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RIAA Forces YouTube to Remove Free Guitar Lessons
Journal written by Bushido Hacks (788211) and posted by
Zonk
on Sat Jul 07, 2007 01:21 AM
from the quit-trying-to-learn-things-you-ungrateful-grubs dept.
from the quit-trying-to-learn-things-you-ungrateful-grubs dept.
Bushido Hacks write "Is it so wrong to learn how to play the guitar? According to NPR, a record company ordered YouTube to remove videos of a man who offered to show people how to play the guitar for free. One of the songs that he taught was copyrighted, and as a result over 100 of his videos were removed from the internet. 'Since he put his Web site up last year, he has developed a long waiting list for the lessons he teaches in person. And both he and Taub say that's still the best way to learn. If someone tells Sandercoe to take down his song lessons, he says he will. But his most valuable videos are the ones that teach guitar basics -- things like strumming, scales and finger-picking. And even in the digital age, no one holds a copyright on those things.' How could this constitute as infringement if most musicians usually experiment to find something that sounds familiar?"
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Fair use (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fair use (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Fair use (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Fair use (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Fair use (Score:5, Informative)
People have figured out chords to songs from the radio for decades. Is playing the song for a friend, or teaching them the chords, a violation of copyright? Then I should be signing checks to the RIAA every other day, it seems. But that is silly; it's just simple sharing. Doing it over the internet is nothing new (although, doing it over the internet commercially is something else. If anyone makes money, it should be the artists).
Here is a little sharing of my own. I figured out the chords to 'Cloudbusting' by Kate Bush the other day. But I won't post the actual chords (which might be 'copyright violation', supposedly), instead, I modulated the song to a different key. So actually they aren't the chords to anything: And anyway these are probably inaccurate, like 95% of internet chords.
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Oops... I was wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
Justin could make good money selling DVDs. More power to him for chosing not to, but he doesn't have the right to make that choice on the songwriters' behalf.
Justin does sell DVDs, as you can see at his site [justinguitar.com]. So really, these freebies are in part adverts for his products.
Essentially, he is using copyright material for his advertising campaign. It's no different from when Coca-Cola's marketing people ripped off 7 Seconds of Love's song Ninja for an Argentinian TV ad. Whose side was everybody on then?
HAL.
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Re:Fair use (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is Madness - eradicate all copyright! (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine two scenarios:
1. you write successful book/album and it stays copyrighted indefinitely, bringing you income forever
2. you write successful book/album and the copyright expires in 14 years, depriving you of income
Under which scenario are you MORE likely to write a new book/album?
> J K Rowling (Harry Potter) was an unemployed single mother when she wrote her first novel.
And it was a hugely successful novel. She could easily have hung up her writer's cap and lived off royalties from the first book, but she felt compelled to write more Potter novels. Why? Just for the money? You want to tell her that to her face?
It's time to stamp out the myth that "without copyright, nothing creative would ever be produced." It wasn't true in the past, it won't be true in the future. The only thing that won't be produced is fat-cat middlemen who think music isn't something to be ENJOYED, it's merely something to be bought and sold!
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Re:This is Madness - eradicate all copyright! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is Madness - eradicate all copyright! (Score:5, Insightful)
Media companies don't want to encourage the creation of new works, they want artificial scarcity. They want to create the impression that making music, making pictures, writing stories, and making videos is some kind of black art that only they can do and that costs millions in investments. As far as they're concerned, if teaching music were outlawed, it would be all the better because they could just keep selling the crap they are selling right now.
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This bit is always amusing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Come on, guys. The vast majority of rock music uses the same few chords. They're not secrets. There's really no use in trying to hide them!
And, why does the RIAA always try to squelch those who are interested in learning guitar? Don't they need a steady influx of "talent" to exploit?
Re:This bit is always amusing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This bit is always amusing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This bit is always amusing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This bit is always amusing... (Score:5, Interesting)
The number of songs that use a standard blues progression is STAGGERING. Half of a Blues Brother's CD is straight blues progression, which you can find being recorded by any other reasonable blues artist.
The number of songs based off of George Gershwin's I've Got Rhythm are so numerous, jazz improvisers know the progression by heart so they can be more versatile at jam sessions and gigs.
