The Labels Want Songwriters’ Rights, Just Not Songwriters Themselves

Chaos for Who?

The music industry loves to talk about artists.

It loves to celebrate artists.

It loves to hand out awards, sponsor songwriter camps, run social media campaigns about creativity, and tell the world that music starts with the creator.

Until the creator asks for something back. Then suddenly the language changes.

Now it’s not about art. It’s not about fairness. It’s not about creators. It’s about “chaos.”

The major labels and BMG have petitioned the United States Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that would allow songwriter Cyril Vetter to reclaim worldwide rights to a song he wrote more than sixty years ago.

And their argument is fascinating. Not because it’s convincing. Because it exposes exactly how the industry thinks.

The labels claim that if songwriters can reclaim worldwide copyrights under U.S. termination law, it will create uncertainty, confusion and disruption throughout the music business.

Chaos.

That’s the word.

Chaos.

Funny how the same industry that spent decades telling creators to sign away global rights in perpetuity is suddenly worried about fairness and stability.

The same companies that built billion-dollar catalog empires from contracts signed generations ago now want us to believe they are protecting the music ecosystem.

Protecting whom?

Certainly not the songwriter. The songwriter is the one who created the asset. The songwriter is the one who took the risk. The songwriter is the one whose work still generates value decades later.

Yet when a court finally interprets the law in a way that potentially benefits creators, the industry’s first instinct isn’t celebration.

It’s litigation.

The hypocrisy becomes even more obvious when you look at history.

Labels routinely tell artists that contracts are sacred. Deals are deals. You signed it. Live with it.

Except when the labels don’t like the outcome.

Then contracts, precedents and long-standing interpretations suddenly become flexible.

Then the legal teams arrive. Then the lobbying starts. Then the scare campaign begins.

We’re told the sky will fall. We’re told investment will disappear. We’re told the business will collapse.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Every technological shift was supposedly going to destroy music.

Home taping. CD burning. MP3s. Streaming. TikTok. Now songwriter rights.

The industry’s prediction record on catastrophe is so bad that “chaos” should probably be treated as a marketing term rather than a legal argument.

Because let’s be honest.

If a songwriter reclaiming rights after half a century creates disruption, maybe the disruption isn’t the problem.

Maybe the underlying business model is.

The labels argue that billions of dollars and countless agreements were built around the assumption that foreign rights remain permanently with publishers.

That may be true.

But an industry building its future around assumptions doesn’t magically transform those assumptions into justice.

There was a time when artists couldn’t own masters.

There was a time when musicians signed contracts they barely understood.

There was a time when labels controlled manufacturing, distribution, promotion and access to audiences.

That world is disappearing.

And perhaps what we’re seeing in Vetter v. Resnik isn’t chaos. Perhaps we’re seeing correction.

The most revealing part of this case isn’t the legal argument. It’s the language.

The labels describe the songwriter’s position as a fringe theory. Yet a federal appeals court agreed with it.

Creator groups support it. And the logic is straightforward.

If termination rights exist to give creators a second chance at ownership, why should that second chance stop at a national border?

Why should a songwriter get half the apple?

The answer seems obvious.

Because half the apple is still enough for the labels to keep the other half.

That’s what this fight is really about.

Control.

Not creativity. Not fairness. Not artists.

Control.

The irony is that the music business constantly tells young creators that ownership matters.

Keep your rights. Build your catalog. Think long term. Become an entrepreneur.

Until those same principles start applying to creators whose songs were written decades ago.

Then ownership suddenly becomes dangerous. Then ownership becomes disruptive. Then ownership becomes chaos.

The labels want everyone to believe they’re defending stability.

What they’re actually defending is a system that has benefited them enormously for generations.

A system where rights flow one way. A system where creators are encouraged to surrender ownership but discouraged from reclaiming it. A system where fairness is celebrated in speeches but challenged in court.

If the Supreme Court ultimately hears the case, the decision will affect far more than one song.

It will answer a much bigger question. Who does copyright actually exist to serve?

