Category: I Am Sparticus

@robertblevine_: Legacy Artists File Brief in Lawsuit Against Pandora Over Pre-’72 Recordings

[Editor Charlie sez: Failing to pay pre-72 artists the digital royalties they are entitled to is another example of how Big Tech forces wasteful lawsuits–and cons the industry into false choices on “omnibus” legislation!]

A veritable supergroup’s worth of sixties musicians on Friday (Jan. 12) filed an amicus brief in a California lawsuit against Pandora for its use of sound recordings made before 1972, and thus not covered by federal law. Although the issue in the case — originally brought by Flo & Eddie, Inc., which owns the Turtlesrecordings, and currently before the California Supreme Court — is fairly obscure, the artists are anything but. The amici artists include Carole King, Melissa Etheridge and Doors drummer John Densmore; the estates of Hank Williams and Judy Garland; and companies like the Beatles’ Apple Corps., Grateful Dead Productions and Experience Hendrix.

At stake is whether, and how, non-interactive streaming services like Pandora need to compensate performers and labels for their use of older recordings that are still covered by state law. The music industry has also been lobbying for a legislative answer to the question, and the recently introduced CLASSICS Act (Compensating Legacy Artists for their Songs, Service, & Important Contributions to Society Act) would require digital services to pay for the use of recordings made before 1972. On Jan. 26, the Friday before the Grammy Awards, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a “field hearing” in New York on this and other copyright issues, according to multiple sources.

Read the post on Billboard

@davidclowery: Here’s How You Know Mic-Coalition “Shiv Act” Is About Screwing Songwriters Not Transparency — The Trichordist

Yesterday we detailed one of the main problems with the so-called “Transparency in Music Licensing and Ownership Act” or as Artist Rights Watch termed it “The Shiv Act.” The bill would take away from songwriters legal remedies like attorney’s fees and statutory damages. Thus making it virtually impossible for individual songwriters and small […]

via Here’s How You Know Mic-Coalition “Shiv Act” Is About Screwing Songwriters Not Transparency — The Trichordist

@kostasrossoglou: How Google’s Local Search Results Harm Consumers and Why the EU Acted

[On June 27], the European Commission announced that Google has breached antitrust rules by manipulating search results to favor its own vertical search services. In a landmark decision, the EU antitrust enforcement body hit Google with a record fine of €2.42 billion and gave Google a deadline of 90 days to end all discrimination against rival services. We applaud the European Commission’s dedication to the issue and commitment to restoring competition in online search to the benefit of consumers.

Google ordered to cease anticompetitive practices

Google has been found guilty of engaging in illegal conduct with the aim of promoting its vertical search services. Although the decision addresses comparison shopping services, the European Commission has also recognized that the same illegal behavior applies to other verticals, including local search. To this end, Google has been ordered to cease abusing its dominant general search engine to give advantages to its own specialized search products. A similar order has the potential to neutralize the harm Google has inflicted to online search and to effectively address anticompetitive concerns over local search.

Why local search matters

Local search is one of the most important human behaviors on the internet. It is the bridge between online research and offline commerce. Local searches – people looking for a pediatrician in Munich, a hotel in Barcelona or a Thai restaurant in Copenhagen – comprise the largest single category of search, representing roughly one third of total desktop search volume, and over one half of smartphone search volume. Between the defaults on iOS Safari and Android’s pre-installed Chrome, Google enjoys a 98% market share on smartphones.

The European Commission has been investigating Google for seven years following a number of complaints by both European and US companies, as well as consumer groups. Yelp has been a complainant in the case and we have been engaging with the EU authorities providing evidence of consumer harm in the market of local search.

Read the post on Yelp’s Policy Blog

Must read by @neilturkewitz: Canadian ruling dictating Google’s worldwide search results is far from unprecedented

A little over 20 years ago, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow penned a manifesto that served as the basic blueprint for Silicon Valley cyber-libertarian ideology for two decades. Premised on the notion that the Internet (capitalized here since Barlow definitely treated it as a space rather than as a tool for communication), freed from government interference and the application of laws, would produce a more perfect society in which disputes would be resolved through dialogue rather than force or mandate, he famously wrote in his 1996 Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace….While it may have been forgivable in 1996 to be unable to accurately foresee the role of the internet, it is unforgivable in 2017 to pretend that this is an accurate reflection of the world we inhabit…An internet of Backpage, of ISIS recruitment, of cyber-bullying, of phishing, of ransomware and revenge porn, of cyber-espionage, of trafficking in counterfeit and pirate content. Achieving an internet that captures its potential to enhance social, cultural and economic well-being requires more than self-governance, and is predicated on the technology neutral application of laws to internet-based conduct.

