What Happens When Someone Jacks Your Swag?

Musicians aren't the only ones who have to deal with piracy, this'll make your head explode with righteous fury.

Two websites were ripping artists' work off of their DeviantArt websites and reselling them on canvas for hundreds of dollars a painting, giving no money back to the artists. The offending website even bragged about how much it was "helping artists.'

The same thing happened recently to a group of graphic designers as well. (My favorite part is where they point out the scammers trying to re-sell the Time Warner Cable logo. Wow.)

This is heinous. 

What can we do?

---

A) Was DRM right? Is the only way forward to continuously develop new ways to manage access to our art?

Not quite.

Treating your fans as criminals by default might discourage the occasional theft but it comes at the cost of punishing people who legitimately purchased your music. Even control-loving Apple had to relent on pushing DRM through iTunes when the customer outcry grew too strong.

There will always be pirates and there will always be paying customers.

Guilty until proven innocent? Or innocent until proven guilty? (aka Type 1 or Type II errors)

Who will you favor?

B) Patrol the web ourselves looking for signs of our work being stolen? Maybe hire interns? Lawyers?

The probability of this time/money investment paying off is slim. The internet, like the universe, is infinite. You could search 24 hours a day and still miss infringements. Launching satellites into the unknown is for NASA. You're a musician, you should be creating music!

As I said previously, people can steal your songs but they can't steal your brain. Longevity as a musician comes from consistently producing great work.

That being said, however, TinEye is an awesome reverse image search that is a great tool for finding people using your images. An occasional check on TinEye would be a good idea to check and see where your visual arts are being used.

C) Give up?

Nope.

D) Copyright your work?

If you're worried about someone stealing your work, copyright it. This won't really stop a pirate, but it gives you recourse should you discover someone stealing your work.

Under US law you automatically own the copyright to any work of art/music you produce as soon as it is recorded in a tangible form, like a recording or sheet music. However, actual time of creation is difficult to establish in court as it essentially would come down to both parties saying they created the work first.

Thankfully, around $35 you can get a Performance Right (PR) and Sound Recording (SR) copyright to your music through the US Copyright Office. Any question of ownership is solved and should you need to take the claim to court you'll stand a good chance of winning sweet cash money from whomever is stealing your goodies. (note: I'm not a lawyer, but this is my understanding of the basics)

Copyrighting songs isn't perfect by any means, but it's cheap, effective, and simple enough to be well worth the effort.

---

Back to the top story, the group of aggrieved artists is filing a class-action lawsuit against the website. With the help of copyright and strength in numbers, these artists will probably prevail. At the time of writing, the offending websites were down.

Right on.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Would You Sue a Restaurant for $30,000 If They Didn't Pay You Royalties?

Edit: Oof, this post has been the most negative feedback I've gotten.

I'll gladly admit I'm wrong, and simply leave this post up only for reference. I still appreciate the feedback, however. Getting my thoughts on track is very important.

Read below if you really care to.

------
This makes me queasy:
Restaurant Owner Ordered to Pay BMI $30,450 For 'Illegally Playing' Four Unlicensed Songs

This is not about feeding musicians, it's about feeding the "Royalty Collection Agencies".

BMI began sending communication regarding the restaurant's lack of proper licensing back in September of 2009, but it wasn't until May of 2010 that BMI even bothered to visit Fosters to verify that the business was actually playing unlicensed music. (From page 32 of the PDF.)

So without verifying anything, BMI starts demanding payment from a restaurant for "Piracy".


This is how the mafia demands "protection".


To which BMI would retort: "But it's all 'For the Artists'!"


Would you sue a restaurant out of business for playing your songs and not paying you a few dollars?


Of course not, that's terrible business! The restaurant is playing your music to a captive audience, this is a good thing. From psychology we know that people prefer things more simply by repeated exposure. (The Mere Exposure Effect)


From Wikipedia:

In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often a person is seen by someone, the more pleasing and likeable that person appears to be.

Music is marketing material, not the profit driver it once was. You want more people listening to your music, this is a good thing!


The traditional performing rights organizations (BMI, ASCAP, SESAC) are scared; the era of terrestrial radio domination has passed as competition for ear-time has shot up exponentially. They somehow decided it wasn't important to deal with the issues of streaming internet radio, satellite radio, and cable TV so now SoundExchange swooped in to become the only entity in the US allowed to collect digital royalties.


Oops. Their business model just got OWNED.





Better start suing fans!


These traditional performing rights organizations made sense thirty years ago, but not anymore. Without the concentrated market of old-school radio, songs don't get as famous as they used to since people listen to what they demand, not what they're fed. (Jeff Bridge's new album sold only 13,000 copies, which is now enough to break into the Billboard top 25!) Without monster-hit songs, the amount of royalties collected on a per-song basis will continue to drop, shrinking the margins of these agencies as they have to chase down royalties for more songs for less pay. Unless they fundamentally change their business model, I don't see traditional performing rights organizations having an important role in the future of music.


My suggestion? While I'm registered with ASCAP, I'm not counting on the $50 registration breaking even. SoundExchange will probably play a bigger role in your career, so I'd make that a priority over traditional performing rights orgs. Still, I don't really figure royalties into my business plan as they'll only become significantly large long after I'm making better money from other income streams.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Quick Link: How to Trademark Your Band's Name

Great post over at Digital Music News on the how and why of getting your name and symbols trademarked. It's written by a copyright and trademark lawyer so I won't bother summarizing the article since he does a much better job of explaining things.

http://digitalmusicnews.com/stories/020311samename#YCebBWm-zg9czgjiprj0AQ

Don't Let Mediocre Ideas Own You

It was a damn good idea.

We had all the artwork ready, logistics were perfect, and . It was going to draw a lot of attention to use, build our brand, and even stir a little controversy (yay!)

But,

It was the controversy that shut the whole fiesta down.

Back up, the idea:
There was a viral ad campaign pushed around Dallas that featured a black and white photo of someone looking a rough around the edges with text that said "I Am Second". The ads were EVERYWHERE, you couldn't drive down 75 or 35 without seeing this on billboards, bumper stickers, fliers etc.

SO:
We were going to put fliers and signs near all the major highways that featured a blood-soaked dinosaur that said "I Am First" and a link to our website.

Kickass, right?

We got nuts about it. Our friends loved it to. I was already fantasizing having two hundred new fans at our next show. Maybe even winning some advertising award for creativity (even though I can't name one, haha). It was gonna blow up.

However, we kinda forgot who we'd be dealing with: a southern evangelical church coalition. I wonder how they'd react to us proclaiming dinosaurs came first.

Hmm... this might be an issue.

The copyright lawyer I talked to said as much. "While technically you wouldn't be infringing, they could still sue as tarnishment... Do you have the cash to beat them in court?"

Harpooned.
Fuck.
No awards for me.

We spent the next practice debating if it was still worth the risk. "What percent chance do you think we have of them suing us?" Eventually the idea had to die. We poured a forty of Mickey's on the curb to mourn the loss.

It's hard coping with an idea that was almost great, especially after loading so much work into it. But such is life. Don't hold onto mediocre ideas too long, throw that trash out.

Never, ever, stop coming up with new ideas.