Cultura Voice

Do you remember when the music industry was clawing at YouTube’s throat? C’mon; it hasn’t been  that  long. Three years ago, for example, then-RIAA boss Cary Sherman was claiming: “It makes no sense that it takes a thousand on-demand streams of a song for creators to earn $1 on YouTube, while services like Apple and Spotify pay creators $7 or more for those same streams.” More recently, of course, there’s been the battle over Article 13 (now 17) in Europe – the legislation aiming to make digital services legally responsible for copyright infringement on their platforms. Having slammed YouTube for its supposed “carpet-bombing propaganda” ahead of the vote on Article 13 (and the Copyright Directive) by European lawmakers, a raft of music biz orgs brought out the bunting when, in April last year, the European Council gave the bill the green light. Now, thanks to Brexit, UK politicians now say Article 13/17 won’t actually be adopted in Britain after all. ...

How do you know when a copyright has been infringed? For years, this wasn’t even a question people asked in China because it was so obvious. The guys on the corner with carts full of bootleg CDs and DVDs, the illegal BitTorrents and download sites – all of them were wantonly and flagrantly engaging in copyright infringement. Indeed, infringement was their business model. If they weren’t offering copies of copyrighted works, nobody would be interested. Slowly but surely, though, China’s enforcement of copyright infringement has improved – in large part because large Chinese companies like Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent now control the rights to a great deal of content and  their  business models are based on people not getting such content for free somewhere else. The BAT companies have turned to Chinese agencies and courts to enforce their rights, evidenced by a concomitant surge in copyright-related litigation. We wrote about this last year in Copyright Protection in C...