The corporations that acquired it.

Or the people who created it.

Because if reclaiming your own work after sixty years is considered chaos, perhaps the real chaos was the arrangement that existed before.

Fender Wants Your Guitar Back

Fender has lost its mind.

It thinks it can copyright a shape, and call that “heritage.”

That’s corporate greed, pretending it’s preserving culture.

The Stratocaster body shape is not sacred scripture. It’s a guitar shape that entered the bloodstream of modern music decades ago. Pretending to own the shape now is like claiming ownership of the power chord, the double cutaway, or rock and roll itself.

And somehow this whole mess started with Fender suing an AliExpress seller in Germany.

The seller never showed up.

Fender won by default.

Then, suddenly, that default judgment became the foundation for a wider campaign. Cease-and-desist letters started flying. Builders, retailers and manufacturers of their own guitars using the Stratocaster body shape, found themselves being told that Fender now had legal proof that it owned the Stratocaster body shape.

Not a patent. Not a trademark. A copyright.

And that’s where things start getting ridiculous.

Because this wasn’t simply about stopping counterfeit guitars with fake Fender logos on the headstock. Most musicians understand that. Most builders understand that.

The company reportedly demanded that builders and retailers destroy their existing inventory.

Destroy it. Millions of dollars in manufacturing and research/development.

And then things got even uglier.

Fender allegedly wanted stores and manufacturers to hand over the names and addresses of customers who had already bought guitars with Strat body shapes.

The request?

Have those customers return their guitars so they too could be destroyed.

Read that again.

A billion-dollar corporation wasn’t just trying to stop future sales. It wanted guitars already sitting in people’s homes.

That’s the moment this stopped looking like brand protection and started looking like corporate intimidation.

And nobody likes a bully. Make no mistake, that’s exactly how this looks.

Then comes the inevitable question.

Why now?

The Stratocaster body shape debuted in 1954.

Seventy-plus years later we’re suddenly being told the shape is protected in a way that thousands of builders and guitar tinkerers somehow missed?

Think of EVH tinkering with a Stratocaster body, to come up with his sound and the Frankenstein look. George Lynch playing Charvel and then ESP’s that use the Stratocaster body shape. Hell, Lynch even makes Custom guitars right now utilizing the Strat body shape. Add to that list Kirk Hammett and his ESP guitars and every other guitarist that played a guitar with a Strat body that wasn’t Fender. All of the guitars are illegal according to Fender.

And let’s be honest about who’s making these decisions.

Fender’s CEO, Edward “Bud” Cole, is a Fender lifer. He knows the history. He knows the market. He knows exactly what the Stratocaster means to players.

Which means this isn’t confusion.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth.

Fender is no longer automatically the best guitar in the room. There was a time when the logo alone was enough.

Not anymore.

Today there are boutique builders producing instruments with better fretwork, better neck profiles, tighter quality control and greater consistency than many production-line Fenders.

We feel it immediately as soon as we pick up a guitar and within ten seconds we know.

No legal brief changes that. No cease-and-desist letter changes that.

The PR damage may be even worse.

Because Fender looks like the guy who arrives at the party after midnight, grabs the microphone and starts yelling at everyone.

Nobody likes that guy. Nobody respects that guy. And nobody forgets that guy.

The guitar industry has already lived through this movie. Gibson went after PRS over the single-cut body shape.

The courts ultimately rejected the idea that one company could permanently monopolize a broadly recognized guitar design.

That should have been the lesson.

Instead Fender looked at history and apparently concluded:

Let’s try it ourselves. Only louder.

And the saddest part?

Fender should know better. Its reputation wasn’t built by lawsuits or cease-and-desist letters or by demanding customer lists or threatening independent builders.

It was built by making great guitars.

This entire campaign feels disconnected from players and completely connected to spreadsheets.

That’s how great brands start to decay. Not because competitors catch them. Because they convince themselves that people love the logo more than the product. They don’t.

That’s why this whole thing lands so badly.

