Part 4: Internet Intermediaries
Jeremy: OK, so here’s the question. Should anyone have to pay, like for example should a TV station have to pay for broadcasting it?
Pearl: If they’re making money off of it, yeah. I don’t make money off of Beyoncé’s music.
Jeremy: OK, so people who make money off of music should have to pay the artist for their work.
Pearl: Yeah, it’s not your art, it’s someone else’s art.
Jeremy: So that’s the ethical principle. OK. That makes sense. If you sell Linux CDs — talking about software now —ethically you ought to be using some of the proceeds to give to the developers of the software. And if you don’t, should the law be able to force you to do that?
Pearl: Say that again?
Jeremy: So if you have a recording of Beyoncé that you got hold of somehow, and you released it and sold it, should the law require you to give that money or some of it back to Beyoncé? That’s a better example than the Linux CDs, because the license explicitly allows you to copy those for free.
Pearl: Yeah, because Beyoncé’s the one who made it.
Jeremy: So that’s where the theft, the idea of theft comes in. If you’re making money off the author, then not helping the author would be like theft.
Pearl: Because they could be making that money, but they’re not, you’re making that money with their stuff.
Jeremy: OK, that makes sense, so it’s still an ethical thing. Copyright should only apply to people who make money off of people. That makes sense and that would make a good argument. I can see myself comprehending that, and it makes a lot of sense.
Pearl: You should come over to my side. (laughs)
Jeremy: So the recording industry would like you to change your ethical point of view so that artists who don’t want to allow people to listen to their music aren’t seen as doing anything wrong, and you’re the one who’s seen as doing the wrong thing. So they want to flip the ethics.
Pearl: Then if you want to charge for every little thing, your art is not going to reach the audience that you would ultimately like, and then you’ll make even less money.
Jeremy: So do you think it’s a lost cause for them? Because America has changed a lot in this era of Trump. It’s getting more about the money, and less about the art. So can you see a future in which young people change their mind on that and say no, if I create something I want to be paid every time someone listens to it? Do you think it’s impossible to convince young people to think that?
Pearl: It wouldn’t work. Like, you don’t have those, like, just starting out music producers that put all of their best new songs on SoundCloud for free. Imagine if they charged people, they would never get anywhere. No one would share their music or link to them, because everybody would have to pay.
Jeremy: Should SoundCloud have to pay?
Pearl: Pay who?
Jeremy: The artists who upload their stuff to Soundcloud. You said before if you’re making money off content…
Pearl: Oh, are they making money out of it?
Jeremy: SoundCloud are making money because they’re getting advertising, probably.
Pearl: Yeah, but they’re not making money off of like, that song directly. SoundCloud is giving you a service, allowing you to share your music with the world.
Jeremy: So they should be able to use people’s music for free, and make money off people’s music for free?
Pearl: They’re not making money off of your music, they’re making money off of being a provider of space, like YouTube.
Jeremy: OK, so this is really relevant. This chapter of the book will be called “Internet Intermediaries”. If you are SoundCloud and you make money from general advertisements run on your website, you shouldn’t you have to pay the artists anything, if the artists voluntarily upload their stuff.
Pearl: Right.
Jeremy: But what if they didn’t voluntarily upload their stuff? Like, if you are a deejay and you upload your stuff on SoundCloud, willingly, knowingly that people are going to get it for free, SoundCloud shouldn’t have to pay you anything, correct? But what if it was unwillingly? What if someone downloaded your album on BitTorrent and then put it on SoundCloud, and people went there to play the song that came from BitTorrent, should the artists get anything then? Because in that case they haven’t consented to their stuff being there.
Pearl: Are you remixing it?
Jeremy: No, you are just taking a copy of a CD that you bought.
Pearl: Well that’s why they won’t allow you to do that on SoundCloud.
Jeremy: OK, fair enough. It’s fair enough that if you don’t want to be on SoundCloud, you can take yourself off SoundCloud.
Pearl: But like, YouTube pays you money per view only if you enable ads for the first five seconds of your video or whatever. And if you don’t, they won’t pay you.
“Should it make any difference then how music ends up on a site like SoundCloud?”
Jeremy: You might not be expecting any kind of payment most of the time when you upload your stuff to a site like that. Or if you do, it’s just because you’ve got a site like YouTube that will pay you a little bit for ads. Should it make any difference then how music ends up on a site like SoundCloud? If the artist uploaded it themselves, SoundCloud shouldn’t have to pay. And if the site uploads it, they should have to pay.
Pearl: That’s the thing, SoundCloud doesn’t upload things on their own.
Jeremy: But if they did, they would have to pay.
Pearl: If they did, yeah.
Jeremy: OK but here’s the thing. On sites like YouTube, 90 percent of the songs are uploaded by members of the public rather than by the website itself or by the artists. In that case should the website have to pay?
Pearl: Should YouTube have to pay just because I ripped my CD onto YouTube?
Jeremy: Should YouTube have to pay the artist if they are running ads on a video that you uploaded, as a user?
Pearl: Well that’s why YouTube has those monetary policies against people doing that.
Jeremy: OK, but they do it anyway, right? So if someone does that, should YouTube have to pay?
Pearl: Yeah, but that’s why those songs get reported and they don’t get monetary… they lose their AdSense if they figure it out. Because YouTube knows it’ll have to pay.
Jeremy: Actually what happens is the copyright holder has the choice of taking the content down or taking its AdSense revenue. And YouTube has deals with major content owners that give it permission to do that in advance. So that’s the way things work now. Do you think the way that YouTube does it is a good way for things to work?
Pearl: I think YouTube works pretty well as it is. You’ll get money if it’s original content, they’ll take away your AdSense if it’s not. You can watch the Vevo version of the video or you can watch the bootleg version of the video, you know? One of them makes money and the other doesn’t, and it’s up to you to decide which one you want to watch.
Jeremy: Cool. So this has been the Internet intermediaries chapter of the book.
Part 5 of this interview, titled Copyright Enforcement, was published on January 19.
