie, when a customer comes in they also aren't in a
| shrodingers-cat quantum dilemma superposition state, it's
| just the simple idea that different things have different
| prices and different compensation structures for artists.
| function_seven wrote:
| Why are the labels paying the "sale" royalty to their
| artists if no such thing is occurring? Was the track sold
| or was it licensed?
| Closi wrote:
| They sold a license.
|
| This is like saying "Was a movie ticket sold or was it
| admission?" - you can purchase admission, so it's a
| nonsense question.
|
| The contracts will then define what a particular
| transaction means in a particular context, and what the
| royalty rate is. Without seeing the exact contracts and
| definitions of 'sale' and 'license', which are
| suspiciously absent in the article, then the whole
| premise of the article is IMO missing substance.
| benreesman wrote:
| The quantum superposition thing is just a cheeky metaphor
| for a sketchy-sounding accounting practice, I wouldn't read
| too much into the wave-function collapse analogy.
| Closi wrote:
| It's a metaphor which makes it sound more complex than it
| is.
|
| All they are describing is that they have agreed to
| different royalty rates for different types of sale.
|
| I have zero doubt that the contracts will have very clear
| definitions of what counts as a 'sale' and what counts as
| 'licensing', but this article just pretends that it is
| highly ambiguous in order to make a strange analogy to
| quantum mechanics.
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