It’s petty.

It’s defensive.

It’s short-sighted.

And most importantly, it’s unnecessary.

If Fender wants respect, make better guitars. If Fender wants loyalty, earn it. If Fender wants to remain the standard, stop acting like the standard needs a lawyer.

Because the truth is already out there.

The shape is not the product. The player is.

And if Fender has forgotten that, the damage it’s doing to its own brand may last a lot longer than any body-shape ruling ever will.

A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, Stupidity

“They Won in 1966: The Hendrix Case and the Lie of ‘A Contract Is a Contract’”

There’s a moment when you read a court decision and you realise, this isn’t about justice. It’s about architecture.

Not justice. Architecture.

Because what just happened with Jimi Hendrix’s bandmates isn’t shocking if you understand the system. It’s only shocking if you still believe the system is trying to be fair.

The estates of Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell walked into court thinking they were arguing about rights.

They weren’t.

They were arguing against a blueprint that was locked in before they even plugged in their amps.

And the judge basically said:
Yeah… the blueprint holds.

Let’s call this what it is.

These guys helped build the sound. They played on “Are You Experienced”, “Axis: Bold as Love”, “Electric Ladyland”. That’s not background noise, that’s the DNA of rock music.

But legally?

They’re session players with better branding.

Why?

Because somewhere in the 1960s, when you couldn’t get your music heard without a label, when gatekeepers weren’t optional but oxygen, they signed a contract that said: “We (the producers) own everything. Forever. Everywhere.”

And the court looked at that and said:

Cool. Case closed.

Here’s where it gets twisted.

Everyone loves saying “a contract is a contract.”

Until it isn’t.

Because we’ve seen legislation, actual law, designed to give artists their rights back over time. We’ve seen frameworks like the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 termination rights that basically admit: “Yeah… artists got screwed. Let’s give them a way out.”

So the narrative becomes: when labels want certainty, contracts are sacred. When artists want relief, well, it depends…

And suddenly legislation becomes optional. Flexible. Interpreted.

Funny how that works.

But here’s the real game, and this is the part most people miss.

The label didn’t “win” this case.

They won it in 1966.

Because they didn’t just sign a deal, they defined the category of ownership itself.

They made sure the band never owned the master in the first place.

And if you never owned it?

There’s nothing to return. That’s not a loophole. That’s design.

Think about the power dynamics for a second.

You’re a band in the ‘60s. You want: Studio time. Distribution. Radio play

All controlled by the same entity.

So you sign.

Not because it’s fair. Because it’s the only door in the building.

That’s not negotiation. That’s survival. And decades later, a court looks back and says: “Well… you agreed.”

Technically true.

Practically absurd.

And here’s the part that should really bother you. The judge didn’t say the deal was fair. He said it was clear.

That’s the entire threshold. Not fairness. Not balance. Not context. Clarity.

So if you screw someone over clearly enough… it’s enforceable forever.

That’s the lesson.

Meanwhile, Sony Music Entertainment UK walks away saying:

“We’re pleased our rights have been confirmed.”

Of course they are.

Because those “rights” were engineered in an era where artists had none.

And before you think this is ancient history, it’s not.

The contracts look different now. Cleaner. Friendlier. But the structure?

Still the same.

Artists today don’t get told: “We own your masters forever.”

They get told: “We’re partnering with you.”

Then buried in the language: Licensing terms that never end. Revenue splits that never shift. Control clauses that quietly lock everything down.

Same game. Better PR.

So yeah, it feels like labels pick and choose when rules matter. But the truth is colder than that.

They don’t break the rules. They write them early enough that they never have to.

This case wasn’t about Hendrix’s bandmates losing.It was about a system doing exactly what it was built to do:

Protect ownership. Not contribution.

And until that changes?

You can play on the record. You can define the sound. You can help change music forever.

And still legally own… nothing.

That’s not a glitch.

That’s the business.

Music, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

The Night Axl Rose Chose Ego Over Fans: The Eastern Creek Guns N’ Roses Disaster

I’ll never watch Guns N’ Roses again. Eastern Creek was enough.

