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Comment by anon1234321 | Hacker News Reader

How about hurting the record companies, who front most of the capital for artists, pay them salaries, etc.

> pay them salaries

You must not know much about how the recording industry works. The record companies "pay" artists by giving them lending them money, the payments for which are deducted from their royalty percentage (e.g. the record company take 90% of the cost of the CD, and the artist gets 10%, then the "loan payment" comes out of the artist's 10% royalty).

What you think of the terms between artists and labels is not really relevant to the matter at hand. No one is forced to sign with a big label. If you want someone's money, then you have to be willing to play by their rules. If the contract terms are too one-sided, then other labels would undercut the competition by offering better terms. This is what happens.

But again, totally irrelevant to YouTube's massive copyright heist. There's no justification for basing your business model on copyright infringement. No justification for having an asinine takedown system that doesn't change the fact that the top result will be yet another illegal copy of the video you just spent forever trying to get taken down.

It's incredibly obvious you have a dog in this fight and are incredibly biased. It's well known almost every recording artist gets screwed, and that it's easier to fight fans than their bosses. Take what you've written about startup youtube, and applied it to TODAY'S youtube, but flipped it to be 100000% anti-consumer, you'd be on the right track. Thanks to your record companies, I can no longer broadcast my gameplay if the game itself has coded-in music, because my video will get flagged as stolen content. If I'm recording a 3 hour video, and a friend walks in and his ringtone goes off and happens to be 4 secs of a song....I now have my entire video removed for content theft, though I've never done such a thing.

This all happened thanks to the Viacom lawsuit[1], which forced youtube to be the most pro-recording industry, and anti-consumer popular site ever. Now, an automated bot trolls everyone's videos for any knid of match, and if flagged the video is automatically taken down unless you file an appeal. In other words, guilty until proven innocent. Unless you are a record label, then it's innocent until proven guilty.

Did you miss the Family Guy fiasco[2], where they used a 7 year old video of Nintendo gameplay footage in the show, the bot saw it as "Fox Owned", and had it removed for copyright infringement.

The youtube era you describe was for a few months-years. We've been dealing with the bullshit youtube became EVER SINCE. Forgive me if the complaints of a record company insider (in whatever capacity you may be), falls on deaf ears.

This is reminiscent of Lars Ulrich complaining about Napster and the internet in general. Only even he admitted he was wrong about that.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-viacom-lawsuit-idUS...

[2] https://consumerist.com/2016/05/20/fox-swipes-youtube-clip-o...

I actually have exactly zero skin in this game. I'm no fan of current copyright law, with it's ridiculously long terms. I'm posting from a throwaway because trashing Google, one of the biggest employers in the US, is a career-limiting move.

> It's incredibly obvious you have a dog in this fight and are incredibly biased.

Because you disagree with him, apparently.

> What you think of the terms between artists and labels is not really relevant to the matter at hand.

The grandparent wasn't opinion, it was correction of an inaccurate statement of fact in the great-grandparent, to wit, the false claim that record companies pay artists salaries, such that you could "steal from record companies" by piracy and hurt their income (and jeopardize the artists "employment" and "salary") separately from directly hurting artists income. Artists aren't salaried employees, they are contractors who receive sales royalties from record companies. Therefore, the scenario presented in the great grandparent is contrary to fact.

If you don't sell any copies, you usually don't owe the advance back; it's yours to keep and the label eats the cost. It's not a salary but it has a somewhat similar effect and I stand by my point. Nevertheless, I was wrong and I do stand corrected.

> it's yours to keep and the label eats the cost

Not quite. It's structured as a loan. As far as book-keeping goes, they write it off as a sunk cost, but you still owe them. The contracts usually tie you to them for a period of time (or something like X albums). If you make a single album and it flops, you are still tied to them. If they decide not to give you the money to make more albums your music career is basically over.

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