Business

These music stars are taking the piracy fight to Capitol Hill

By
Claire Atkinson
Published April 1, 2016, 2:12 a.m. ET

Hundreds of the country’s most successful recording artists are sick and tired of getting ripped off via pirated videos — and are demanding Congress do something about it.

The powerful group — Katy Perry, Billy Joel, deadmau5, Steven Tyler, Christina Aguilera and scores of others — wants lawmakers on Capitol Hill to sharpen the teeth of the current copyright law, 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to keep illegal videos off streaming services like Google’s YouTube.

Currently, complaints made about the pirated work result in the video being taken down — and then re-posted, sometimes minutes later.

The streaming services, the artists, managers and music labels said, benefit greatly from the rampant piracy — at the expense of the artists.

The lobbying effort is being coordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America.

The musicians fired off a letter to the US Copyright Office on Thursday, the final day for comment on proposed changes in Congress to the DCMA.

Music managers pushing for the changes said:

  • Music creators can’t police the billions of Web sites
  • Takedown notices are useless when videos get re-posted
  • The notice and takedown system doesn’t keep up with technological innovation.

Roughly 1 billion takedown notices will be sent to Google alone in 2016, the RIAA said in its 147-page report.

“A law that might have made sense in 1998 is now not only obsolete but actually harmful,” reads a letter from the group.

In 2014, the association said it sent a quarter-million takedown notices to just one site, called — and 97 percent of those notices were for the same song. The site claimed DMCA safe harbors protected it.

Artists’ managers involved include Irving Azoff, as well as Bruno Mars’ manager, Brandon Creed.

Just as the artists’ letter hit the Copyright Office, so did a 100-page joint brief from 18 music organizations looking for reforms to the law.

Suggestions from these groups include the implementation of so-called “audio fingerprinting,” which bars redistribution of unlicensed music; metadata analysis, which can identify possible infractions; and automatic removal or disabling of links to previously noted pirated content.

Meanwhile, a report from researchers at the University of California and Columbia University claim that more than 28 percent of all takedown requests are “questionable,” according to a report on Web site,

Google is expected to file its responsibility response on Friday.