For those who weren’t there, January 30, 1993 at Eastern Creek Raceway should have been legendary. A sea of people standing in 40-degree heat. Depending on who you believe it was anywhere from 20,000 to maybe close to 100,000 fans. Either way, it was huge. And everyone there wanted the same thing, to see the biggest rock band in the world.

The day actually started the right way.

Pearls & Swine opened. I still wonder what ever happened to them. I’m sure a Google search would give me the answers.

Rose Tattoo came out swinging with that filthy slide guitar.

Skid Row were handing bottles of beer into the crowd, even though glass was banned, which was reckless and perfect and exactly what rock and roll used to feel like.

Everything about it felt dangerous and alive.

Until it didn’t.

Because then we waited.

And waited.

The band were supposed to arrive by helicopter. Which sounds cool until you realise you’ve been standing in brutal heat for hours while nothing happens. Eventually the word spread through the crowd around 9pm: Axl Rose was still in Melbourne because he “wasn’t feeling it.”

Not sick. Not stranded. Not injured.

Just… not feeling it.

That’s the moment the magic died.

When the band finally hit the stage more than two hours late, the damage was already done. People were walking away from the show as they played. When “Paradise City” started it was the cue for a mass evacuation.

Thousands of people had missed their last trains home. Remember, this was a raceway miles from proper public transport. Fans were stranded because the frontman of the biggest band on earth decided the schedule was optional.

And that was the pattern.

This wasn’t an isolated rock-star mishap. This was behaviour.

Two years earlier at the Riverport Amphitheater on July 2, 1991, Rose spotted a fan filming the show. Instead of letting security deal with it, he jumped into the crowd himself, attacked people trying to grab the camera, came back onstage and announced:

“Thanks to the lame-ass security, I’m going home.”

Then he smashed the mic and walked off.

The crowd rioted. More than 60 people were injured. Fifteen arrests. The venue wrecked.

A year later came the infamous Montreal disaster at Olympic Stadium on August 8, 1992.

Metallica had already cut their set short after James Hetfield was badly burned by pyrotechnics. That night could have been Rose’s moment to be the hero, to carry the show, save the night, give fans something.

Instead he complained about his voice and walked off early.

The crowd exploded. Cars outside overturned. Fires lit. Windows smashed.

Hero moment… squandered.

And by 1992 the late starts had already become routine. Fans waiting hours was basically part of the ticket price.

Before the Sydney show there had already been the chaos of the Melbourne gig at Calder Park Raceway. The Victorian Ombudsman later produced a 100-page report describing what was arguably one of the worst concerts ever staged in Australia.

One line from that report says everything:

“The area later became a saturated and smelling swamp due to the heavy rains and the urine.”

Melbourne had 40 degree heat, violent winds and driving rain. Sydney just got the furnace, 40-degree heat.

Both crowds got the same treatment.

Because the shows were staged at remote racing venues, thousands of fans had no way out once transport shut down. Add brutal heat and suddenly water started selling for around $7 a bottle, which in 1993 was outrageous.

Meanwhile inside the band, things were falling apart. Rose had effectively isolated himself from the rest of Guns N’ Roses, especially Slash, largely over Slash’s involvement with Michael Jackson.

The divide was so deep Rose travelled on a completely separate helicopter, stayed in a different hotel, and even entered the stage from the opposite side.

That tells you everything.

Look, rock and roll has always had chaos. That’s part of the mythology. The danger, the excess, the unpredictability, that’s the electricity people pay to feel.

But there’s a difference between rock-and-roll chaos and just not giving a damn about the people who paid to see you.

That night at Eastern Creek, Axl Rose had a choice.

He could respect the crowd standing in brutal heat waiting for him. Or he could treat the fans like they didn’t matter.

He chose the second option.

And once you see that choice clearly, it’s very hard to unsee it.

