#directly profiting from piracy

[werewolf-cuddles]

Here, have a mirror of the final Nightly build of Citra (March 3rd 2024), and the most recent build of Yuzu I could find via the Wayback Machine. (February 28th 2024)

EDIT: On April 27th 2024, Uncle Wario was assassinated by the Nintendo Ninjas. The Yuzu and Citra mirrors will be reuploaded elsewhere soon.

[amazinglyspicy]

PIRATE SAFELY!! But pirate ;)

Hello! I’ve gotten a flood of new followers thanks to an addition I made about NOT torrenting from the Pirate Bay, so I want to address it better.

If you’ve come to check my blog for more piracy resources, advice, guides, etc, then check out some of the links in this pinned!

First and Foremost, Do not do Anything without an adblocker. Ublock Origin is the best.

Resources/Wikis: 🌟Top recommendation is the Free Media Heck Yeah Wiki, frequently updated, maintained, and transparent, as well as has a welcoming community behind it if you have questions. The rest are for redundancy's sake and for anything not found in FMHY, though most Wikis on this topic tend to repeat the same info. 🌟

VPN Comparison Chart - General Rule of Thumb, DO NOT use any VPN recommended by Youtubers, influencers, or any other shill with a profit motive. Large marketing budget does not equal good privacy practices. Do your own research.

-Since both Mullvad VPN and IVPN are planned to now suspend port forwarding support, the next best choices for torrenting though a VPN seem to be AirVPN and ProtonVPN.

HOWEVER, AirVPN has no evidence of a no logging policy (aka there’s a chance they keep records of what you do on their service) and ProtonVPN has no method of anonymously signing up and use a subscription model instead of a preferable pay-as-you-go model. So take that as you will.

(NOTE: You do not need to pay for a VPN if you are only directly downloading from a server or streaming off of websites! But it’s probably a good idea for privacy reasons anyways.)

A very good Comprehensive Torrenting Guide! -eye strain warning

And another one!

-If you torrent you need a VPN depending on how strict your government is on copyright laws. This works on a case by case basis, so I recommend looking up your own country's laws on the matter. Generally speaking, use a VPN to torrent if your country falls under The 14 Eyes Surveillance Alliance. More info on what that is Here.

A Note about Antivirus: - If you're using trusted websites, and not clicking on any ad links/fake download ads (Should be blocked by ublock), then you don't necessarily need any antivirus. Common Sense and Windows Defender should be enough to get you by. If you would like to be certain on what you are downloading is legitimate, then run your file through a virus scanner like VirusTotal. Keep in mind that when scanning cracked software some scans may flag “false positives” as the injectors used to crack the software look like malware to these scanners. Once again, the best way to avoid malware is to use trusted sites listed here and use an adblocker at all times.

If you have any questions on anything posted, need help finding things, or just need some clarification on any terms used, shoot me an ask or message! I've got a few years experience with not paying for anything I want, and LOVE to help others with this kind of stuff. But if you don't trust me, since I am a random stranger on the internet, that's fine (I wont be offended promise)! Do your own research!

INFORMATION SHOULD BE FREE!

Last updated: February 16th 2024

[themthouse]

The Internet Archive, Misinformation & the Problem of Digital Lending

I am in the embarrassing situation of having reblogged a post with misinformation. Specifically, the "Save the Internet Archive" post featuring the below image and its associated link to a website called "Battle for Libraries".

The post claims that the recent lawsuit the IA faced threatened all IA projects, including the Wayback Machine, which is not true. The link to a petition to "show support for the Internet Archive, libraries’ digital rights, and an open internet with uncensored access to knowledge" only has one citation, which is the internet archive's own blog.

After looking for more context, I found that even articles published from sources I trusted didn't seem to adequately cover the complexity of what is going on. Here's what I think someone who loves libraries but is hazy about copyright law and the digital lending world should know to understand what happened and why it matters. I am from the U.S., so the information below is specifically referring to laws protecting American public libraries. I am not a librarian, author or copyright lawyer. This is a guide to make it easier to follow the arguments of people more directly invested in this lawsuit, and the potential additional lawsuits to come.

Table of Contents:

First-Sale Doctrine & the Economics of E-books

Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)

The “National Emergency Library” & Hachette v. Internet Archive

Authors, Publishers & You

-- Authors: Ideology v. Practicality

-- Publishers: What Authors Are Paid

-- You: When Is Piracy Ethical?

First-Sale Doctrine & the Economics of E-Books

Libraries are digitizing. This is undisputed. As of 2019, 98% of public libraries provided Wi-Fi, 90% provided basic digital literacy programs, and most importantly for this conversation, 94% provided access to e-books and other digital materials. The problem is that for decades, the American public library system has operated on a bit of common law exhaustion applied to copyright known as first-sale doctrine, which states:

"An individual who knowingly purchases a copy of a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner."

With digital media, however, because there isn't a physical sale happening, first sale doctrine doesn't apply. This wasn't a huge problem back in the early 2010s when most libraries were starting to go digital because the price of a perpetual e-book license was only $14 -- about the price of single physical book. Starting in 2018, however, publishers started limiting how long a single e-book license would last. From Pew Charitable Trusts:

"Today, it is common for e-book licenses from major publishers to expire after two years or 26 borrows, and to cost between $60 and $80 per license, according to Michele Kimpton, the global senior director of the nonprofit library group LYRASIS... While consumers paid $12.99 for a digital version, the same book cost libraries roughly $52 for two years, and almost $520 for 20 years."

Publishers argue that because it's so easy to borrow a digital copy of a book from the library, offering libraries e-book licenses at the same price as individual consumers undermines an author's right to license and profit from the exclusive rights to their works. And they're not entirely wrong about e-book lending affecting e-book sales -- since 2014, e-book sales have decreased while digital library lending has only gone up. The problem, they say, is that e-book lending is simply too easy. Whereas before, e-book sales were competing with the less-convenient option of going to the library and checking out a physical copy, there is essentially no difference for the reader between buying or lending an e-book outside of its cost.

Which brings us to the librarians, authors and lawmakers of today, trying to find any solution they can to make digital media accessible, affordable and still profitable enough to make a livable income for the writers who create the books we read.

