ARIA Sells a Licence for DJs to Format Shift Music 239
lucas writes "The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) has set up a new licence to let DJs format shift their music to use at gigs.
DJs will need to pay a licence fee to copy music they already own legally from one format to another for ease of use, and as a back-up in case originals get lost or stolen.
Criminal penalties for DJs involved in "music piracy" are up to sixty thousand dollars and 5 years imprisonment. There are also on-the-spot fines of over one thousand dollars."
Has the world gone bonkers? (Score:5, Interesting)
You either:
1. Buy (and subsequently own) the music on the physical media. Then you are legally allowed to do whatever you want with it, including selling.
or
2. Buy a license to listen to the music. Then you can media-shift all you want, as you are licensing the music. You never have to rebuy it either, if your disk breaks, just download the music, you already have a license.
This thievery has to stop. It is insane.
Imagine a world where the people weren't such meek sheep.
Re:Does this match up with other Australian laws? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is also a "format shifting" making it legal to rip a cd and place the music on your portable player.
The problem with these exceptions are that they are for non commercial uses. it is fine for YOU as a citizen to do it for yourself but not as a PUBLIC performance which has always been a separate part of the law. If you are getting paid to do it in public you have always been required to pay a licence like this, perhaps the only difference is the industry body is now doing this. It seems just another way of clearing this public use of music which you would have ether gone to the record company itself or another agent to do this.
Re:Does this match up with other Australian laws? (Score:3, Interesting)
They go after the big fish: the ones which cause actual damage.
Re:Don't buy into this... (Score:2, Interesting)
surely lives on as the avant garde of whatever the kids are listening to today? Why would DJs even be thinking about playing music that is already signed and licensed? It's likely mainstream pap rather than independent new productions.
If anything the DJ's should be pioneering selective filtering of the Creative Commons and underground music scene, completely bypassing the established order. And FWIW, speaking as as an ex-musician, I'd have no problem with them using CC licensed work to make money if it's promoting my music and drawing people to my site.
In my understanding the DJ's tell the record companies what to do, not the other way about. Record companies only sell safe MOR products and haven't invested in A&R for over a decade.
I think they must be talking about another kind of DJ, the sort you hire for wedding and birthday parties who plays Abba tunes so the oldies can dance
Re:2006 copyright law changes (Score:4, Interesting)
From the fact sheet:
Heh! Can't even distribute it to your family members...
I can see the 'A' slowly shifting... ARIA becomes RIAA. Give it six months and the malicious law suits will begin...
Since the venues are already paying a licensing fee for public performance, maybe DJs should 'sell' their music (in all its formats) to the venue for the duration of the gig. I know it doesn't get around the 'private use' element of the act, but I'm sure there will be some creative workarounds.
The realities on the ground for Pro DJ's (Score:5, Interesting)
As a rule, when speaking of bigger names, not only do the record labels definitely give them the
music for free, actually they beg them to play it. Now suddenly the same DJ's who were GIVEN
all of these songs from the record labels, the producers or specialized promotion companies for free
would have to pay for the use of them?
A while back, a little known organization in the UK named the PPL managed to get similar laws enacted [bbc.co.uk]
To my knowledge, no one has ever gotten busted for not complying with their arcane rules
which border on extortion pure and simple, and are impossible to comply with.
What's happening pure and simple is that many of the people who make up the voting boards of these
entities are totally overwhelmed by technology they just do not understand, and are passing measures
which they believe in earnest are going to help stem the tides of something they feel they can still control.
As someone posted above, paying such tax is only helping legitimize something which is patently
unfair at best, and not ever going to be a solution to anything other than yet another desperate attempt
at trying to put the proverbial cat back in the box, when the box itself has all but disappeared.
Let's not even go into details on who is going to get the money collected (probably pop artists
whose songs never get played once in the clubs, but who have enough airplay stats to register
on the radar of performing rights societies... LOL)
Who thought the dying throes of an entire industry were going to be that much fun?
Z.
Re:No "fair use" in Australia (Score:3, Interesting)
The same goes for live music, on which royalties are payable too.
The way this is done is by fixed fee. The royalties agency determining what songs generally statistically get played and divides the revenue.
Of course that mean that lesser known artists get nothing and 90% of royalties paid goes to 10% of the artists. Nice.
Re:Does this match up with other Australian laws? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not certain that format shifting is formally recognised as a legitimate exception to the copyright law (maybe it is, I don't know) but even if it isn't nobody is going to be jailed for that, just as nobody was jailed for using their VCR to record Neighbours.
Re:Performance fees are also going up (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Performance fees are also going up (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No "fair use" in Australia (Score:3, Interesting)
So you are right, but you are wrong if you are in their twisted world.
You say:
"No copyright holder is in any way harmed by allowing DJs for format shift."
Right, but not in their world. In their world a copyright holder is harmed because if he wasn't allowed to format shift legally, they could charge him more for doing so and so they are harmed by the format shifting. I say if we go this far, bring back legal payola. Give the DJ's back some of the power they have in the game.
You want your songs spun at parties I DJ? That's gonna cost you. The musical equivalent of shelf space perhaps?
(I am being daft here in this last bit for a reason.)
all the best,
drew
Re:No "fair use" in Australia (Score:5, Interesting)
DJ are probably the single largest consumers of Music. I probably spent an average of £20 per week on vinyl alone, and this was then average 12 inch single cost £5. I have not bought any in years so do not know how much it costs now, I would imagine it has certainly gone up a bit. Without buying that much new music DJing becomes too dull. I managed to keep it up for a year or two never getting any money back as I was not famous (or that good) but then gave up.