A to Z of Making It, Music, My Stories, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit, Unsung Heroes

Always a Few Years Too Late: Why Australian Hard Rock Albums Missed Their Moment

Talent was never the problem. Songs weren’t the problem. Crowds weren’t the problem. Australia produced world-class live acts with world-class songs, often before the rest of the world caught on.

But.

The albums arrived late because everything around the music moved slower, sideways, or backwards.

This wasn’t coincidence. It was systemic.

Australia didn’t just sit far from the US and UK/Europe, it existed in a different time loop.

By the late ’80s, LA scenes moved in months. UK trends turned over in seasons. And Australia lagged by years.

Not because musicians were behind, but because infrastructure was.

Touring overseas required money bands didn’t have.

Labels wanted proof that bands had an audience before investment. Proof required exposure. Exposure required travel.

That circular logic delayed everything. By the time an Australian band secured a deal, the sound they pioneered locally had often already peaked internationally.

When albums finally arrived, they sounded right, just not right now.

If geography slowed bands down, management actively sabotaged them.

The Australian industry of the era was full of managers with control clauses but no leverage. Contracts restricted bands from signing deals independently.

Bands routinely received offers they couldn’t legally accept.

Deals were turned down “to get a better one.” Momentum was paused “to build hype.”

Albums were delayed “until the timing was right.”

The timing never was.

Candy Harlots are not an outlier here, they are a case study. A Virgin Records deal offered early, declined by management, then re-offered years later after the band had already fractured. Multiply that story across dozens of acts and you start seeing a pattern, not bad luck.

BB Steal finally released their Def Leppard influenced record “On The Edge” in 1992, however the first single of the album came out in 1988.

Roxus released their excellent melodic rock album “Nightstreet” in 1991, and like BB Steal, they had a few years between the first single (1989) and the album release.

But.

Australian hard rock thrived live.

That was both its strength and its trap.

Venues were packed. Residencies mattered. Reputations were earned face-to-face.

Bands became mythical locally without leaving physical evidence behind.

But labels don’t sign myths, they sign masters.

Many bands, gigged relentlessly without recording. Rewrote sets constantly instead of committing songs. Waited for “the real album” moment.

By the time that moment arrived, line-ups had changed, scenes had shifted, or the industry had moved on.

Albums became memorials instead of weapons.

Delay kills cohesion.

The longer an album takes to materialize, the more likely, members age out of the lifestyle, internal politics harden, financial strain builds resentment and key writers leave before the payoff.

Australian bands often lost founding members before recording debut albums.

Not because of ego, but because people don’t wait forever.

When albums finally arrived, they were frequently recorded by survivor line-ups, not the ones that created the original sound. That created a strange historical dislocation: the record didn’t fully reflect the band people fell in love with.

Australian mainstream media didn’t discover hard rock, it reacted to it.

By the time a band reached Triple M rotation or national press coverage or television exposure …the scene had already peaked locally.

Specialty radio (like 2RRR’s Metal Show) carried enormous cultural weight, but limited commercial reach. Those DJs broke bands, but couldn’t break markets.

So albums were greenlit after proof, not during ignition.

That delay mattered.

The final nail wasn’t grunge, it was speed.

Between 1989 and 1992, Glam fragmented and Alternative exploded and the Labels pivoted instantly.

Australian albums arriving in 1991–1993 weren’t bad, they were misaligned. They sounded like records that should have come out in 1989.

And many of them should have.

But systems don’t reward “should have.” They reward timing.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Australia still struggles with this. It’s better in the streaming era but it’s still a problem.

Different genres. Same mechanics.

Local scenes ignite.

Momentum builds.

Gatekeepers (the ones that still exist) hesitate.

By the time support arrives, the moment has shifted.

The lesson isn’t “work harder.” It’s compress the timeline.

Scenes don’t wait. Audiences don’t wait. History doesn’t wait.

An album arriving late doesn’t mean it failed. It means it arrived as evidence, not influence.

That’s why records like “Five Wicked Ways” still hold up. They weren’t chasing trends, they were documenting one that had already happened. That gives them a strange durability, even if it robbed them of impact at the time.