Further Reading:

1854. Copyright Infringement -- First Sale Doctrine

The surprising economics of digital lending

Librarians and Lawmakers Push for Greater Access to E-Books

Publishing and Library E-Lending: An Analysis of the Decade Before Covid-19

Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)

Controlled digital lending is a legal theory at the heart of the Internet Archive lawsuit that has been proposed as one solution to the economic issue with digital media lending. This quick fix is especially appealing to nonprofits like the IA that are not government, tax-funded programs. Where many other solutions, like a legally enforced max price on e-book licensure for public libraries, would not apply to the IA, CDL would essentially be manipulating copyright law itself as a way to avoid e-book licensure altogether and would apply to the IA as well as public libraries.

Essentially, proponents of CDL argue that through a combination of first-sale and fair use doctrine, it can be legal for libraries to digitize the physical copies of books they have legally paid for and loan those digital copies to one person at a time as if they were loaning the original physical copy.

It is worth noting that the first-sale doctrine protecting physical media lending at public libraries does not cover reproductions:

“The right to distribute ends, however, once the owner has sold that particular copy. See 17 U.S.C. § 109(a) & (c). Since the first sale doctrine never protects a defendant who makes unauthorized reproductions of a copyrighted work, the first sale doctrine cannot be a successful defense in cases that allege infringing reproduction.”

This is where fair use comes in, which allows some flexibility in copyright law for nonprofit educational and noncommercial uses. Because the IA and other online collections are nonprofit organizations, proponents of CDL argue that they are covered by fair use so long as their use of CDL follows very specific rules, such as:

A library must own a legal copy of the physical book, by purchase or gift.

The library must maintain an “owned to loaned” ratio, simultaneously lending no more copies than it legally owns.

The library must use technical measures to ensure that the digital file cannot be copied or redistributed.

While this model first earned its name in 2018, it has been practiced by a number of digital collections like The Internet Archive’s Open Library since as early as 2010. It is important to know that controlled digital lending has never been proven officially legal in court. It is a theoretical legal practice that has passed by mostly unchallenged until the Internet Archive lawsuit. This is partially due to the fact that before releasing their official CDL statement in 2018, the IA had been honoring Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests of books in CDL circulation, which authors claim they are not always responding to or honoring anymore. The legality of CDL essentially depends on a judge's interpretation of current copyright law and whether they see the practice as an infringement, which would set a precedent for similar cases moving forward.

There are, however, U.S. court decisions that have rejected similar cases, like Capitol Records v. ReDigi, which argues that digital files (in this case, music files) cannot be resold without copyright holder’s permission on the grounds that digital files do not deteriorate in the same way that physical media does, implying that first sale doctrine doesn’t apply to digital media.

In 2019, the Authors Guild, a group of American authors who advocate for the rights of writers to earn a living wage and practice free speech, pointed out this court case in an article condemning CDL practices. They also argued that not only does CDL undermine e-book licensure (and therefore author profits off e-book sales), but it also would effectively shut down the e-book market for older books (the market for copyrighted books that were published before e-books became popular and are only being digitized and sold now). The National Writers Union has also released an “Appeal from the victims of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL),” that cites many of the same complaints.

Further Reading:

U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index

Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending by Libraries

FAQ on Controlled Digital Lending [Released by NYU Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy]

Controlled Digital Lending Is Neither Controlled nor Legal

Appeal from the victims of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)

FAQ on Controlled Digital Lending [Released by the National Writers Union]

 The "National Emergency Library" & Hachette v. Internet Archive

While the Internet Archive is known as the creator and host of the Wayback Machine and many other internet and digital media preservation projects, the IA collection in question in Hachette v. Internet Archive is their Open Library. The Open Library has been digitizing books since as early as 2005, and in early 2011, began to include and distribute copyrighted books through Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). In total, the IA includes 3.6 million copyrighted books and continues to scan over 4,000 books a day.

During the early days of the pandemic, from March 24, 2020, to June 16, 2020, specifically, the Internet Archive offered their National Emergency Library, which did away with the waitlist limitations on their pre-existing Open Library. Instead of following the strict rules laid out in the Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending, which mandates an equal “owned to loaned” ratio, the IA allowed multiple readers to access the same digitized book at once. This, they said, was a direct emergency response to the worldwide pandemic that cut off people’s access to physical libraries.

In response, on June 1, 2020, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House filed a lawsuit against the IA over copyright infringement. Out of their collective 33,000 copyrighted titles available on Open Library, the publishers’ lawsuit focused on 127 books specifically (known in the legal documentation as the “Works in Suit”). After two years of argument, on March 24, 2023, Judge John George Koeltl ruled in favor of the publishers.

The IA’s fair use defense was found to be insufficient as the scanning and distribution of books was not found to be transformative in any way, as opposed to other copyright lawsuits that ruled in favor of digitizing books for “utility-expanding” purposes, such as Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust. Furthermore, it was found that even prior to the National Emergency Library, the Open Library frequently failed to maintain the “owned to loaned” ratio by not sufficiently monitoring the circulation of books it borrows from partner libraries. Finally, despite being a nonprofit organization overall, the IA was found to profit off of the distribution of the copyrighted books, specifically through a Better World Books link that shares part of every sale made through that specific link with the IA.

It worth noting that this ruling specifies that “even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, however, would not excuse IA’s reproduction of the Works in Suit.” This may set precedent for future copyright cases that attempt to claim copyright exemption through the practice of controlled digital lending. It is unclear whether this ruling is limited to the National Emergency Library specifically, or if it will affect the Open Library and other collections that practice CDL moving forward.

Further Reading:

Full History of Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive [Released by the Free Law Project]

Hachette v. Internet Archive ruling

Internet Archive Loses Lawsuit Over E-Book Copyright Infringement

The Fight Continues [Released by The Internet Archive]

Authors Guild Celebrates Resounding Win in Internet Archive Infringement Lawsuit [Released by The Authors Guild]

Relevant Court Cases:

Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc.

Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust

Capitol Records v. ReDigi

 Authors, Publishers & You

This is where I’m going to be a little more subjective, because each person’s interpretation of events as I have seen has depended largely on their characterization and experience with the parties involved. Regardless of my own ideology regarding accessibility of information, the court ruling seems to be completely in line with current copyright law and precedent. Ironically, it seems that if the Internet Archive had not abandoned the strict rules regarding controlled digital lending for the National Emergency Library, and if they had been more diligent with upholding those rules with partner library loans prior to the NEL, they may have had a better case for controlled digital lending in the future. As is, I agree with other commentators that say any appeal the IA makes after this point is more likely to damage future digital lending practices than it is to save the IA’s current collection of copyrighted works in the Open Library. Most importantly, it seems disingenuous, and even dangerously inaccurate, to say that this ruling hurts authors, as the IA claimed in their response.

