The 1709 Blog

Australia's art resale scheme: can it ever be self-sustaining?

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From John R. Walker, one of our Australian readers, comes this fascinating and provocative item:</div>
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"The Australian government's minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, has just announced an additional $700,000 in public funds to subsidize the operation of the art resale scheme. This brings the total publicly funded commitment to nearly $2.5 million, plus if you add the $1+ million that <b>CAL </b>(appointed collection agency) has allocated, the scheme is rapidly exceeding a cost of $3 million:  so far, it has delivered just $600,000 in payments to artists. The Government <b>statement </b>says:  "As the income from resales increases, it is anticipated the scheme will become self-sustaining." </blockquote>
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 The scheme was premised on a market size and turnover that was, even at the height of the boom, wildly overestimated by a factor of at least 2 or more.  Even a fully retrospective and compulsory scheme such as enacted in the UK, would not be self-funding in Australia; the long term market here is simply not large enough. </blockquote>
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 This government's policies have had a devastating effect on the art market: the resale scheme  has undermined confidence resulting in reduced demand and, at the same time the ruling on SMSF (Self-managed super funds) will result in a massive over-supply of indigenous art for resale on to a reduced market. In this situation, the very idea that a scheme premised on levying on the value of art resales ever becoming even vaguely self-funding is ludicrous. </blockquote>
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 The paradox is that the Australian government has done the resale royalty, at a secondly instrumentation level, as professionally as it could be done and the Act itself reflects the constraints of a constitution that set out very consciously to embody the principles of responsible representative government:  therefore, the Australian scheme is a <i>lawful</i> scheme. However, the messy reality is clear proof that resale royalties, at the level of principle, if done lawfully and properly, are bad policy".</blockquote>
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Do you agree with John, or do you take a different view? Do let us know!</div>

Australia's art resale scheme: can it ever be self-sustaining?

From John R. Walker, one of our Australian readers, comes this fascinating and provocative item: "The Australian government...

11:46 PM

A case of bad timing for the Beastie Boys

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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Just as the sad death of the Beastie Boys' Adam 'MCA' Yauch from cancer was announced, aged just 47, Tuf America, Inc announced a new lawsuit against the band and</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> co-defendants Universal Music, Brooklyn Dust Music and Capitol Records. T</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">uf America </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> administers the rights to the recordings of Trouble Funk's catalogue, including the group's 1982 funk classics, "<i>Drop the Bomb"</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>and "<i>Say What"</i> and the federal lawsuit </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">relates to two songs on the Beastie Boys' debut album,</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">'Licensed To Ill</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">', and two more on the follow-up,</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">'Paul's Boutique'</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">. The company claims that the group illegally sampled the two Trouble Funk songs. The 20 years delay in pursuing the litigation is partly linked to the fact Tuf America only gained control of the copyrights in Trouble Funk's catalogue in 1999, the additional ten year wait seemingly being down to the fact it's only recently that the label noticed the alleged infringements.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The law suit doesn't surprise Kembrew McLeod, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, and co-author, with economist and researcher Peter DiCola, of the book "</span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">" who says  "'Paul’s Boutique' and other albums of that era are like ticking legal time bombs" adding "For instance, in 2005, Run DMC was sued by the Knack for using</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">'My Sharona'</i><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">for its song '</span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">It’s Tricky.</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">' And they were sued 20 years after the fact." This reality is compounded by the fact that each time "Paul's Boutique" is issued in a new format, or repackaged, the statute of limitations on filing an infraction claim starts anew at year zero. In his book McLeod and DiCola analyse the samples in both "</span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Paul's Boutique</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">" and Public Enemy's "</span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Fear of a Black Planet</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">," two classics of hip-hop's sample era, and estimated the cost of legally producing them and licensing the samples: With all samples intact, McLeod explains "Based on the number of sales, both albums would have lost money per unit, and</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">'Paul’s Boutique</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">' would have lost somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20 million -- and we were being extremely conservative with our estimates."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">A separate article again asks if the Beastie Boys’ seminal works could ever have been produced under the current sampling and clearance regimes in the USA – and asks whether the law should change?  </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">http://paidcontent.org/2012/05/06/rhyming-stealing-lets-honor-late-beastie-with-better-copyright-laws/</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The Beastie Boys were triumphant in one sampling claim when they defeated a challenge from composer and flautist James Newton who claimed that despite a valid licence for the sample of the sound recording of his work, the band had also sampled his composition :<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>Newton v Diamond<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></b>349 F.3d 591 (9<sup>th</sup><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>Cir 2003). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">More here:<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #000066;">allhiphop.com/2012/05/07/beastie-boys-hit-with-lawsuit-over-track-on-pauls-boutique/#wpcom-carousel-120911</span> and http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2012/05/beastie-boys-trouble-funk-lawsuit.html</span></div>
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A case of bad timing for the Beastie Boys

Just as the sad death of the Beastie Boys' Adam 'MCA' Yauch from cancer was announced, aged just 47, Tuf America, Inc a...