Australian hard rock didn’t miss because it lacked vision.

It missed because the system was built to move after the fire, not during it.

And by the time the album hit the shelves, the fire had already moved on.

Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

When Governments Screw With Music (And Everything Else)

Raise the price of cigarettes and people don’t quit smoking. They buy their smokes from the guy in the back alley with a duffel bag full of Marlboros. That’s the reality in Australia right now. The tax man thought he was going to nudge people into clean lungs and longer lives. Instead, he just created a booming black market.

And it’s not new. America tried it with booze. Prohibition was supposed to turn sinners into saints, but it made millionaires out of gangsters. The War on Drugs? Same story. You criminalize a behavior, you don’t kill demand, you hand it over to the underground.

Music lived this too.

Remember blank CD levies? The government thought, “Well, everybody’s copying music, so let’s tax the media.” You couldn’t even buy a spindle of discs for backing up photos without paying a piracy tax. Did that stop Napster? No. It just made fans hate the industry more. It turned the record labels into the bad guys and turned piracy into a cultural rite of passage. You weren’t just burning a CD, you were sticking it to The Man.

And those anti-piracy lawsuits? Suing twelve-year-olds for downloading Metallica? It didn’t scare people straight. It normalized piracy. It made Kazaa, LimeWire, and torrents explode because everyone suddenly knew where to find free music. If the government and the industry hadn’t been so hell-bent on control, maybe Spotify would’ve shown up ten years earlier.

Same deal with tickets. Governments ban scalping to “protect fans.” What happens? Scalpers just go underground. Paperless tickets, ID-only entry, sounded good on paper. In practice? Fans locked out of shows they paid for. Friends couldn’t swap tickets. And the black market didn’t disappear, it just got meaner, riskier, full of counterfeits. Meanwhile, Ticketmaster legalized scalping with “dynamic pricing.” The very thing the government said was illegal in the parking lot became policy inside the system.

That’s the lesson nobody in power ever learns: you can’t legislate away desire. You can distort prices, you can ban behavior, you can tax the hell out of things people want, but all you do is create shadow economies. You don’t stop smoking, drinking, downloading, or reselling. You just push it somewhere else.

The record industry thought it could dictate how people listen. Governments thought they could dictate how people live. And every time they try, the unintended consequences swamp the original plan.

Because people are wired to find a way. If the front door’s locked, they’ll kick open the side window. If you make the official channel impossible, they’ll build their own.

That’s the throughline, from cigarettes to booze to black market tickets. Governments and corporations think they’re playing chess. But the public is playing guerrilla warfare. And guerrillas always find a way.

Who Owns the Past? Preservation Is Theft Now

Because here’s the truth nobody wants to admit:

Every settlement is about money.
Not truth. Not justice. Not art.

Money.

The record companies don’t care about your dusty old 78s. They don’t care about preservation. They don’t care about whether some kid in Berlin discovers Billie Holiday for the first time and has their life changed. They care about the ledger. About squeezing every last nickel out of a format that no longer even exists in the real world, except as cultural artifact.

And the Internet Archive?

They care too. About survival. About keeping the lights on and the lawsuits at bay. You think they wouldn’t have fought this in court if they had endless money to burn? They folded because lawyers bill by the hour and the music industry has deeper pockets than any nonprofit ever will.

This isn’t about “illegal record stores.” No one is streaming Ella Fitzgerald off the Archive instead of Spotify. This is about control. About the labels saying, “We own history. We decide how you access it. We decide what survives.”

Meanwhile, the music is dying. It’s literally locked in grooves that disintegrate a little more every time a needle touches them. But no, preservation is theft now. Access is piracy. Knowledge itself is contraband.

The labels call it “copyright.” But let’s stop dressing it up: it’s rent-seeking. It’s gatekeeping. It’s an industry clinging to relevance by making sure no one else can touch the vault.