The IA argues that because of the current digital lending and sales landscape, the only way authors can make their books accessible digitally is through unfair licensing models, and that online collections like the IA’s Open Library offer authors freedom to have their books read. But this argument doesn’t acknowledge that many authors haven’t consented to having their works shared in this way, and some have even asked directly for their work to be removed, without that request being honored.

The problem is that both sides of this argument about the IA lawsuit claim to speak for authors as a group when the truth isn’t that simple.

Authors: Ideology v. Practicality

Those approaching the case from an ideological point of view, including many of the authors who signed Fight for the Future’s Open Letter Defending Libraries’ Rights in a Digital Age, tend to either have a history of sharing their works freely prior to the lawsuit (ex: Hanif Abdurraqib, who had published a free audio version of his book Go Ahead in The Rain on Spotify before Spotify began charging for audiobooks separately from their music subscriptions) or have alternative incomes related to their writing that don’t stem directly from book sales (ex: Neil Gaiman, who famously works with multiple mediums and adaptations of his writing).

In these cases, the IA lawsuit is framed as an ideological battle over the IA’s intention when releasing the National Emergency Library.

Many other authors, including a large number of smaller names and writers early in their careers, take a much more practical approach to the lawsuit, focused on defending their ability to monetarily profit off their works. This is by no means a reflection of their own ideology surrounding who has the right to information and whether libraries are worth protecting. Instead, it is a response to the fact that these authors love writing, and they simply would not be able to afford to continue writing in a world where they do not have the power to stop digital collections from distributing their copyrighted work without their consent. These include the authors, illustrators and book makes working with the Author’s Guild to submit their amicus brief in  Hachette v. Internet Archive.

These authors claim that controlled digital lending practices cause significant harm to their incomes in the following ways:

CDL undermines e-book licensing and sales markets, as most consumers would choose a free e-book over paying for their own copy.

CDL devalues copyright, meaning authors have less bargaining power in future contract negotiations.

CDL undermines authors ability to republish, whether as a reprint or e-book, out of print books once their publisher has ceased production. This includes self-publishing after the rights to their work have been returned to them.

CDL removes the income from public lending rights (PLR) that authors receive from libraries outside of the U.S. which operate on different lending and copyright standards.

The amicus brief provides first-person anecdotes from authors, including Bruce Coville of The Unicorn Chronicles, about how the rights to backlisted books, or books without an immediately obvious market, make up a huge portion of their annual salary. Jacqueline Diamond cites reissues of out-of-print novels as what kept her afloat during her breast cancer treatment.

It is worth noting that according to the Author’s Guild, some authors who originally signed Fight for the Future’s open letter defending the Internet Archive have even retracted their support after learning more about the specific lawsuit, including Daniel Handler, who writes under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket. The confusion stems from the use of the term “library” by both the Internet Archive and Fight for the Future. While authors overwhelmingly support public libraries, online collections like the Internet Archive don’t always fit the same role or abide by the same regulations as tax-funded public libraries. Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street, has written the following:

“To this day, I am angry that Internet Archive tells the world that it is a library and that, by bootlegging my books, it is simply doing what libraries have always done. Real libraries do not do what Internet Archive does. The libraries that raised me paid for their books, they never stole them.”

Further Reading:

Amicus Brief [Submitted by the Author’s Guild]

Fight for the Future’s Open Letter Defending Libraries’ Rights in a Digital Age

Joint Statement in Response to Fight for the Future’s Letter Falsely Claiming that the Lawsuit Against Internet Archive’s Open Library Harms Public Libraries [Published by the Author’s Guild]

Copyright: American Publishers File for Summary Judgment Against the Internet Archive

 Publishers: What Authors Are Paid

Some of the commentators I’ve seen are disgruntled specifically with the publishers suing the Internet Archive, and I will say that many of these complaints are valid. The four publishing companies behind the lawsuits (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House) are not known for the stellar treatment of their authors and employees. With the HarperCollins Publishers strike ending only a month before the IA lawsuit ruling, many readers are poised to support any entity at odds with one or more of the “Big Five” publishers. In this particular case, however, the power wielded by these publishing companies was used in defense of author’s rights to their works, for which The Authors Guild and other similar creator groups have expressed gratitude.

When it comes to finding solutions to the digital lending problem in general, it is important to understand what and how authors are paid for digital copies of their work. Jane Friedman has created the graphic below displaying the industry standards for the Big Five publishers. You can read more about agency and wholesome models here.

As you can see, authors and publishers alike benefit from e-book library licensure when compared to individual e-book sales, especially when you consider the time limits on library licensures. But advocates of this licensure model argue that the high prices for e-book licensure are designed to make up for the lost sales in e-books. While library goers buy more books than book buyers who don’t visit the library, the copies they buy typically vary by format. For example, a reader may borrow an audiobook from the library, decide they like it, and purchase a physical copy for their collection. While readers may buy a physical copy of a book after reading a physical library copy, they are unlikely to buy a digital copy after readying a digital library copy, making e-book lending a replacement for e-book buying in ways that physical lending doesn’t fully replace physical book purchases.

What ISN’T accounted for in this graphic is self-publication and what is known as a right of reversion. Depending on the wording of their contract, an author can request their publication rights be returned to them if the work in question is out of print and no longer being published. The publisher can then either return the work to “in print” status or return the rights to the author, who can then self-publish the work. In these cases, the 5-15% profit they would have made off their traditionally published book becomes a 35-70% profit as a self-published book. This is why authors are particularly frustrated with the IA’s argument that it is perfectly legal and ethical to release digital copies of books that are no longer in print. Those out-of-print works are where many authors earn their most reliable, long-term income, and they provide the largest opportunity for the authors to take control of their own works again and make fairer wages through self-publication.

The most obvious answer to this is that if authors are being the ones hit hardest by library and digital lending, then it is the publishers that need to treat their authors with better contracts. The fact that some authors are only earning 5% of profits on hardcover copies of their books (whether those are being sold to libraries or individuals) is eye opening. Alas, like the “we shouldn’t have to tip waiters” argument, this is much easier said than done.

Further Reading:

What Is the Agency Model for E-books? Your Burning Questions Answered

What Do Authors Earn from Digital Lending at Libraries?

 You: When Is Piracy Ethical?

