![]() “Whatever we think about piracy or hackers, we should be less judge-y about it. “There’s something about pushing the envelope and challenging the rules that creates this new marketplace of opportunity that made music much more accessible to us today,” she says. Jessica Silbey, Professor and Yanakakis Faculty Research Scholar People had grown accustomed to the idea that they shouldn’t have to buy a CD to have access to their favorite music. Beloved by college students DJing parties from their dorm-room desktops, Napster was shut down by a federal judge in 2000 for copyright infringement. The MMA passed the US House of Representatives and Senate unanimously in 2018, a testament to the widely acknowledged reality that copyright law had failed to keep up with changes in the way people listen to and share music.Īn early-and unwelcome to the traditional music industry-harbinger of that change was Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing service that allowed people to play and exchange music for free online. When we debate, under the MMA, who gets which money, we’re losing sight of what copyright law is for.” The Napster Effect ![]() That’s what copyright law is supposed to do. “Copyright law is a public good, meant to promote progress. “Copyright law is not just for copyright owners,” says BU Law Professor Jessica Silbey, whose work explores intellectual property in the digital age. Article one, section eight of the US Constitution gives Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” And early in 2021, musicians organized protests at more than 30 Spotify offices around the world, demanding increased transparency in the company’s business model and more money per stream.īattles over royalties are nothing new in the music industry, and neither is the centuries-old balancing act behind them. The services-Spotify, Amazon, Google, and Pandora-then challenged those new rates in court and won on the grounds that they hadn’t been given proper notice of the increase. In 2020, the Copyright Royalty Board increased the rates streaming services would be required to pay to songwriters and publishers for the use of their musical works. “That’s the baseline, and then we go from there.” “I love to start off my course by saying, ‘Music licensing is a shit show,’” laughs Taylor, who serves as assistant director of the BU/MIT Startup Law Clinic. The copyright regime for music streaming is so complicated and so uncertain that Spotify identified several licensing scenarios as risks when it released its financial results for the second quarter of 2021. They pay licensing fees to songwriters and publishers, record labels, and performing rights organizations, among others. ![]() They pay to reproduce and distribute musical compositions, to publicly perform musical compositions, to reproduce or distribute sound recordings of musical compositions, and to publicly perform sound recordings. But they also must pay to license the rights to every song they offer on their platforms. ![]() In 2020, streaming services in the United States brought in $10.1 billion in revenue-83 percent of the music industry’s total. In 2020, streaming services accounted for 83% of revenue in the music industry ![]()
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