Over that time I amassed quite a large volume of records that form a pile 1 metre deep. My friends often asked me how much they thought I had spent, and on the odd occasion someone would estimate how many records I had and work it out. At that point I usually stopped paying attention in case I had a heard attack.
I suppose the point I am trying to make is that very few DJ's actually make a profit from DJing. It is a hobby, or a loss leader that leads a small minority into a music career producing albums of their own. Even people who make it big and actually get signed to a label to produce their own music usually do it for the love or to keep up their image in clubland so they can sell their own music.
The people who really be hit by this are aspiring DJ's who need to produce mixtapes in order to get any sort of gig. They then hand the mix tapes out for free as a marketing tool and 90% of them go straight in the bin. Are they also expecting these people who are usually young and skint anyway to cough up £500. The irony is that the main people they intend to listen to the tapes / mp3s are the very same record executives and talent scouts who are lining their pocket with the fee the DJ paid to produce them.
If you want to turn your hobby into a career you are better of playing with computers or going outside and playing football, now thats where the real money is. Let the music industry choke to death through lack of new talent then we can reinvent it afterwards when all these stupid laws have been repealed. If you want to listen to music in the meantime, go to your local venue that has a jam session for the evening, maybe even try and take part yourself.
The real problem is that DJ's don't have... (Score:4, Interesting)
Realize, at least in the U.S. that something like 80%-90% of albums rights are held by four conglomerate corporations. Likewise, probably about 80%-90% of radio stations are owned by 4-5 major conglomerates.
DJ's are thousands of independent joe-average people, many working part time on the side.
> We have to buy the albums but are never given a license. We have albums stolen, broken, etc. at a much higher rate. But have to replace said albums at the full price (even though we already have a license).
> We have to pay performance licensing for the right to play songs in public. (FYI, weddings are a private event and different rules apply.)
> We receive few guarantees and protections. While a specific grant in the DCMA allows for radio stations to make ephereal recordings. DJ's are not given that protection. For one simple reason...they didn't have a mega-association with millions of dollars to lobby (bribe) Congress. Yes there are some DJ associations, but the industry doesn't really lend itself to such a conglomerate as labels & radio does.
> Advantage of digital recordings. Our masters are safe from theft. Instead of having to lug 4 80lb suitcases of CDs to bring all our stock. We can lug one 5 lbs external hard drive.
It's disgusting...
Oh, by the way, if you are a musical artist and you want me to respect your copyrights. Get the law changed to protect DJs and web radio.
Cause I quit recognizing your copyrights as soon as the laws stopped. If your an artist...don't gripe to me about the violation of your rights. Cause us DJs have had our rights violated repeatedly.
Copyright is a two way system. If you want it honored, you have to honor the users as well. If you're going to claim people are only buying a "license". Then give them a real license and let them register their license. Otherwise, more and more people are going to cease recognizing your copyrights.
I no longer do. Anyone who wants copies of any of my CDs are welcome to make them. I've got a burner in the basement. Having lost several hundred dollars to copyright law abuse, I've cease recognizing your right. While you may have the law on your side.
Most people don't care about legality, rather, they care about right & wrong. (There are plenty of laws on the books that are 'legal' but far from moral.) And most people only feel a moral contractual obligation to another party if that party is acting in good faith. (Which the conglomerate copyright holders are NOT doing.)
The ones that need to change the system are the artists!
Re:No "fair use" in Australia (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No "fair use" in Australia (Score:2, Interesting)
Why can other industries do it right? (Score:2, Interesting)
Imagine pre-school teachers had to pay "broadcasting licenses" to read children's books to their pupils. And school libraries had to invest fortunes into multi-user licenses for their books and magazines ("because, hell, any student could read it!")
Imagine you had to pay a royalty fee everytime you quoted someone else's research paper ("What's that? You want to just be able to quote any research you want and expect to get away with it without million-dollar lawsuits? What kind of utopia are you living in?").
Why aren't stories like these happening when they seem so abundant in the music and movie industries? Because the funding behind scientific research and (arguably) other areas of publishing aren't in the hands of people who have long since stopped seeing any intrinsic merit in what they are doing and run things with the sole intent of squeezing as much money as possible out of it.
We can't blame the MAFIAA, ARIA, or their international counterparts -- these organisations are businesses. They're structured and run like businesses, and, sadly, they seem to be rather good at it. What needs to happen is this: music needs to stop being a business. We need to put a lot of the funding behind artists back into the hands of the public. Subventions for artists by the government (or, on a smaller scale, by local municipalities) is an important cultural stimulant in many countries, and it has the benefit of supporting more independent and emerging artists without focus on factors like "sellability" (i.e. how much money can be squeezed out of it). We have large-scale scientific funding*; why can't we have large-scale artistic funding for artists? Sure, music might not be as important (though I'd rate research for the sake of advancement of knowledge fairly close in importance to cultural evolution), but something needs to fundamentally be changed about the entertainment industry in most countries. We can't just sit and wait until the *AA implodes and another equally unsuitable system takes its place.
* N.B. I'm not USian, so the "we" here refers to all of North America/Australia/Europe
* sits back and watches the -1 Flamebait mods roll in... *