There are number of contributing factors to Tumblr’s enthusiasm for pirating. We are heavily invested in the media we consume, and it is easy to interpret (sometimes accurately) copyright as a weapon used by publishers and distant descendants of long-dead authors to restrict creativity and representation in adaptations of beloved texts. There are also legitimate barriers that keep us from legally obtaining media, whether that is the physical or digital inaccessibility of our local libraries and library websites, financial concerns, or censorship on an institutional or familial level. In fact, studies have found that 41% of book pirates also buy books, implying that a lot of illegal piracy is an attempt at format shifting (ripping CDs onto your computer to access them as MP3 files, for example, or downloading a digital copy of a book you already own in order to use the search feature).

The interesting thing is that copyright law in the U.S. has a specific loophole to allow for legal format shifting for accessibility purposes. This is due to the Chafee Amendment (17 U.S.C. § 121), passed in 1996, which focused on making published print material more available to people with disabilities that interfere with their ability to read print books, such as blindness, severe dyslexia and any physical disability that makes holding and manipulating a print book prohibitively difficult. In practice, this means nonprofits and government agencies in the U.S. are allowed to create and distribute braille, audio and digital versions of copyrighted books to eligible people without waiting for permission from the copyright holder. While this originally only applied to “nondramatic literary works,” updates to the regulations have been made as recently as 2021 to include printed work of any genre and to expand the ways “print-disabled” readers can be certified. Programs like Bookshare, Learning Ally, and the National Library Service for the Blind and Print-Disabled no longer require certification from a medical doctor to create an account. The Internet Archive also uses the Chafee Amendment to break their Controlled Digital Lending regulations for users with print disabilities. While applications of the Chafee Amendment are still heavily regulated, it is worth noting that even U.S. copyright law acknowledges the ways copyright contributes to making information inaccessible to a large amount of people.

Accessibility is not the only argument when discussing the morality of pirating. For some people, appreciation for piracy and shadow libraries comes from a background in archival work and an awareness how much of our historical archives today wouldn’t exist without pirated copies of media being made decades or even a century ago. But we have to be more careful about the way we talk about piracy. Though piracy is often talked about as a victimless crime, this is not always the case, and each one of us has a responsibility to critically think about our place in the media market and determine our own standards for when piracy is ethical. In some cases, such as the recent conversation surrounding the Harry Potter game, some people may even decide that pirating is a more ethical alternative to purchasing. Here are a few questions to consider when deciding whether or not to pirate a piece of media:

Have you exhausted all other avenues for legally purchasing, renting or borrowing a copy of this media?

Is the alternative to pirating this media purchasing it or not reading/referencing it at all? If the former, how are you justifying the piracy?

Who is the victim of this particular piracy? Whether or not you think the creator(s) deserve to have their work pirated, you need to acknowledge there is someone who would otherwise be paid for their work.

If every consumer pirated this media, what would the consequences be? Would you be willing to claim responsibility for that outcome?

If you got this far,  thank you so much for reading! It is genuine work to try and understand the complexity behind every day decisions, especially when the topic at hand is as complicated as the modern digital lending crisis. Doing this research has changed the way that I understand and interact with digital media, and I hope you have found it informational as well.

Further Reading:

Panorama Project Releases Immersive Media & Books 2020 Research Report by Noorda and Berens

The Chafee Amendment: Improving Access To Information

National Center on Accessible Educational Materials

National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled

Books For People With Print Disabilites: The Internet Archive

Bookshare

Learning Ally

[squwooshk]

I wrote this essay for another platform, but I want to share it here.

Capitalism is killing art, in every part of the process. From the creation, the consumption and finally the preservation. In this serious of essays, we'll be looking at the preservation in particular. Looking at the ending of the process, and working backwards, will help give us a stronger understanding of the concepts and powers at play in the production, for the preservation and consumption directly effect the creation. This first part of the series will look into the effects of capitalism, and private property, more specifically intellectual property, on the preservation of art and the methods of art preservation that are at odds with capitalism.

Emulation & Video-game Piracy

An important part of the process of preserving art is making sure that the art work can be experienced by as many people, for as long as possible. When it comes to video-games in particular, there's plenty of fans who are dedicated enough to the art for to make sure retro games are always playable for a more general audience, and with as much accuracy to the original experience as possible. These dedicated fans create emulators, software programs that are able to replicate the functions of older video-game consoles, in order to allow older games to be easily playable to modern gamers.

Emulators themselves, are fully allowed under the law[1], however we do encounter a problem. The data that emulators are designed to read, is often illegal to distribute on the internet. The spread of this software, the actual data of a particular video game, is considered digital piracy, a theft of intellectual property[2]. This is an argument often used by corporations like Nintendo to shutdown websites that host these data files[3]. However, these same corporations often give no good alternatives to emulation, and in extention this piracy.

Many of these companies do not re-release these games, at best they may remake them or occasionally offer a limited selection on their own emulators, which can often have errors or be tied to a subscription service, as is the case with Nintendo.[4],

The preservation of these games often come down to an effort from the fans, an effort that is in direct conflict with the intellectual property owners. Without emulation, many more obscure games, and a good number of games with complex licensing agreements, would be permanently lost to time.

I would like to take the time to look at two examples in particular, Metal Gear Solid (Game Boy Color, also known as Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel in Japan) and Mother 3. These examples are far from being the only examples worth talking about, but I think they both greatly exemplify the ideas I wish to discuss.

Metal Gear Solid (Gameboy Color) which I will refer to as Ghost Babel for the rest of this essay, for simplicity and to avoid confusion with Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation) which is a completely different game, is a game released in 2000 by Konami for the Nintendo Gameboy Color. The game was a spin-off of the Metal Gear Solid series. The game has never been re-release.

This is primarily due to the lower sales of the release brought in compared to any mainline Metal Gear Solid game (all of which have been re-release and remastered many times) and the little market demand, especially in the AAA gaming world that Konami is a part of, for 2D stealth action games. There is little profit to be found in porting over Ghost Babel to more modern systems, so it just isn't done. Art that isn't profitable is cast aside by the capitalist.

The only way to play this game, and comply with the laws of a capitalist society, is to own a Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance or a DS (but not a DSI or 3DS) and an original physical copy of the game. All these items are no longer being produced, they are all in the second hand market, and as the supply will never rise, the prices can tend to get high pretty quickly.

Not only is pricing an issue, but these objects will not last forever. The cartridges used to store the data of Gameboy Color games have batteries that will one day die, preventing saved data from being written on them[5], and the electronic parts in these systems, and in the cartridges, will one day fail as any other machine will without constant maintenance. Preservation through the ownership of the original hardware is limited in scope, and is doomed for failure.

The only method of preservation that solves all these problems, the problem of limited supply, high prices and degradation of hardware, is digital emulation and piracy. This is however, in direct conflict with the intellectual property of the capitalist. The capitalist wishes to actively suppress these acts of preservation in the name of preserving their intellectual property[6]

Mother 3 is a video game created by Nintendo that has never been released outside of Japan. The reason for this is once again a profit one, Mother 2 (know simply as Earthbound outside of Japan) did not sell well at all when it first came out and Mother 1 was never released outside of Japan untill way later, where it got a digital release, do to the growth in a western Mother Fandom. The Mother series has a very particular style and humor, that doesn't always sell as well with western audiences, making localization a process that yealds little profit, thus the localization is never made.

For anyone who lives outside of Japan, the only way to play this game is illegally. You must rely on fan translation and emulation. No one other than Japanese people, or people who know Japanese, own a Japanese Game Boy Advanced, and have a copy of the game, can play it without going in direct violation of the interests of the capitalist and violating their intellectual property rights.

Music preservation and Intellectual Property

Video-games are far from the only art from that's preservation is at threat from capitalism. Music is another art form that has been plagued by intellectual property. From songs that quote passages of other songs, to song that uses samples with licensing issues, so much art has been altered, limited or destroyed by capitalism. I'll be looking at three different examples.

The Gun Song by Car Seat Headrest has two versions, the original version of the song, and the No Trigger Version. The differences between these two versions is pretty simple, the no trigger version is what you'll find on streaming services, and the original thay is only available on the Bandcamp version of the album. The reason for this is a lyric change due to copyright issues.

The original version of the song end with the lyrics "Down by the river, I shot my baby" sung with the same melody as the song Down by the River by Neil Young. Do to the shared melody and lyrics, this caused copyright issues. All releases of the song, other than the original independent release, have been altered to cut this part out. This song, as it was intended to be heard, has become difficult to access for most people.

The album Everything is a Lot by Will Wood and the Tapeworms was drastically altered when it was remastered, because all the samples used in the original ran into licensing issues. This lead to the more accessible version of the album (the only version getting physically releases) missing important parts of songs, in particular, the vocal send off on the track "Thermodynamic Lawyer" which originally opened with a sample from the movie Liar Liar, but now just opens immediately into the song, removing a lot of the punch of the original

The Faces mixtape by Mac Miller has faced a similar treatment to that of the Will Wood album, but on a more severe scale. The version of the album available on streaming has been gutted of many of it's samples (at least 9).

Intellectual Property & Profit Motive

Now, it's time to talk about how all these issues are an intrinsic part of capitalism. Capitalism as a system prioritizes one thing above all else, capital. Capital is itself a form of private property, and intellectual property is an idea or artistic expression turned into private property. The property holders will defend their right to profit off this property using the violence of the state, using the power of law to punish those who violate their property.

This become a problem for art when the profit motive gets involved. Profit is the driving factor behind all of these anti-preservation decisions we have discussed here today. With video-games, companies want to continue to indefinitely make a profit off of their old creations, but fail to offer an adequate way too, and often prioritizes only the cash cows. When the public tries to take this into their own hands, out of the love of art, they get punished. Their preservation is a threat, because they allow all games to be preserved and experienced freely, even the cash cows that corporations don't wish to abandon.

As for music, record labels (and in some of these cases film studios who own sound bites) want to profit off of royalties. When a song uses a sample, a good bit of the profit made on that song goes to the owners of royalty licenses, despite the fact that their intellectual property often makes up only a fraction of a truly transformational work. When they can't make their royalties, they leave the work to die.

Conclusion

Capitalism, primarily through the medium of intellectual property, a form of private property, actively disrupts the preservation of art. It seeks to destroy methods of preserving art that would eat into the profits of capitalist, without offering a viable alternative except when it seems financially beneficial to the capitalist.

Bibliography

1.https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol2/iss2/3/

2.https://www.howtogeek.com/262758/is-downloading-retro-video-game-roms-ever-legal/

3.https://kotaku.com/nintendo-orders-rom-site-to-destroy-all-its-games-or-1847487357

4.https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/nintendo-switch-online-is-terrible-and-its-only-getting-worse

5.https://forums.atariage.com/topic/193374-battery-life-of-old-game-cartridges/

6.(to actually gain access to this you'll probably have to prepend it with 12ft.io/) https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-America-Inc-v-Tropic-Haze-LLC-1-24-Cv-00082-No-1-D-R-I-Feb-26-2024

[kingmystrie]

Sounds like you have a problem with the implementation of copyright, not the inherent idea of copyright itself. Everyone knows Disney and other corporations end up abusing it. That doesn't mean copyright is inherently bad, it means there are loopholes in copyright that need to be fixed. Maybe learn the difference. Those posts of yours were shockingly ignorant and couldn't even pass themselves off as informed if they tried.

You do realize anti-copyright is an entire movement right?

The idea that there's such thing as intellectual property inherently limits people's freedom of expression and makes media harder to access in the long run. By reducing the amount of people who are allowed to share works of art, literature, etc. we make it harder for pieces of media to be preserved for future generations for example.

In fact archivists and others are asking to be exempt from copyright law.

In the case of things like patents it stops the global south from being able to do things like produce vaccines to prevent the spread of illnesses.

We also know that many people in many countries actually use piracy as a means to access information and media and be able to participate with each other globally.

In most cases of copyrighted works the money doesn't even go to the actual artists who made it after it's been made. We've already seen how little in residuals writers actually get from their work.

I'm not saying piracy is ethical as it is right now, because for example many authors do need those sales to be good to continue their lively hoods because the people who hire them don't want to pay them a livable commission. There's the fact that it's hard to quantify and identify the worth of someones labor when most of said labor is mental in nature. And the fact that there has to be some kind of cushion to fall back on for these jobs when you're waiting in between commissions.

But the fact of the matter is that that's what it IS, is capitalists not wanting to pay people fairly for their labor, not piracy that's making our lives shit. It's people not wanting to pay high commission prices for working artists.

It's people thinking that something already existing is worth more than the potential art we could get if we just paid people directly to make more art.

I don't want to live in this world where every new movie or whatever the fuck is just a corporate sponsored rehash of something that already exists because its more profitable to make something over and over again than it is to make something new.

I don't want to live in a world where what tv show gets to continue is determined by whoever paid for it to be made.

I want to live in a world of enthusiastic and free creative expression, copyright is antithetical to that.