11:45 PM

Neelie says ACTA is doomed

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<span style="color: #0d0d0d; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda has said that the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) , signed by almost all EU member states – but not all – is likely to follow the US’s SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) into the dustbin of failed legislation saying “We have recently seen how many thousands of people are willing to protest against rules which they see as constraining the openness and innovation of the internet” adding “there is a strong new political  voice, and as a voice for openness, I welcome it even if I do not always agree with everything it says on every subject … we are now likely to be in a world without SOPA and ACTA”. ACTA is currently awaiting review by the Court of Justice and EU Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht had urged the EU Parliament to delay any formal ratification of ACTA until that happened, but it now looks like the whole process has stalled as member states (even those who had previously signed up) lose the political will to move the Agreement forward.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the USA,critics of the U.S. government's antipiracy efforts have new ammunition to support claims that authorities are too eager to do the bidding of copyright owners. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau (ICE) seized Dajaz1.com, a music blog, in November 2010 and then held onto it for more than a year before returning the domain to the owners having repeatedly failed to produce evidence that the site had violated copyright laws. Now the EFF has picked up on the story blogging "The whole story is, in a word, appalling …. U.S. taxpayers and their representatives have an object lesson, if one were needed, in why the government should not be granted new IP enforcement powers and why we need to reconsider the inclusion of copyright infringement as a basis for civil seizure and forfeiture."</span></div>
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Neelie says ACTA is doomed

Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda has said that the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) , signe...

11:44 PM

Troll news

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Whilst searching "copyright troll" on Google for my previous post, I came across a wrap up on the <a href="http://the1709blog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/righthaven-another-mediacat.html">Righthaven</a>  1709 Blog we posted in November 2011. As suspected, and with apologies  for blogging at such a late stage, it all ended up rather badly for the  troll, echoing the<a href="http://the1709blog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/media-cat-saga-now-for-obituary.html"> 'Media CAT / ACS:Law'</a> case in the United Kingdom.  </div>
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Righthaven LLC, the law firm headed up by Steve Gibson, which rather publicly failed in its attempt to make money for <i>The Denver Journal, the Las Vegas Review Journal </i>and  itself by suing readers for sharing stories online, was finally dealt a  death blow mid-March by a federal judge who ordered the Las Vegas  company to forfeit “all of” its intellectual property and other  “intangible property” to settle its debts. As commentators say, the  order is a somewhat ironic twist to a copyright trolling saga that began  in 2010, when Righthaven was formed with the idea of suing blogs and  websites that re-posted newspaper articles (or snippets of them) without  permission. U.S. District Judge Philip M. Pro of Nevada ordered  Righthaven to surrender for auction the 278 copyrighted news articles  that were the subject of its lawsuits. saying “The copyright  registrations to more than 275 works are in Righthaven’s name, can be  transferred by this court, and can then be auctioned”. The  Righthaven.com domain was auctioned for $3,000 to help satisfy the legal  bill Righthaven must pay to one of its defendants that prevailed in a  copyright suit brought by Righthaven. The legal costs are more than  $60,000 in the case before Judge Pro, and in total Righthaven owes about  $188,927 to various defendants.</div>
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As of the 3rd May there was seemingly no buyer interest in the  copyrights up for auction - and a 50% discount was applied by Lara  Pearson, the court appointed attorney handling the sales. The Righthaven  trade mark was sold for $1,025 on eBay. There is a minimum bid of $50  for copyrights and you have till Saturday (5pm, PDT) to buy your slice  of copyright 'history'. </div>
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http://www.pinewswire.net/article/judge-orders-failed-copyright-troll-to-forfeit-all-copyrights/</div>
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http://www.vegasinc.com/news/2012/may/03/prices-slashed-righthaven-copyrights-auction/</div>

Troll news

Whilst searching "copyright troll" on Google for my previous post, I came across a wrap up on the Righthaven 1709 Blog ...

11:42 PM

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Australia's art resale scheme: can it ever be self-sustaining?

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