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Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes

(savingcountrymusic.com)
153 points breve | 2 comments | 31 Aug 25 05:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Veserv ◴[31 Aug 25 07:47 UTC] No.45081271[source]▶
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

replies(2): >>45081487 #>>45088129 #
1. tzs ◴[31 Aug 25 23:47 UTC] No.45088129[source]▶
> 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

That's not from the DMCA. Those statutory damages were there long before the DMCA. (Also, they can be reduced to $200 in the case of innocent infringement). The DMCA did add some new statutory damages for violations of the new rights DMCA added to US copyright law, such as circumventing protection.

> 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.

There are two things not quite correct here. First, the money you pay the copyright owner under a compulsory license is not damages. It is royalties.

Second, it is not capped. Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work.

If I take that $0.124 compulsory license and my cover of your song sells 5 million copies I'm going to owe you 5 million x $0.124 = $620 000. I suppose as a practical matter it is capped because there are only so many people and most aren't going to by more than one song. The best selling song so far is Bing Cosby's version of Irvine Berlin's "White Christmas" with 50 million sold, so $6 200 000 if that had been under a mechanical license at today's rates.

For statutory damages the number of copies involved only matters in so far as the court might take it into account in deciding where along that $200 - $150 000 range the award should fall.

If I made and sold for example 10 000 unauthorized copies of your work and you found out about 5 000 of them and sued me, asking for statutory damages and won, and then later you found out about that other 5 000 and wanted damages for those to you would be out of luck. The statutory damages award from your first suit covers all my infringement of that work up to the time of that suit.

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2. Veserv ◴[01 Sep 25 01:56 UTC] No.45088740[source]▶
> First, the money you pay the copyright owner under a compulsory license is not damages. It is royalties.

The rates for compulsory licensing cap your compensation and thus provide a reasonable cap on your compensatory damages.

> Those are per copy. Statutory damages are per work.

The most infamous cases were lawsuits against individuals for their individual per-work downloads, or per-work uploads regardless of the number of copies distributed [1][2]. From the perspective of the individual who is unlikely to create more than a handful of copies per work they intend to consume, per-work is largely indistinguishable from per-copy. So, if they made a single copy of a work, which is the most likely case, they are liable for 750$ per-work, yet if musical recordings were subject to the same statutory compulsory licensing as musical compositions, they would only be liable for 0.124$ per copy, a nearly 6000x difference between compensatory and statutory damages for their single copy of a work.

Of course, it could be reasonable to have statutory damages as a punitive measure to dissuade copyright infringement, but the Supreme Court has ruled that punitive damages in excess of a 10:1 ratio with compensatory damages is almost certainly unconstitutional in a lawsuit [3]. That is not binding on Congress with respect to law, but it is certainly troubling that we have decided that music copyright infringement is so heinous as to demand a nearly 600x greater punitive damage ratio compared to what is already at the limits of what is considered constitutional when no specific ratio is specified.

[1] https://www.dcba.org/mpage/vol210209art3

[2] https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages