The times they are a changin...

And so too is our need to update our digital copyright laws. The following was reported on February 7th 2011 by cnet news.

So..."Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin"
~Bob dylan

February 7, 2011 10:11 PM PST

White House will propose new digital copyright laws

by Declan McCullagh

The Obama administration has drafted new proposals to curb Internet piracy and other forms of intellectual property infringement that it says it will send to the U.S. Congress "in the very near future."

It's also applauding a controversial copyright treaty known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, saying it will "aid right-holders and the U.S. government to combat infringement" once it enters into effect.

Those disclosures came from a report released today by Victoria Espinel, whom President Obama selected as the first intellectual property enforcement coordinator and was confirmed by the Senate in December 2009. There's no detail about what the proposed law would include, except that it will be based on a white paper of "legislative proposals to improve intellectual property enforcement," and it's expected to encompass online piracy.

The 92-page report (PDF) reads a lot like a report that could have been prepared by lobbyists for the recording or movie industry: it boasts the combined number of FBI and Homeland Security infringement investigations jumped by a remarkable 40 percent from 2009 to 2010.

Nowhere does the right to make fair use of copyrighted material appear to be mentioned, although in an aside on one page Espinel mentions that the administration wants to protect "legitimate uses of the Internet and... principles of free speech and fair process."

The usual copyright hawks in Congress applauded the Obama administration's report.

"I'm committed to strengthening the laws that promote investment, innovation and creativity at home," said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican who chairs the House subcommittee that writes copyright law. "I share the view that our criminal and IP laws need to be modernized to ensure that legitimate online commerce is not crippled by rampant piracy and counterfeiting, much of which originates overseas."

In October 2008, President Bush signed into law the so-called Pro IP ACT, which created Espinel's position and increased penalties for infringement, after his administration expressed its opposition to an earlier version.

Unless legislative proposals--like one nearly a decade ago implanting strict copy controls in digital devices--go too far, digital copyright tends not to be a particularly partisan topic. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, near-universally loathed by programmers and engineers for its anti-circumvention provisions, was approved unanimously in the U.S. Senate.

At the same time, Democratic politicians tend to be a bit more enthusiastic about the topic. No less than 78 percent of political contributions from Hollywood went to Democrats in 2008, broadly consistent with the trend for the last two years, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20030956-281.html#ixzz1DOKXEmQC

The most popular way to get your music online in 2010

2010 Music Website Heat Map

By Ryan Van Etten on 02/03/2011

If you’re red-green color blind then this is going to hurt. Based on estimated traffic data from Compete, this visualization depicts web-based music consumption in the U.S. in 2010. Included are websites where music is streamed and/or downloaded. Due to accurate sample rate availability (and in the interest of sanity) websites with less than 100,000 monthly visits are omitted. The map is to scale. Larger map areas represent higher website traffic. Green indicates positive growth in 2010. Red indicates negative growth in 2010. Hold your mouse over each area for stats—the visits/month stats are for December 2010. For those that don’t speak metric: 1k = 1,000. 1M = 1,000,000.

There’s a lot of green—as a whole music consumption on the web is clearly increasing. One contributing factor to that is that the percentage of people that have internet access is growing. Notably extreme growth occurred for SoundCloud, OurStage, Bandcamp, Grooveshark, and ReverbNation. It’s understandable why SoundCloud is rocketing—it offers rock-solid tools, widgets, community, and an API. In summer 2010, SoundCloud launched a Creative Commons search page. Like Indaba Music, SoundCloud is heavily geared towards electronic music and producers. IMO electronic music is growing faster than rock and has more room to evolve. In my analysis of the 2009 heat map, I referred to Grooveshark as Jaws-like and this year was another feeding frenzy. Grooveshark now gets more visits than Last.fm. But let’s zoom out and view the bigger picture:

In February 2010, Sysomos reported that approximately 31% of YouTube videos are music—roughly one out of every three. The YouTube Music area on the map below represents this 31%. Its size is roughly equivalent to 3x everything else combined. Compared to YouTube, Grooveshark is a minnow. You want pop perspective? According to the Compete data, ladygaga.com had more visits in 2010 than any other artist, and although her traffic decreased 55% over the year, she still gets 5x as much traffic as nin.com. According to data from Next Big Sound, Lady Gaga videos got played 45 million times on Vevo in December 2010. Dividing that number by the 2 million unique visitors that Compete estimated for Vevo that month tells us that the average Vevo user watches 23 Lady Gaga videos per month. Scream now if you have to. Who had the most visited website at the end of the year? I thought is was going to be paramore.net, who with over 400,000 website visits in December 2010 had Eminem, Bieber, and Gaga all beat. But it was taylorswift.com who had the most, with close to 600,000—that’s like half of Bandcamp right there.