This is not an endorsement of AI art, there's issues I have with it such as impersonating artists. But "theft" isn't one of them.

Namely because copying something isn't theft by definition.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

i actually think we tend to see more private property fetishism from the online artist crowd than can be written off to like, anti-ai sentiment alone. art style theft discourse, anti-piracy discourse, and a general tendency to present supporting small businesses as a moral good are very petit bourgie aligned stances. those are also in contrast to like the actual conditions of most waged artists- who are generally made to conform to the stylistic sensibilities of their employers and who aren't necessarily the primary profiteers of their work, also they're kind of contradictory stances to hold from ppl who make their names and careers off of derivative works. like you say, its false consciousness, but i think the online artist archetype has primed a lot of ppl to jump to ip as a first defense against any perceived threat to their career prospects

Mm you make a fair point but I still think this tendency isn’t reducible to petty bougie class striving

First, often the animating concern isn’t even directly economic except in some extended sense. When someone writes “OC DO BOT STEAL” [eta: lol that was a funny typo so I’m leaving it] under their fan character sketch or expresses fear of Literal Nazis using their art, I don’t think their worry is they’re not going to get a cut of the money the proud boys make off their fantroll. It seems more analogous to ppl worrying that ppl who make them uncomfortable will sexually fantasise about them against their will; there’s I think(?) a Lydia xz brown post I can’t find rn that expresses this as horror at acquiring a theory of mind, bc it reveals others’ fundamentally dangerous ability to think of you without your consent. Money does not even have to enter into it in order to fear badwrong representation by ppl you don’t like or trust!

Second, even when the anxiety is economic, it doesn’t have to be petty bourgeois. You can see this clearly w some writers who panic about piracy and exalt ip law as a noble protection of human dignity while frankly acknowledging they are not the ones principally profiting off of their sales. They’ll instead point out, I live and die by contract work from the publishers who actually enjoy the proceeds of my ip, and precisely bc of this they will refuse to keep contracting with me if my work is pirated instead of purchased bc the value to them of the product of my labour is how much it sells for, not how much it gets read. Same for waged artists who treat much of their work as exposure in hopes of getting further hiring offers from it, who again have an economic incentive to resist unattributed “art theft” fully consistent with never expecting more than wage labour as artists. Which seems more analogous to store clerks bristling at shoplifting since they’re threatened with punishment for letting it happen under their nose than it is to the classic image of the independent artisan with aspirations to medium-sized business ownership

[citrus-shygal]

Yuzu ramble

Tl;dr Switch emu should've been a lowkey thing and made available after the consoles life. Nintendo sucks but the devs were stupid for turnin profits. Yuzu devs may have fucked things in the future because of this

It's stupid to have a switch emulator available at all since you can still get both the console and games without issue

I love emulation specifically because it allows for preservation n accessibility to games that aren't being made anymore. And with the Wii U/3DS eshops shut down emulation is easier at this point

Ik its kinda silly to draw the line for piracy anywhere since yknow - its still piracy. But this is why. Nintendo isn't providing a means to play these games so it's free real estate(so long as devs don't provide materials directly (or try to profit)).

Openly promoting piracy and profiting from the tools being used of course Nintendo is gonna step in

It would've been so cool to eventually have a 3DS emulator that can run the whole library and a Switch emulator for when the console and games are no longer available but we're back to square one and that sucks

Not to mention this is gonna set a terrible precedent for any future cases

Not happy about them getting shut down but I'm not surprised - should've been smarter about this

[avaantares]

More on that pirated fanfic thing...

@spamatron3000 wrote: #i doubt they have any of mine #primarily because only like two of them have ever been finished

I notified a few other authors whose works were listed along with mine (there are TONS but I just ran out of time today), and some of the fics that company had pirated were not even finished on AO3, so incomplete status does not appear to be any protection from piracy.

@littlebluewraith wrote: #i'm super curious about how much--if anything--they might have changed #did they at least ctrl+f and replace names or was it left fully intact?? lmao holy shit

NOPE. Not only did they not change anything, they didn't even do the logical thing and download the auto-generated ebook format from AO3! Instead, they appear to have copied the HTML version directly and dropped it into a (bad) ebook file generator, because it's full of formatting errors like underlined text and single-line paragraph breaks that wouldn't be present in a properly-formatted epub like the ones AO3 generates. (I read downloaded fics on my Kindle, so I know what the formatting looks like.) I looked at some other pirated books in their lineup, and it's the same thing in all of them. It makes me think the fics may have been scraped by a poorly-programmed bot, rather than manually copied.

Didn't even make a fake author name, holy shit. Is the lazily pirated fanfic genre really lucrative enough to make this worth it?? Who the fuck is buying these???

As for how lucrative it is... Sadly, the answer is very, which is why it's a huge problem throughout the publishing world. One common tactic is for pirates to steal and reupload ebooks from legitimate small-press or self-published authors, and then turn around and DMCA the authors to get the legitimate copies of their books kicked off of Amazon! Since Amazon gives the benefit of the doubt to the first person to file notice, this often results in the real authors' accounts being shut down, leaving the pirated copies without any sales competition for those titles.

In the case of fanfiction, since there's no cost for the material they're selling and very little risk of legal reprisal from fanfic authors (who tend to avoid legal entanglements over IP, given the fuzzy gray area fanfiction occupies), any revenue from the pirated books is pure profit for the pirates. Hundreds of millions of people shop on Amazon, so if even 0.000001% of them buy a $2.99 ebook, they still stand to make thousands of dollars from the scheme. It's a numbers game.

As for who is buying them... The pirate company is grouping them into series and dumping them into the same keyword pool as a bunch of other genre ebooks, so given the way Amazon's algorithms work, the pirated titles have a high chance of showing up in recommendations for people reading (for example) genre supernatural romance, or mecha war stories, or whatever. Thanks to One-Click purchasing and Kindle reward promotions, the buyer may not even realize it's fanfiction until after they've bought it!

And the sad truth is, a lot of people don't care if it's pirated, as long as it's cheap and/or convenient. Look how many people shop on sites like Redbubble without verifying that the seller is the original artist, even though a massive percentage of the content there is stolen.