Fortunately, governments, policy makers and many non-governmental organizations are increasingly aware that it is long past time to jettison the baggage of Barlow’s cyber-libertarianism.  In furtherance of this understanding, governments around the world have taken action to ensure the application of law to online behavior, all of which brings us around to the [now buried] headline—the recent decision of the Canadian Supreme Court in Google v. Equustek.

Google, channeling Barlow’s “we are everywhere and nowhere,” challenged the right of Canadian courts to issue an injunction that had effect in jurisdictions other than Canada. The Canadian Supreme Court quickly dispelled this, holding that: “Where it is necessary to ensure the injunction’s effectiveness, a court can grant an injunction enjoining conduct anywhere in the world. The problem in this case is occurring online and globally. The Internet has no borders — its natural habitat is global. The only way to ensure that the interlocutory injunction attained its objective was to have it apply where Google operates—globally.” In four short sentences, the Supreme Court of Canada turned Barlow’s “absence of borders” into a mandate for taking technology-neutral action in defense of its territorial sovereignty.

Read the post on The Hill

 

ARW Replay: Beyond EU Antitrust: Sign Up for Class Action Against Google in Europe

[Editor Charlie sez: Chris wrote this post in 2015 and it is worth reconsidering in light of the European Commission’s ruling that Google is an out of control monopoly.]

Anyone in the music business has felt Google’s boot on their throat in a host of ways.  Set aside the millions of take down notices and the absurd YouTube ContentID system.  Set aside how Google hides advertising revenue from its YouTube cash cow that should rightly go to the artists and songwriters.  The Europeans are focused on a much simpler issue.

Google favors YouTube in video search results.  We all know they do it and they’ve been doing it for years.  Now there may be a chance to actually do something about it, at least in Europe.

As MTP readers will recall, the European Commission has pursued antitrust complaints against Google in Europe on behalf of price comparison sites and others that Google steals content from.  Anyone in the music business is very familiar with Google stealing content in their various business lines–they do it to us all the time when they’re not driving traffic to pirate sites.

According to the New York Times:

[Google] may be the target of a series of new civil lawsuits that claim Google abused its market dominance to favor its own services over those of its rivals.

On Tuesday, Hausfeld, an international law firm [and US-based class action specialist] with connections to companies affected by Google’s activities in Europe, and Avisa, a European public affairs company that has represented complainants in the antitrust case, will announce that they have created an online platform [the Google Redress & Integrity Platform (GRIP)], to help companies sue Google for financial damages in European courts….

“So far, the focus has been on public enforcement,” said Laurent Geelhand, managing partner at Hausfeld, in Brussels, who declined to comment on the size of any potential civil damages. “But what’s still missing is how this has financially affected the victims.”

That’s us.

According to Reuters:

[T]he [GRIP] platform would build on the European Commission’s April charge sheet, which accuses Google of unfairly promoting its own shopping service to the disadvantage of rivals.

“GRIP offers corporations, consumers and other entities harmed by Google’s anti-competitive business practices in Europe a mechanism to evaluate their potential claims,” Michael Hausfeld, chairman of Hausfeld, said in a statement.

Re/code quotes Avisa Partners:

“It has been five years between the first complaint against Google and the EC’s statement of objections, which is about three times longer than the groundbreaking Microsoft case,” Jacques Lafitte, founder of Avisa Partners, said in a statement. “Google’s president, lawyers and publicists have worked well to create this delay. But Google has not been able to stop the inevitable: It finally faces justice.”

Yeah.  What he said.

IMPALA have brought their own complaint with the European Commission which, as far as I know, is still in the hopper and has not been acted on as yet, although I’m sure it will be.  Even so, artists and labels may wish to consider investigating the Hausfeld online platform to see if it would make sense for them to participate in any civil action against Google.

While Google’s potential exposure to a ruling against the company would start with a staggering $6 billion fine, that fine does not preclude civil lawsuits against Google by those it has harmed.  While nobody takes paying a $6 billion fine lightly, does it really seem like it would be a lot of money to Google?  And when you consider that Google have managed to drag out the adjudication for years already, it really seems rather like chump change.  No pun intended.

We appear to have a law firm interested in at least helping potential plaintiffs bring these cases.  Why not at least check it out?

U.S. music folk should be thinking that this may be their last chance to get justice from Google.  The U.S. government has so far been unwilling to take action against Google, so this may be our only choice.