In case you think that infringement of copyrights in AI training happens only to rock stars, photographers, record companies or movie studios, let me give you a personal anecdote that might cause you to reconsider. I asked Bing’s Copilot AI tool to list the deal points in a record producer agreement, and this is what I got back: Copilot Certainly! When negotiating a producer agreement, several key points should be considered. Here are some common negotiation points from the artist’s perspective: Scope of Engagement: The producer is generally engaged for one album project at a ..read more

Whenever someone is holding your money, you kind of want to a lot of about it, don’t you? You want to know how much, where they hold it, and when you get it back, right? Seems reasonable. But not only does the MLC hold what is likely to be hundreds of millions in black box money, they don’t really tell you these attributes, do they? Plus they tell you that somehow the Music Modernization Act authorizes them to invest your money in the open market to obtain some theoretical government mandated rate of return, yet the Copyright Act says nothing of the kind. They then refuse to disclose how they ..read more

One of the few things Congress got right in Title I of the Music Modernization Act is the five-year review of the mechanical licensing collective. Or more precisely, whether the private company previously designated by the Copyright Office to conduct the functions of the Mechanical Licensing Collective should have another five years to continue doing whatever it is they do. Impliedly, and I think a bit unfairly, Congress told the Copyright Office to approve its own decision to appoint the current MLC or admit they made a mistake. This is yet another one of the growing list oversights in the ov ..read more

The Internet is an extraordinary electricity hog. You know this intuitively even if you’ve never studied the question of just how big a hog it really is. AI has already taken that electricity use to exponentially extraordinary new levels. These hogs will ultimately consume the farm if that herd is not thinned out. This is nothing new. Consider YouTube. First of all, YouTube has long been the second largest search engine in the world. So there’s that. Reportedly, YouTube’s aggregate audience watches over 1 billion viewing hours per day. To put that in context, the electricity burned by YouTuber ..read more

Fans don’t expect you to give up your right to choose your channels or to survive. If you are in a situation where the platform like TikTok overplays their hand and is so unreasonable that you have to walk away, it’s not your fault. It’s your right. But it is undoubtedly inconvenient for fans when platforms are impossible to deal with and their use of the music they love to create UGC is disrupted due to business. But although TikTok is undoubtedly a big platform, it’s not the only game in town and there are other platforms that are licensed among TikTok’s competitors, particularly YouTube, Fa ..read more

When Universal withdrew from TikTok, the social media company was suddenly thrown back to its pirate-site roots for the Universal catalog of all sound recordings and many, many songs. The eponymous TikTok is now on the clock to take down or mute Universal’s entire catalog. So tick tock baby. Universal head Lucian Grainge made the case for the company’s approach to terminating its TikTok license because his negotiators were unable to reach a meeting of the minds with the other side. This is not a big deal, really, it happens every day. Because in a free market capitalist system, “fair” is where ..read more

Bravo @UMG taking a bold stand on @tiktok_uk for not paying proportional rates for music. There’s no such thing as ‘promotion’ online, everything is a distribution/communication, every performance drives value. Value that performers & songwriters should see. https://t.co/SS7vjg7sf7 — Crispin Hunt (@crispinhunt) January 31, 2024 ..read more

Speculative ticketing is the practice of selling an option to maybe buy a popular ticket (often at an insane price) before the ticket goes on sale. You may not realize you are not buying a real ticket, although these tickets often come with fine print, and as Tom Waits tells us, the large print giveth and the small print taketh away. There is an effort going on to specifically ban speculative ticketing at the state level which I applaud as I think speculative ticketing should be a crime. One reason I think this is because I think it already is a crime in most if not all states and possibly und ..read more

The MLC announced it was auditing 49 users of the blanket mechanical license, a massive undertaking. This announcement sent me back to the audit provisions of Title I of the Music Modernization Act to review what the role of the auditor actually is for audits of music users by the MLC as opposed to audits of the MLC by copyright owners. As often happens when reviewing little-used code sections that abruptly become important, I was reminded of a couple nuances that were obviously flawed when drafted. The key nuance is how can an auditor be looking for overpayments against the interest of the pa ..read more

It is commonplace for artists to conduct a royalty examination of their record company, sometimes called an “audit.” Until the Music Modernization Act, the statutory license did not permit songwriters to audit users of the statutory license. The Harry Fox Agency “standard” license for physical records had two principal features that differed from the straight statutory license: quarterly accounting and an audit right. When streaming became popular, the services both refused to comply with the statutory regulations and also refused to allow anyone to audit because the statutory regulations they ..read more