Black out against censorship. Is your favorite website on strike today? Jivewired isn't, but that's just because we are still in development. We are not adjusting the consumer experience on our properties, but we will be helping to drive awareness of key issues around these bills to our fans and users.
Jivewired has and supports many friends in the music business. We do our best to support them with the idea that music comes before business and that the bottom line is the promotion of the indie artist and not always the dollar value associated with said promotion. I can make that claim with 100% honesty based on our financials since starting Jivewired. Up to this point, it has been a very expensive labor of love.
Through Jivewired Radio, we work with indie artists on a daily basis. We pay royalties. We don't steal their music. We share their music legally through our radio station, with 90% of our airtime dedicated to independent artists. We actually purchase a lot of the music we air through sites like iTunes, Amazon, Bandcamp and small and mid-sized independent labels.
Many people don't realize that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is being pushed by the RIAA and could adversely affect the independent artist.
What Is SOPA?
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R. 3261, is the House version of a bill in Congress meant to give law enforcement tools to go after offshore web sites that are alleged to have infringing intellectual property content and/or dedicated to intellectual property theft. The bill covers music, movies, software and even other forms of intellectual property that are vulnerable to counterfeiting such as clothing, sports memorabilia, photographs and pornography.
The bill could also enable the US Department of Justice to seek court orders preventing payment processors and ad networks from facilitating transactions on these sites. The DOJ can also order that these sites be blocked, filtered and/or removed from the Domain Name Registry, an international directory service of sites on the internet. DOJ can also prevent these sites from appearing in search engine results. Further, Internet Service Providers can be asked to block their users from these alleged infringing sites.
The Effect Of Piracy
The music industry has claimed for over a decade now that most or all of the loss of revenue in the music business has been due to digital theft. SOPA allegedly aims to end piracy and counterfeiting. On the surface, that seems to be a good thing. I think we can all agree that piracy needs to be stopped. If enough people steal music or other forms of art, art will eventually cease to exist.
As claimed by the RIAA via it's website::
In the decade since peer-to-peer file-sharing site Napster emerged in 1999, music sales in the U.S. have dropped 47 percent, from $14.6 billion to $7.7 billion.
A British study in 2009 by think tank Demos found that downloaders buy more or the same amount of music as those who do not illegally file share. Of those that buy more music after downloading, 93% bought CDs/vinyl or paid downloads. 78% bought CDs/vinyl and 54% bought paid downloads (source: Demos data).
The US Government Accounting Office released a 2010 report that supports the above findings in some form or another. But most importantly they stress that industry numbers assume a 1:1 substitution rate for piracy to predicted purchases. The substitution rate determines what percentage of pirated downloads would convert to paid downloads if piracy was eliminated. The RIAA claims the conversion would be 100% or a 1:1 substitution rate. This is a ridiculous and baseless claim.
More:
"So as we can see, the actual effects of piracy on recorded music though not negligible or minimal, are nowhere near what is claimed by the RIAA. In fact there seems to be at least an 80% net effect discrepancy in the RIAA’s report vs other independent, objective analyses." ~ Greg Sandoval, CNET
Bandcamp, an online music marketing platform heavily used by indie musicians, has new data that supports this. Their foundation is relatively simple: If you give fans an easy way to support the artist and offer them a great music experience, you can turn potential piracy into real purchases.
It’s also worth noting that while the RIAA have been complaining about piracy and declining music sales, CD Baby and TuneCore (the main aggregators for digital music distribution used by indie artists) are reporting sales in excess of $350 Million dollars in just the last 3 years. In each of those cases, there was no down year.
The RIAA’s answer to piracy, "their investment in education by litigation" (a quote attributed to Mitch Bainwol at a Leadership Music Digital Summit event) effort yielded the following results:
Between 2006-2008, the RIAA spent $64M to recover $1.4M in damages. This is a 2% return.
In 2008 alone, they spent $17.6M to get $391,000. This is a 0.02% return.
By any objective measure, this is an epic fail based on cost vs. recovery. As far as fighting piracy itself, it is similarly anemic. If a fraction of that $64M was invested in innovation and legitimate educational efforts as opposed to litigation and stagnation, the music industry could develop a more robust and honest business model.