[masonsystem]

possibly worthless statement bc im not going to do any preliminary research before saying this but: i dont get why second hand sales are considered legal/lawful but piracy/digital distribution isnt cuz like that money being exchanged thru secondhand sales is not going to see the original publisher/producer/artist's pockets anyways so like... what really is the difference. maybe its a matter of putting money back in the economy (that sounds really fucking incorrect LMAO) but like yeah the original distributors and producers really only make money from direct sales so isnt it their responsibility to continue providing a means of being able to directly buy their media from them if they want to continue reaping a profit.... you dont really lose money from piracy i think bc the fault is on you for failing to establish an accessible way to sell your products no? 🤨🧐💭

[mack3030]

No offense but do you have a life other than the sims paywall issue? Any friends maybe other than other haters ? Really so weird spending all your life on this. Looks miserable.

You wanna know what's actually miserable? - Doxxing people who pay you for content - Content that you didn't actually make, but stole/bought from 3D modelers and claim you made - Tracking your patreons emails and names and sharing that info with third parties - Creating/buying tons of sock puppet and shell accounts on tumblr to harrass people who call you out on this behavior - Using said sock puppets to make comments about people's personal appearence, and to make negative comments about people's mental health in order to drive them to hurt themselves - Being transphobic in reddit comments and in posts by implying a trans-man doesn't "actually exist" - Contacting people's jobs 4x with bogus claims because your feelings got hurt that they called you out on your shit on the internet - Getting your "friends" to make false claims about death threats and then fake screenshots to try to make the other side look bad - Purposefully joining piracy groups in order to dig up "dirt" on the members and or doxx them and release screenshots if they betray you - Threatening leakers by saying "next time they die" - Using the brand names, logos, and designs of real companies without their permission - Stealing the propritary designs of small family owned businesses and making 3D models of those designs so you can profit off them on patreon - Publicly doxxing someone who called you out and encouraging people to harrass her and contact her work -Deadnaming a trans person and threatening them - Ruining the reputation of a big custom content creator simply because she's friends with one of your detractors by releasing fake screenshots and getting sock puppets to claim she's involved - Sending hateful asks/anons to friends of those who are accusing you to try to get them to turn on your accusers, putting them through mental and emotional anguish. DID I FUCKING MISS ANYTHING? I'M SURE I DID. SIMBLR HELP ME OUT. :) Fun fact, for me, staying in and researching and doing stuff like this relaxes me. I actually had a full day of work today and my "wind down" process is to get on tumblr. Now it's obvious you're a sock, so I'm saying this more for the benefit of others: YOU DO NOT GET TO TELL OTHERS HOW TO USE THEIR FREE TIME UNLESS THAT FREE TIME IS DIRECTLY HURTING YOU, SOMEONE ELSE, OR SOCIETY. And frankly, I doubt me trying to get justice for my friend (who these bullies are REALLY trying to make hurt themselves) falls into that category. So fuck off.

[duelistkingdom]

the thing is, in the argument of piracy, media conglomerates are still operating under the framework of when piracy DID actually mean that profits were being directed elsewhere. as in, a pirate would put a video game on a bootleg cartridge*, or a movie on a bootleg dvd, or an album on a bootleg album, and then sell that to an unsuspecting consumer who believed they were purchasing a product that was direct from the manufacture. in the concept of physical media, sharing the physical copy with a friend or family member is more analogous to how piracy works in the modern age.

HOWEVER, if you are able to go on the internet, and obtain a rom hack of the video game to play directly on your computer for free, or stream a movie/album without paying for it, this becomes more of a “would the consumer have paid for this if the free pirated option were not available?” and increasingly, the answer is “no, the consumer would not have paid for it.” however, companies fail to see the “a consumer downloaded a free pirated copy, ergo this is a sales loss” does not hold the same water as “the consumer purchased a pirated copy, ergo this is a sales loss” as a 1:1 to claim. a consumer choosing to download a copy for free is not exactly a sales loss if the consumer was never intending on purchasing in the first place.

* a note on video game piracy: in this case, the consumer was often getting an inferior product as well, as a pirated copy of a game would often run worse. ocarina of time’s anti piracy measures rendered the game unfinishable, for example. i can recommend some interesting youtube videos on video game piracy over the years if one is interested!

[goddessalexissara]

Annoyed At Anti Piracy

I am so tired of anti piracy takes and other corporates positions pretending to be about protecting artists.

Piracy is not the problem, it's fucking bullshit and it's genuinly upsetting to see other authors and stuff lie to themselves and use the same "profit lost" model that giant companies use to declare piracy the enemy.

It is companies, it is capital, that are the reason writers are poor, artists are poor, etc not random people doing a thing you don't like, shut up.

"Just go to the Library" is such a fucked take, like what Library where, not everywhere has libraries, not all libraries will buy all books, not all libraries can stock some books, travel is not free, time is not free and for people reading queer books they run the risk of people they know seeing them or just being hate crimed in general.

My Fiancé worked in public libraries for years, they aren't some fucking utopia and I promise you the companies that are telling you to worry about digital piracy want to ban libraries as well. You can look at the rich history of anti library stuff and takes from Authors and artists too.

"Art isn't a right" is also a totally fucked take, art is nearly as important as food and shelter. The earliest records of humans we have are from their art, art is what makes humans, human. Art is in our bones, it's how we operate, it's how we evolve and learn. Art is in everything we do, art is direly needed.

Your hypnotical profit lose isn't real either. Most studies not done by companies that would profit on the idea of banning all "piracy" show no connection to profit loss from high piracy, some artists have reported increased money directly because piracy. Sometimes accessibility is what a story needed at the right time to boost it and give more royalties to an artist, not to mention the increasing merch and attention based economies for art.

I am just so over it. I have been part of a lot of award winning projects, great pieces of art, many of which basically aren't on sale anymore. I refuse to give into fear mongering witch hunts against my own audience and my own people.

The companies are our enemies, not the people.

