To Help Livestreamers Avoid Copyright Violations, Riot Games Releases an Uncopyrighted Album (bloombergquint.com) 31
League of Legends developer Riot Games released a 37-track album of ambient tunes (now on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music) "that will let gamers stream their sessions accompanied by music that doesn't infringe copyright protections," reports Bloomberg.
And that's just one response to aggressive copyright enforcement: For example, a new Guardians of the Galaxy game to be released later this year will be loaded with a soundtrack with songs by Iron Maiden, KISS, Wham!, Blondie and more. To stay on the good side of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the studio behind the game, Eidos Montreal, has created a toggle switch that will allow gamers to turn off the soundtrack when live streaming, Venturebeat has reported. Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt SA also created an option for players to turn off certain songs that could cause trouble and replace them with an alternative.
After largely ignoring streaming platforms for years, last spring the music industry suddenly bore down on Twitch, owned by Amazon.com Inc. and started sending users thousands of DMCA takedowns for copyright violations. Twitch responded by telling users they could no longer use copyrighted material and also had to remove old posts that violated the rules. Some games are still struggling to adapt. Earlier this month, a number of music publishers, including those that represent Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande, sued Roblox Corp. for copyright infringement, saying the company hasn't licensed the music many of its creators have used in their games. The lawsuit is seeking at least $200 million in damages, the Wall Street Journal reported...
The collection is just the beginning and Riot said it's committed to creating more projects like Sessions in the future.
And that's just one response to aggressive copyright enforcement: For example, a new Guardians of the Galaxy game to be released later this year will be loaded with a soundtrack with songs by Iron Maiden, KISS, Wham!, Blondie and more. To stay on the good side of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the studio behind the game, Eidos Montreal, has created a toggle switch that will allow gamers to turn off the soundtrack when live streaming, Venturebeat has reported. Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt SA also created an option for players to turn off certain songs that could cause trouble and replace them with an alternative.
After largely ignoring streaming platforms for years, last spring the music industry suddenly bore down on Twitch, owned by Amazon.com Inc. and started sending users thousands of DMCA takedowns for copyright violations. Twitch responded by telling users they could no longer use copyrighted material and also had to remove old posts that violated the rules. Some games are still struggling to adapt. Earlier this month, a number of music publishers, including those that represent Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande, sued Roblox Corp. for copyright infringement, saying the company hasn't licensed the music many of its creators have used in their games. The lawsuit is seeking at least $200 million in damages, the Wall Street Journal reported...
The collection is just the beginning and Riot said it's committed to creating more projects like Sessions in the future.
Monstercat (Score:2)
Has been doing this for almost a decade now, lately they negotiated deals from well known artists to get the same streaming protections. The good thing about them, they actually have good songs that you want to listen to. Then you find the artist and continue to support them via (meager) streaming payouts
Re: Monstercat (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
You young guys won't remember, but I'm old enough to remember when home taping killed music.
Killed it dead.
Re: (Score:2)
Most games DO have their own music, specially composed for the game. A lot of them use royalty free music as well, for obvious reasons.
However, there will always be a small number of games that do want to use some mass market song or other. These can cause problems with streamers. It's not the entire soundtrack, but usually a song here and there where appropriate.
Very few games actually need licensed songs.
Re: (Score:2)
How long before some asshole decides to claim copyright on these, like the people who claim copyright over classical music that's public domain?
Pretty sure that something being public domain hasn't stopped them before. In theory the perjury clause of the DMCA should do something, but we all know that it's useless in practice.
Re: (Score:2)
While someone will do that, it will be resolved quickly, as there will be a company (Riot in this case) that can easily prove what is going on. It won't be like if you play classical music and some troll copystrikes you, where you have to write a thousand emails to google while the troll gets every dollar of your earnings.
Re: (Score:3)
That is the problem.
There are NO recordings that are copyright-free. Public Domain runs headfirst into a conflict with "new recordings" of the same music, even if it sounds nothing alike. For example, the track "Bolero" ran out of copyright this decade, but the company who licensees it, insists it's not, and another company insists a "new recording" which sounds like nothing MIDI recordings of it.
There is a way around this, and it sucks to do it, but the way around the problem would be for the games to go b
Wow! What an interesting concept! (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if this takes off! There [freemusicarchive.org] might [silvermansound.com] be [hooksounds.com] whole [bensound.com] websites [ccmixter.org] full of royalty-free music! Heck, maybe even Youtube playlists [youtube.com] or something.