And the Archive? They’ll move on, quietly. Keep scanning books until publishers come for them again. Because that’s the gig. You build something for humanity, and eventually someone shows up with a cease-and-desist and a calculator.

So yeah. Every private settlement is about money.

But every one of these cases?

They’re really about memory. Who controls it. Who owns it. Who gets to say what endures.

And that’s the part that should terrify you.

Here is the article.

A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, My Stories, Stupidity

Four For Friday

It’s a SPOTIFY and HIPGNOSIS special today.

The article I am referencing is from Music Business Worldwide.

NEW ROYALTY MODEL

There will be an annual stream count that artists must meet in order to start generating Spotify royalties.

Spotify is targeting a tiny proportion of tracks on its service that are very low in popularity.

In total, the tracks Spotify is targeting, generate royalties that when combined add up to tens of millions of dollars a year. If no action is taken, these tracks accumulated together will generate around $40 million.

SO WHAT HAPPENS TO THE $40 MILLION?

It will go back into Spotify’s ‘Streamshare’ royalty pot.

And the monies in the pot will be re-distributed amongst the tracks that are, more popular.

Take from the poor so that the rich get richer.

Spotify is telling the world that this targets the royalty payouts whose value is being destroyed or who are not even being paid to the creators because they haven’t met the digital aggregator minimum level for payments. And they are sitting in their bank accounts, earning interest.

Spotify seems to forget that every artist begins with low plays/streams.

MMM. SO THIS HELPS THE ARTISTS HOW

So while Spotify is thinking of keeping streaming money in their bank account to pay the larger artists, Hipgnosis who is an investment fund is doing something fishy.

As you probably are aware, Hipgnosis purchased a lot of rights to valuable intellectual properties. It’s share price doesn’t reflect what the company believes it’s worth.

It wanted to do something sneaky to inflate or boost its share price by selling a stake of the company to another entity owned by Hipgnosis and to use the profits of the sale to pay down debt.

This was all contingent on some mathematical equations about retroactive Copyright payments from the US.

Hipgnosis estimated they were due USD$21.7M however when all the dust settled they are only getting $9.9 million.

So they had this share but back scheme which they have now shelved and their share price went down even further.

All of these schemes and creative accounts on the backs of the rights they own from artists.

And Yes, I do know that the artists sold their rights to Hipgnosis for a large fee.

A to Z of Making It, Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Copyright, Influenced, Music, My Stories, Stupidity

Four For Friday

PET SHOP BOYS vs DRAKE

The Pet Shop Boys need to relax.

The lyric in question is “the west end boys and east side girls”.

The lyrics are the main Chorus words for “West End Girls” by Pet Shop Boys and those same words are said three times in Drake’s song “All The Parties”, which is a shit song by the way.

And the words are not said with any sense of melody or to a backing track of music. They are just said. Spoken like and then auto tuned.

But “East End Girls” is at 239 million streams on Spotify so the Pet Shop Boys are very protective of their intellectual property.

COPYRIGHT TERMS

John Naughton writing for the The Guardian said the following;

…especially copyright – have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying.

Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off.

It’s obviously important that clever people are rewarded for their creativity and the patent system does that quite well.

But if a patent only lasts for 20 years, why on earth should copyright last for life plus 70 years for a novel?

Yes why should it.

When the songs from the 60s were recorded, the Copyright terms for the songs was 28 years with the chance to renew for another 28 years. A total of 56 years.

And yet those songs got retroactively locked up for a long time by a 1978 Amendment to the Copyright Act by Disney which changed the terms to “life of the creator plus 70 years”.

This would mean that Disney’s “Mickey Mouse” created in 1928 and based on the laws of the time, should have been out of Copyright by 1984 however it would be locked up until 2003.

But in the late 90s and with the 2003 date looming, another Disney amendment was made that extended this law for Corporate works to 95 years. So the Mickey Mouse work from 1928 would finally be out of Copyright in 2023.

And 10 months in, Disney hasn’t suffered the financial losses they said they would if they lost the rights to Mickey Mouse.

