Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes

The most ridiculous part of music copyrights is that the DMCA explicitly encodes statutory damages of at least 750$ up to 30,000$, and up to 150,000$ for willful infringement per work [1].

Yet musical compositions are subject to compulsory mechanical copyright licenses at a fixed rate of 12.4 cents or 2.38 cents per minute, whichever is higher [2] for music covers [3] (i.e. same song, different singer/band or even same singer different time). Meaning you can make a cover without permission as long as you pay the copyright holder at the rates specified in the law.

So we already have cheap compulsory licensing for musical compositions which caps damages at a 1/6,000 to 1/240,000 of the DMCA rates. We should just have compulsory mechanical licensing for recordings as well.

If we really want to get crazy, we could even let copyright holders declare a compulsory licensing rate per work then multiply that by some number to get their intellectual property value and then charge them property tax on that intellectual property. So you can set a high compulsory licensing rate, but then you have to pay more property tax on your income generating property or vice versa. This allows valuable works to be protected to support the artists making them, while allowing less valuable works to be easily usable by whoever wants to.

[1] https://uwf.edu/go/legal-and-consumer-info/digital-millenium...

[2] https://copyright.gov/licensing/m200a.pdf

[3] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ73.pdf

As a former film student I can say from experience that licensing rights can be expensive. And how expensive depends on the usage. E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema.

Want to play any popular music in your cinema film? The license can easily cost 25.000 € (for film students that is typically more than the budget).

Smaller labels make better prices tho and sometimes the artist lets you use it for free (if it is their choice to make).

> E.g. playing a song at a live event is different from using it in television which is different from using it in your youtube video which is different from using it in a film for cinema.

Not a criticism, just an addendum for anyone interested:

In the US, almost every bar/restaurant/venue is an ASCAP licensee, and it is relatively cheap (around $10/year/occupant for all forms of media), so a venue that wants to play live or recorded music, television broadcasts, etc., and seats 100 people would pay about $1000/year.

It's a very good price, and one of the main reasons that at any concert hall or arena, you will hear even huge artists playing covers without having to get them pre-approved.