It should also be noted that very recently the RIAA has fought to lower the royalty rate for music recordings from 9 cents to 5 cents. Even more recently, the RIAA argued that most recordings are not eligible for copyright recapture.
We can therefore surmise that the Recording Industry Of America's claim that they stand for artist and songwriter rights is disingenuous, minimally. So who is the RIAA really fighting for? Most likely the major labels.
The conglomeration of major record labels over the past 25 years to four singular entities has done more to hurt music than anything. Obviously, giving a small group of corporations nearly complete control over a single industry [music] eliminates opportunity for the tens of thousands of independent artists with no label affiliation. The RIAA is strongly affiliated with and has the undying support of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group.
What This Means To The Independent Artist
The entrenched old guard want SOPA because they feel major labels and middlemen need to control distribution. In turn indies are denied an equitable market share. If anything, this year has proven that indies need to be awarded more opportunities. A larger segment of the listening public deserve the right to listen to indie based music, even on commercial radio stations in primary markets.
The inherent danger SOPA and PIPA present is that in the process of protecting corporate interests, it will cripple or even obliterate the distribution, access & discovery platforms the Internet provides for independent artists.
SOPA hurts the smaller and independent sites whose sole purpose is to promote independent musicians, and in turn, hurts the indie artists who do not have the support of the major labels to promote and distribute their music. Ultimately, this could lead to unstoppable erosion and an exponentially dying community left with no way to defend itself.
Furthermore, the independent artists and small and mid-sized independent labels, for that matter, will NEVER have the lobbying presence to protect the sites that promote and distribute their music from unwarranted shutdown. This bill, if passed, will shut down live streaming, shout casting, user generated content and have a chilling effect on podcasting and social media.
Wait, there's more.
Besides some concerns of censorship, the bill presents some troubling moral and legal issues. Apparently almost any site can fall under this definition. Only .us, .net and .org sites are exempt from the application of this law.
The amendment’s modified definition of sites that can be targeted for suits by the Attorney General remains entirely open-ended. Any site is subject to prosecution as an infringement site if its domain name, were it domestic, would be eligible for seizure. Seizure law allows for confiscation of any property that is used in any manner or part to commit or facilitate illegal activity. That means a website with 99% lawful activity and no bad intent can qualify as an infringement site based on a small amount of infringing activity by users, including those users who upload content.
End result: The Attorney General would have carte blanche to go after virtually any user-generated content site, whenever it wants to, and without due process. They are all punishable as infringement sites by the terms of this bill.
This puts sites like ReverbNation, Sonicbids and Jivewired squarely in the site-lines of the DOJ. Why? Because their content delivery networks may exist outside of the United States. There are also cloud services that utilize servers outside of the US that are properties or contractors of US based companies.
DNS filtering or rerouting is the most egregious form of censorship proposed in SOPA. When you block, filter and reroute net traffic, you control what the public gets to see and hear online. The Stanford Law Review published a position paper on this called "Don't Break The Internet." Piracy is bad. But censorship is worse.
But They Are Stealing My Music!
I believe piracy is a real problem. No question. Piracy will never be completely eradicated. Expending an obscene amount of resources to fight piracy just seems like ridiculous overkill. It seems we would be better served investing those resources in a better experience for the music consumer and for a more efficient distribution service for the content creator, one that puts 100% of net sales revenues into the hands of said creator.
Creating and enforcing laws to protect intellectual property is important. No argument there. But smart laws are better than just any laws. When is the recording industry going to stop stepping over dollars to pick up shiny pennies?
When things are bad, it’s nice to deflect fault away from our own shortsightedness. Independents as a whole would be better served trying to capture data as to where they record the most impressions globally. As Bandcamp has demonstrated – a potential pirate is a logical consumer.
As an independent, if you are not making your music available and marketing direct to fans, you are missing a huge opportunity. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Ultimately, it is up to you to choose whether or not to voice your opinion, and with which side your voice stands. If you'd like to join others in voicing your opposition on January 18, here's a link to a Facebook Anti-SOPA Event designed to assist in raising awareness.
Thank you for reading,
Michael Canter
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