SITE BLOCKING

In Australia, the Labels and the Movie/TV networks can go to the Federal Court with a list of sites they want blocked and the Federal Court will just approve the lists and the ISPs will then need to block their users from accessing these sites

The Federal Court is meant to review the lists (which they don’t) before rubber stamping the lists (which they immediately do). Because hey, these entities are the good guys, trying to protect Australians from pirates. And the ISPs need to do their bit to protect the business models of the labels and studios.

WHAT I’M CRANKING RIGHT NOW

Savior from Rise Against.

I became a fan because of the Guitar Hero game this song featured on many years ago.

And at 618 million streams it’s definitely making money for whoever holds the rights to it.

Four For Friday

When I started these weekly posts it was a means to keep me blogging during a hectic schedule.

And there was no definitive structure as to what I would cover. But I can see that Cooyright issues keep appearing.

And here is another week devoted to that beautiful term. Copyright. Which was designed to give the creator a limited monopoly on their works so they could create more works.

LETS GET IT OVER WITH

Ed Sheeran can’t get a break. Last week, the case against him from the daughter of Ed Townsend was dropped.

But this week, an organization called “Structured Asset Sales”, (SAS) have started their own litigation.

They control a different one-third stake in Townsend’s copyrights. They “own” the basic notation (musical score) filed at the Copyrights Office decades ago.

When the original case was happening, (SAS) was also a part of it, seeking a “monopoly over a basic musical building block.”

Their case was also thrown out.

But they are appealing their part. Because hey, they created nothing and believe they should be paid for creating nothing. And they want a monopoly on a feel and style.

A big reason why Copyright had expiry terms initially was to stop all this crap. Politicians had a foresight back in the early 1900s to see this coming.

And that changed in the 60s when the labels and book publishers started to amass intellectual property and then started to lobby politicians to change laws and bring in new laws to give these corporations a monopoly on the works.

It’s funny now, how the labels are also getting sued from the very laws they sponsored to benefit them.

124 WEEKS

In April 2021, UFC fighter Jake Paul knocked out Ben Askren in less than two minutes.

Soon after, the popular H3 Podcast on YouTube commented on the fight and showed a clip of the fight.

Event promotor Triller wasn’t happy and issued a copyright infringement lawsuit demanding $50 million in damages.

H3 opted for a fair use defense.

The case is now in its 124th week.

The clip of the fight was 119 seconds long.

Who are the real winners here?

URUGUAY

The Uruguayan Government has a bill in motion which would allow artists to go direct to internet platforms like Spotify and social media sites like Facebook for compensation.

Spotify would still need to pay the existing licensing agreements and if this bill goes ahead could be forced to pay again to the artists direct.

I’m all for artists getting paid but the problem lays with the entities who hold the rights to the songs. They get the majority of the streaming pool and they don’t distribute it back to the artists.

This is a perfect example.

Spotify still needs to honor the licensing agreements with the labels and publishers so these organizations will receive their cut.

And if they are aware of the artist going direct, I am sure that some creative accounting will take place to hold back any payments to the artists.

Anyway. Spotify isn’t happy with the bill and unless it’s changed they will pull out of Uruguay.

As a byproduct, the local music industry which has been growing 20% from streaming revenue will have this source of income come to zero.

ALBERT NAMATJIRA

Albert Namatjira died in 1959. He was an Aboriginal artist, painting the Australian landscapes in watercolors.

This means the works will be part of the public domain and anyone can use them in their works moving forward.

But lawyers for the family are arguing that Copyright should last in perpetuity. Forever. Never expire.

And they are pissed.

The issue here is that the family were getting royalties for his art up until 1983. At that point in time, the government trust that administered the rights sold them to a private organization and the royalties ceased.

It took the family 34 years to get the rights back in 2017, with the proviso they need to relinquish them again in 2029.

Furthermore in the last 5 years, Namatjira’s art has exploded in popularity and has become a valuable intellectual property.

But Copyright was never meant to be a reversionary pension fund.

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