musicbizsucks's comments

You can play a fun game with this snippet from the NYT article. You can replace the word "Rationalists" with the name of any group at all and the resulting statement seems vaguely true due to the imprecise nature of the language.

> Many Rationalists embraced “effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation. Some embraced the online writings of “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin, who held racist beliefs and decried American democracy. They were mostly white men, but not entirely.

"Republicans" and "Democrats" and "college students" and "Californians" all work, etc.

I doubt there will be many pro-RIAA perspectives here so as someone familiar with their leadership and goals, I might as well add some perspective.

Imagine yourself stumbling upon some incredible technology breakthrough. Let's say, it's some magical script you wrote that automatically improves the efficiency of any container by 70%+. You've worked for years on this specific problem, went broke a couple of times trying to figure it out, and finally struck gold. You form a company, issue that IP to the company, and start getting rich.

Then one day, literally Google comes along and posts your script to some website they own, without your permission. They did this illegally, without your permission, by using this other neat script called gofyourself-dl. You have a problem now. Every is improving their containers or whatever for free. Your company loses revenue every day because why would anyone pay you for tech they can get for free from Google?

What can you do? Sue Google? Good luck with that! No, you would complain to a regulator, which is the only real power (sort of) against that kind of money. You would try and convince that regulator to stop Google from stealing your IP and getting rich from it because it is YOUR IP and YOU should get rich from it. In the meantime, since gofyourself-dl is the way people are stealing your IP, you naturally try to get that taken down because IT IS BEING USED TO STEAL YOUR IP.

Stealing IP is exactly what YouTube is - and has been - doing, for years. There is this weird idea that the major record labels (who fund the RIAA) have unlimited money and are just as evil as blah blah blah, in reality the entire music economy is a minuscule fraction of Google's market cap, power, size, influence, everything, and large tech companies have no real incentive to deal with them in the standard cases because why would an elephant concern itself with an ant.

It sucks to do this to an open source repo, but everything they are saying in this memo is true - this technology is obviously being used to STEAL IP. Its primary focus is the THEFT OF IP. DMCA is a shitty blunt instrument that no one likes, don't for a second think the RIAA is thrilled with that mechanism, but what else are they supposed to do? What would you do if it was someone stealing your proprietary code and posting everywhere after having stolen it from you?

They are mostly fake. The owner of the blog uses tons of fake accounts to promote his clickbait, and any real community that has formed around it is super toxic. I’d encourage you to find another blog to read that covers these issues.

As someone who works in the actual music business, I can confidently say that Digital Music News is not taken seriously as a news source and has an awful reputation for clickbait, fake comments, and outright lies. As I don’t see any actual evidence or new information in this article, I’m surprised it’s passing the HN community filters.

Since HN moderators may not be aware of this blog’s reputation, I would encourage them to consider bypassing links from here and instead linking to direct sources as they do with other dubious blogs. Notice how there are no real sources for the actual new claims in this article?

Posting from a throwaway account as the owner of this blog has a nasty reputation for attacking naysayers.