Thousands of YouTube partners now make six figures a year — Google has reported that thousands of Youtube creators are now making over six figures a year. Though many of these are established content producers, like major label artists, there are a lot of new, YouTube-native producers, who have found success thanks to significant investment from Google in promoting creators.
The DMCA is Broken… — The Trichordist presents a post from an indie label that has reported over 50,000 DMCA takedown notices in the past year. “If site operators want to hide behind ‘how do we know what’s infringing’… Well, here’s how, we’ll let you know! If we issue you a notice, you now know… do you think the title will suddenly not be infringing the next day, when re-uploaded by the same offending person? Seriously? Does Billy in Pittsburgh suddenly own the rights to a Radiohead album (for example)?”
Music piracy – who’s on the moral high ground? — Interesting piece from the BBC. Notable quote: “Google’s Theo Bertram strongly disputes that: ‘I’m happy to say Google doesn’t support piracy and does support freedom of expression,’ he told me. ‘Those are not in conflict.'”
Vincent Misiano on the Golden Age of Television — TV director of tons of shows, including West Wing, Law and Order, Medium, Warehouse 13, and White Collar, Vincent Misiano shares his thoughts on filmmaking and technology. I share his thoughts that we are currently living in a “golden age” of television. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a vehicle of storytelling throughout history that is so highly developed and fulfilling. As Misiano notes, we may be moving to a world that doesn’t support such storytelling, but that’s not a world I want to live in.
Kim Dotcom Extradition Judge Steps Down After Joking US Is ‘Enemy’ — The New Zealand judge who recently ruled that warrants executed in the Megaupload case were illegal has recused himself after making comments that his country’s long-term ally was an “enemy” at a copyright conference.
Viacom Top Lawyer Michael Fricklas on Piracy, YouTube and His Toughest Decisions (Q&A) — Congrats to Fricklas for receiving The Hollywood Reporter’s “Raising the Bar” award this year. THR has an interesting interview with the general counsel of Viacom.
Guest post: Dear Kim Ditcom — Independent filmmaker Ellen Seidler has a rebuttal to the Megaupload CEO’s “Letter to Hollywood” that is well worth a read. “For the record, the Internet does not belong to you and your ilk (no matter how many times you change your name). The Internet belongs to us all–and that includes the millions of artists and creators who deserve a fair marketplace and an Internet that works for everyone.”
Memo to DOJ: Drop the Apple E-Books Suit — Senator Charles Schumer writes an insightful editorial on the DOJ’s anti-trust lawsuit involving e-books. “If publishers, authors and consumers are at the mercy of a single retailer that controls 90% of the market and can set rock-bottom prices, we will all suffer. Choice is critical in any market, but that is particularly true in cultural markets like books. The prospect that a single firm would control access to books should give any reader pause.”
Two Inane Suggestions for Compensating Artists Online — The Cynical Musician’s Faza explains why free culture guru’s Richard Stallman’s proposals for compensating artists online won’t work.
Google Exec: If You Want to Control the Pirates, Go After Their Money… — That was the response from Google in a “heated debate” between an exec from BPI. The response: “Once we’ve told Google 100,000 times that a particular site is illegal, we don’t think that site should be coming above iTunes and Spotify in the results.”
ICE-led IPR Center seizes 70 websites duping consumers into buying counterfeit merchandise — Kudos to ICE for launching the second phase of Operation in Our Sites, which targets the domain names of websites engaged in infringing activities. This latest round resulted in the seizure of 70 domain names engaged in selling a wide range of counterfeit goods. Many of the sites also displayed SSL Certificates, “further duping the consumer into thinking they were shopping on a legitimate website” and “potentially putting customers’ financial information at risk,” according to the federal agency.
Weighing the costs of crowdfunding — The Future of Music Coalition provides some balance to the hype over crowdfunding, noting “that big pronouncements about how crowd-funding is ‘the future of music’ might be more than a bit inflated. Services like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are an important new tool in musicians’ arsenals. But they work best for artists who already have a particularly tech-savvy, deep-pocketed audience — and who have a long history of putting in the kind of work necessary to build a strong social media following — which … can leave music itself on the back burner.”
How Free is Ruining Everything — Epic, must-read post from Eamonn Forde.
Great finds this week. I really enjoyed them.
Interesting to me that the Eamonn Forde article mentions Bandcamp being awesome but chock full of garbage. This is very true (which is why I started my site), but they’ve really started doing a good job trying to filter out the bad stuff. And while they do provide a top-notch experience, they don’t (by any means) replace labels, which for some reason, people believe that they do.
I think that for any industry to flourish, there needs to be a healthy investment environment. By that I mean a place where investors can be reasonably confident that they have a chance at recouping. The environment for recorded music, at the moment, is anything but healthy.