This isn't really groundbreaking in any way. To be fair, Twitch streamers are, by and large, extremely, extremely stupid, and probably need to be spoon-fed to some degree, but do we really need to consider "Riot Provides Twitch Streamers 37 Songs to Use Freely" as "News for Nerds; Stuff that Matters"?
Re:Wow! What an interesting concept! (Score:4, Informative)
Don't forget https://incompetech.com/music/ [incompetech.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Man, it's so easy to forget these places. If only one of the largest music distribution platforms [bandcamp.com], or even better, two of them [soundcloud.com] had royalty-free music available... oh well, we can always dream [spotify.com]...
Re: (Score:1)
But the headline should have said 'Some people don't realise that copyright free music exists...' and then included your links.
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine if this takes off! There [freemusicarchive.org] might [silvermansound.com] be [hooksounds.com] whole [bensound.com] websites [ccmixter.org] full of royalty-free music! Heck, maybe even Youtube playlists [youtube.com] or something.
This isn't really groundbreaking in any way. To be fair, Twitch streamers are, by and large, extremely, extremely stupid, and probably need to be spoon-fed to some degree, but do we really need to consider "Riot Provides Twitch Streamers 37 Songs to Use Freely" as "News for Nerds; Stuff that Matters"?
There's another possibility that the streamers are consciously choosing the non-free tunes because they prefer them.
I don't know the ambient genre well enough and it may well be that there's no real difference between free vs non-free alternatives, but if the music is really important to the quality of the video I can understand why the artist would think they deserve a cut.
It would be a shame.... (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be a shame if a big chunk of the music industry switched away from heavily copyrighted stuff and a bunch of independent artists found a thriving industry in making public domain and commissioned music.
A Guardians of the Galaxy game is one thing, but most applications don't need star power music. A bunch of YouTubers seem to be discovering hiring composers and musicians to make music for them.
Re: (Score:2)
Oooh, RIAA shills still mod on Slashdot!
Please read the parent. Apparently the recording industry would prefer nobody else thought of this idea.
When the music industry fails to adapt ... (Score:2)
No such thing as "uncopyrighted" (Score:1, Insightful)
Every creation is copyrighted from the moment of creation. At most you can offer it royalty free... but only because you hold the copyright. The offer does not constrain any future holder of that copyright.
In the US, there is no mechanism to put copyrighted material into the actual public domain other than time.
But the gripping hand is that none of this prevents DCMA-like* automated complaint mechanisms from filing takedown-like notices*.
*: I say "DCMA-like" and "takedown-like" because the fact that they ar
Re: (Score:2)
Regardless of the use of the correct "royalty free", or others like "uncopyrighted" or the most common one I see, "nocopyright"/"noncopywrite", the meaning is clear: this stuff won't get you banned by some fucking robot.
Re:No such thing as "uncopyrighted" (Score:4, Interesting)
"this stuff won't get you banned by some fucking robot"
No, there's nothing to stop a takedown robot from firing off bogus takedowns that wasn't there before. The most you can hope for is that Riot Games would go after fraudulent takedown claims after the fact but that would only work because *Riot Games hold the copyright*.
The restaurant industry already solved this proble (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's sad that you can get copyright strikes against your stream when you stream a proper, fully-fledged copy of a game. Activision will issue a strike against you for streaming Warzone without turning off ALL the game's music (not just the wartracks they licensed from some bands in the 80s). A blanket license should be issued not only by the publisher (in this case: Activision) but by all those licensing music TO the publisher so that streamers can stream the whole thing without getting hit.
Copyright trolls (Score:2)
The problem this doesn't fix is the copyright trolls have repeated claimed ownerships of content on platforms like youtube that they don't actually own and even used their economic power to shut down its original creators channels.
Lawful Masses with Leonard French [youtube.com] have cover many cases of this sort of thing repeatedly over several years.
plenty of sources for music (Score:2)
Can someone explain to me (Score:2)
That's not how it works (Score:2)
I appreciate the effort but "uncopyrighted" music (whatever that means) is not the solution. The only viable solution is licensing the album under CC BY-SA or similar copyleft license and then aggressively suing anyone who starts sending invalid takedown notices or claims the music through ContentID.
Without a copyleft license on it, all it takes to turn the "uncopyrighted" album into a copyright minefield is one music industry artist sampling any song in their own music and suddenly they have a valid copy
Takedown notice in 3 .... 2 .... 1 (Score:2)
because there is always an evil actor in the music industry making false claims that gets rewarded by Youtube moderators.
Comment Subject: (Score:1)