// spreadsheet // cruncher: ryanve

It was unrealistic to accurately quantify MySpace Music this year* but if you remember from last year MySpace Music was in the same ballpark as Pandora. MySpace’s Imeem acquisition came to life, but, still, I can’t imagine they saw positive growth in 2010 since visits to MySpace proper declined 77% in 2010 according to Compete. Then there’s iTunes which is essentially not web-based and therefore unquantifiable on Compete. The itunes.apple.com subdomain used mainly for iTunes links including everything on iTunes—not just music—saw 60% growth in 2010. If it were on the map it would be 40% as big as Pandora.

Comparing relative differences as a whole paints a pretty solid picture of music consumption on the web—but it’s not a total reflection. Compete tracks web traffic from sources in the U.S. and therefore European-based services are not as accurately estimated. The same goes for certain mobile or non-web usage. Case in point: Spotify is included on the map but maybe it shouldn’t be—it’s a downloadable app like iTunes and Americans can’t use it. Google currently assigns Spotify a PageRank of 7. It assigns SoundCloud a PageRank of 6. Is Spotify that widely used or does it just get tons of press? Is Playlist so huge because it offers ringtones—anyone using it? Rdio? What will the map look like next year?

Law Grad maintains database of music industry-related court decisions

A tremendous amount of praise is due to Loren Wells (pictured below), a recent graduate of Washington University in St. Louis School of Law for the creation of www.thediscography.com. This phenomenal website catalogs over 2,400 court decisions relating to the music industry that are searchable by artist, case type, location and date. Finally a comprehensive database for music law aficionados.


On January 6th 2011, The National Law Journal reported the following:

Wondering if you can write off your leather pants as a business expense if you are in the music biz?

You can't, according to a 1997 decision by the U.S. Tax Court in a case filed by a backup musician for Rod Stewart. Those pants pull double duty for work and personal use and aren't deductible, the court ruled.

That decision is one of more than 2,400 judicial rulings compiled on www.thediscography.org -- a Web database created by Loren Wells, a recent graduate of Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. The site, which he launched last month, is supported and underwritten by the law school's Center for Empirical Research in the Law. It includes 2,400 court decisions relating to the music industry that are searchable by artist, case type, location and date.

The database began as a personal project for Wells, a huge music fan who has played in bands and dabbled in the industry for years. (He moved in the same musical circles as popular Chicago bands the Plain White T's and Fall Out Boy, but never saw their level of success.)

In those days, he got to know a lawyer in the industry. "He said, 'You seem like a guy who would be good at this,' " Wells said. "The music thing never quite happened, so I made the decision that it was time to go to law school."

When he enrolled in 2007, the first thing he did on his Westlaw account was look up rock and roll superstars Guns N' Roses. Wells began researching music cases and compiling them in a spreadsheet -- first for his own amusement, then for a law school paper. The spreadsheet ballooned and Wells' trademarks professor suggested that he take the idea to the center.

"I was flabbergasted that a student had devoted such a significant amount of time and effort to creating such a unique collection," said Andrew Martin, the center's director. "Until I met Loren face-to-face, I was quite skeptical about the entire endeavor. But once I talked to Loren and got my hands on the data, and I understood his passion and his unique take on American law, I was sold."

The discography represents a significant departure from the center's other projects, which focus on data-driven investigations of the courts, Martin said.

Since graduating in the spring, Wells has spent much of his time working on the database and getting it into a searchable format. The site also includes Wells' Discblography -- a blog devoted to legal issues and developments in the music industry.

He sees the database as a useful tool for academics, journalists and small-time music managers who aren't very familiar with the industry's legal ins and outs. The project has given Wells plenty of time to explore legal issues in the music world. Among his favorite cases are one in which an attorney sued John Fogerty in 2003 for playing too loud at a concert. The judge sided with Fogerty and dismissed the case.

The database doesn't include suits that settled prior to a court decision, eliminating some of the more amusing cases, Wells said. That includes the suit by the rock band Kiss against a tribute band of little people called ... wait for it ... Mini Kiss.

Loren Wells

Photo: Sean Dorgan