[invizigothx]

the conversations around book publishing and piracy and writers made me realize, I'm not sure how commonly known it is, that most books don't earn out their advance. in other words, the writer gets paid something up front (a chunk of that goes to their agent ofc), and then the book is published and all the money from book sales goes into paying for the publishing process AND paying the publisher back for the amount of money the writer got up front. once that's all paid off, then the writer starts to get royalties. BUT, most books don't "earn out." The publisher knows they're going to lose money, and that they'll balance it out by selling 5 million copies of an Oprah Book Club Pick or Celebrity Autobiography or whatever. (this also sucks because publishers will put less effort into promoting new releases, or expect the writer to do the promotion, etc. and dump all their resources into the books they think are going to be the big moneymakers.)

furthermore, the publishing process is LONG for fiction. the amount of time between "final draft submitted to agent" and "writer gets a paycheck" is years. unless they have some other source of funding, writers really only get paid way after the bulk of their work has been done. so - yes - pirating reduces book sales, which impacts writers -- but I'm not sure that pirating is directly affecting royalties in every or even most cases, since many writers never see royalties. and, personally, I think some people will always pirate books, for whatever reason. a system that would need everyone to not pirate in order for the writers to get adequately paid is…. not a good system! this is why, when I see people sharing ideas about "buy books / check them out of libraries / don't pirate them to support authors." -- I think well, yes that's true. but ALSO, what else can we do? are there more robust actions to take? as a semi-professional writer (I think I can call myself this? better than an "emerging writer" lol) -- it seems necessary to think about: health insurance! local funding for arts grants! UBI! also I super encourage everyone to check out indie / non-profit presses. AK Press, Little Puss Press, Neon Hemlock are just a few off the top of my head that are publishing really exciting queer fiction. I think at the end of the day, the solution to "the writers you love are not getting published" will probably be something like "creating more opportunities for people to published, especially outside of profit-driven hellscape of the big 5."

[hypertechual]

important info for new digital pirates:

don't use a free VPN. if you don't feel like researching, just pick nordVPN (scroll to their standard plan) or protonVPN (their free VPN is safe, but too slow for piracy so you'd still need a paid plan). most free VPNs profit by sharing records of your IP address and activities (this defeats the purpose of a VPN). a basic plan costs the same as one streaming service and depending on how you torrent and how frequently, it can be worth it (i personally don't torrent so i don't use a VPN)

you don't need a VPN for most uses, only an adblocker (only use ublock origin). streaming sites or direct downloads (directly from the website) wont get you copyrighted. torrenting (putting info file into torrenting software (only use qbittorrent) then downloading from that) does need a VPN to hide your ip address

don't use random sites. reddit's many piracy communities will have info and guides if you google it. /r/FreeMediaHeckYeah has a general wiki guide saying which sites to use for different content. /r/PiratedGames for game info and guides, /r/Piracy for general info but only regular posts bc its wiki guide isn't up to date EDIT: while reddit is down use the internet archive's wayback machine

[astuteanalytica764y5]

What are the challenges intellectual property software faces in the business sector? 

The ownership of software IP belongs to the entity that received or created the rights to the computer program or code. Protecting intellectual property rights plays an essential role in enabling innovation and protecting investment, especially in the green and digital economy. In-house IP management can be a costly and time-consuming process. Outsourcing IP management, on the other hand, allows businesses to increase productivity, reduce costs, and increase profits. 

The growth of the global intellectual property software market is caused by growing awareness of intellectual property rights and increasing demand for well-documented and secure systems within organizations. Also, the growth of the Intellectual Property outsourcing industry is boosted by rising demand for unique IPs for goods. In addition to this, according to the research report of Astute Analytica, the global intellectual property software market is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.6% during the forecast period from 2023 to 2031. 

The challenges intellectual property software faces in the business sector are: 

Registry issues, delays and backlogs 

Trademark registration normally takes 1 year, according to available data. For patents, time is on the user side because there are concerns beyond just patentability and novelty by experts at the registry before registration is commenced. 

Two approaches exist for addressing late registration, first, select a powerful trademark; and second, where it is an invention, make sure it fulfills all of the criteria for patentability. 

In this manner, the time needed to fully appreciate its singularity is dropped. Secondly, if there is any office opposition or action, make sure to respond as soon as possible so as not to further delay the registration procedures. 

Lack of awareness 

Even though businesses are among the most directly affected by intellectual property rights, little to no effort is created to expand awareness of these rights in the business world. 

Businesses miss out on opportunities to boost profits, broaden their reach, and spread their risk by not understanding the value of intellectual property. 

The first step in decoding this problem is boosting public awareness of intellectual property (IP) in media outlets such as television, radio, and newspapers, which business owners frequently encounter. 

IP Lawsuits 

In addition to the money and time involved, having IP legally challenged can be disastrous for the reputation of the company. To settle IP problems, businesses are often desired to look into non-traditional conflict resolution procedures. Although this way can be more expensive overall, it limits the potential ruin and businesses from the embarrassment that comes from failing a high-profile intellectual property lawsuit. 

Privacy 

Companies are witnessing a drop in their brand awareness and customer confidence. To fight online piracy, many businesses are turning to anti-piracy programs. Experts in intellectual property who can keep an eye on the market for signs of breach are employed to battle more established forms of piracy. 

IP documentation 

The term "IP documentation" is used to describe complete IP agreements that protect a company in every manner. Inexperienced IP attorneys hired by companies to fix IP issues often struggle to properly document their work, yet, any shortcoming on the part of the attorney inevitably affects the company. Specific IP agreements should have non-disclosure clauses, employee-related issues, representations and warranties, and indemnifications, as well as predict future challenges that are likely to occur. 

[tmagder]

A YouTube & UMG AI Partnership and Music's Future

A few weeks ago, Youtube and Universal Music Group announced a partnership to develop AI tools that offer “safe, responsible and profitable” opportunities to music rights holders. AI is the newest threat to the recorded music industry’s business model which, over the past two decades, has been battered by music piracy sites like Napster and Spotify in its early days and the shift away from physical sales.  By now, just about every music fan has already encountered an AI track. Back in April, “Heart on My Sleeve,” an AI Fake Drake/The Weeknd collaboration, went viral. Spotify, TikTok, Apple and YouTube removed the song after millions of streams, in large part because Universal Music Group, which operates as distributor and promoter for The Weeknd, pushed them to do so. 

The music recording industry revolves around three companies  – UMG, Warner Music Group, and Sony - who between them control about 60% of total revenue worldwide. But given that most people now stream their music rather than buy it directly, the “big three,” as they are known, need the cooperation of streaming companies to keep AI from jeopardizing their businesses. YouTube, which is the second largest audio streaming service in the US after Spotify, says it will work with UMG and its artists to develop tools that provide “appropriate protections and unlock opportunities for music partners.”

But Youtube and the other audio streamers have a tense relationship with the “big three,” since those companies control the licenses to most of the music we listen to. Spotify, for example, shells out roughly two-thirds of every dollar it collects to rights holders, which is probably the main reason Spotify has never generated a profit (see embedded video).  Spotify’s new AI-generated DJ is now available in over 50 countries.  What’s to prevent Spotify from bypassing flesh-and-blood artists and rights holders and using all of its meta-data to create its very own AI artists from scratch?  

It’s far too soon to predict how AI will change the music business, but this does have the makings of another “Napster” moment or worse. (341)