What's the lesson, RIAA? Lack of a copyright, or non-enforcement of a copyright, produced MORE art. Enforcement of a non-existent copyright KILLS art. The RIAA is killing the goose in search of more golden eggs.
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Re:This bit is always amusing... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, no. In 1994, SCOTUS found that using a melody from another song is legal fair use [benedict.com], if the new version is genuinely a new song, even if the entire song is noticeably similar to the orignal.
Anything else would effectively be a ban on the creation of new music - there are extremely few places where genuinely new melodies are being created, and most of those are experimenting with bizarre tunings or similar things. The number of possible pleasant-sounding melody themes in the 12-note scale is not so large that we're still capable of finding large numbers of new ones. Most new songs just put existing melodies together in new ways. SCOTUS declined to ban the creation of new music, so there is no such thing as a copyright on a melody, only on the complete song.
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Re:This bit is always amusing... (Score:4, Informative)
"The RIAA is usually (more) rabid about defending guitar tabs and such... I honestly find it funny, in a pathetic sort of way."
Nope -- the RIAA doesn't care about guitar tabs, either. The RIAA has had nothing to do with the shutting down of the guitar tab sites, just as they had nothing to do with this -- the submitter was lying, and he fooled you good and proper. All the record companies care about is the copyright on the recordings. That's why they sue people for trading copies of recordings.
I guess it's easy to use "RIAA" as a catch-all for anybody who attempts to protect their rights in a way that we find distasteful, but I think it's important to understand the difference between record companies and publishing companies, and the respective rights that they hold. To fight your enemy, you must first understand them.
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The guitar website in question (Score:5, Informative)
I'm calling bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
The RIAA owns the copyrights on recordings. Publishing companies own the rights to music and lyrics. If it's an "unauthorized public performance," it's ASCAP and BMI -- who represent the rights of composers and songwriters -- who get you. Not the record companies. Not the RIAA.
That's the ugly truth here -- sometimes it's the composers and the lyricists who are the bad guys. Not everybody who protects their rights (or, perhaps, overprotects in this case) is the RIAA.
This raises the question: did the submitter really think the RIAA was behind this, or was he having a joke at Slashdotters' expense? If the latter, it's worked -- there are already several posts from people who are just shocked that the RIAA would do such a thing.
If this pisses you off, you should be upset at ASCAP or BMI -- who, again, are run by and for composers and lyricists. The RIAA doesn't have a monopoly on evil.
Re:I'm calling bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
A followup to my own post. The copyright claim was filed by ABKCO [wikipedia.org], which happens to be both a record company and a publishing company. So, stating that they were hassled by a record company is correct -- because in this case, the record company has a music publishing arm.
Per the Wikipedia article, ABKCO was also behind the Verve / Bittersweet Symphony mess. It appears that the article has already been updated to reflect ABKCO's action against the guitar lesson fellow.
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Does the article actually say that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, the phrase "RIAA" doesn't even appear in the NPR article.
Didn't anyone bother to proof read the article before posting it, or did another strikingly similar (but different) article about guitar and YouTube get linked?
Not necessarily "Fair Use" (Score:5, Informative)
One of the tests of fair use is if the offending use of said work is non-commercial. While the videos themselves are available for free, they contained advertisements to the teacher's pay site: they could be construed as advertising for it. Thus, the work could be construed as being "for profit" and thus not falling under fair use.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with this interpretation, but I do think it's a good idea to give both sides of the story.
1 Song = 100 Videos? (Score:4, Insightful)
Fair use (Score:5, Informative)
False. Check the page the U.S. Copyright Office provides [copyright.gov] about fair use provisions. Among the things they explicitly say are covered by fair use and have been tested in the courts, they list "reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson", in particular when used for "nonprofit educational purposes".
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Re:Fair use (Score:4, Insightful)
and before someone says "but there's a link to his website so he's technically profiting!"... no, he isn't. Anyone can watch those lessons online for free, he didn't sell it to you. Now if you decide you like his work and want more lessons and want to pay him for lessons that's fine, but you didn't pay him for the original lesson. Think of it as a teacher showing you something in a class, but then you decide to hire the teacher for private tutoring.
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