David Post | 2.12.2024 8:21 AM

Some of you may have seen the article by David Segal in the Sunday NY Times several weeks ago [available here] about a rather sordid copyright fracas in which I have been embroiled over the past few months. [That's me, seated on the right in the photo].

It's a pretty wild story. If you don't feel like reading the whole NYT article, here's a brief summary of how it unfolded:

Off and on, for 30 years or so, I've been in a duo ("Bad Dog") with a friend, Craig Blackwell, here in Washington DC: Two acoustic guitars, two vocals, original songs. We take the music we make very seriously, but we are not professional musicians; we both had and have careers outside of music. We weren't and aren't in it for the money, but just for the pleasure of making music and the satisfaction one gets from creating something worthwhile and interesting and, perhaps, even beautiful.

In early 2023, we recorded an album containing nine new songs ("The Jukebox of Regret"—you can listen to it here) at a local recording studio (Mixcave Studios). After the recordings were mixed and mastered, we posted them (as we had posted other recordings that we had made over the years) on the "Bad Dog" page at Soundcloud.com, a music-sharing website.

Several weeks later, a friend told us that she had input a recording of one of our songs (entitled "Preston") into the Shazam app, and that Shazam identified the song right away—as something called "Drunk the Wine" by someone called Vinay Jonge. It pointed her to the YouTube page where the recording was available to be streamed.

Well! The YouTube recording was, it was clear upon listening to it, an exact duplicate of the recording we had posted on SoundCloud. A quick Google search on "Vinay Jonge—Drunk the Wine" turned up his recording—i.e., our recording of "Preston"—at all the other major music streaming services (Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, allmusic.com, etc.). [Curiously, Mr. Jonge didn't seem to have any other songs posted anywhere on the Internet . A one-hit wonder!].

We began the process of sending "takedown notices" to each of the streaming platforms, informing them that they, and Mr. Jonge, were infringing our copyright.

And then we learned that it wasn't only "Vinay Jonge," and it wasn't only one song; all of the songs on the album had been pirated and were posted on all of the big streaming platforms. Each one had a new song title and a new artist name:

You might ask: How did we figure this out? Good question! Searching for "Bad Dog—Preston" or "Verona" or "The Misfit" at Google or YouTube or Spotify or Apple Music etc. wouldn't have turned anything up, because the song names had all been changed, and each song was associated with a different "artist." Without knowing how our songs had been re-titled, or the names of those who were taking credit for our work, the infringements were completely invisible to us, out there in the great Internet ocean.

So how did we track them down? The answer is: We found these other infringing files after we sent the nine song files to Disc Makers, a commercial CD printing operation, to have them print up some CDs for us to hand out at our upcoming album release show. Disc Makers apparently uses some sort of file-matching software/system to check at least some of the streaming platforms for duplicate files; they found the infringing files, and they sent us a polite note with a list of everything they had found, and informing us that they had put our CD project on "Hold," because the files we sent them "contain previously copyrighted material."

Disc Makers, in other words, thought—not unreasonably, I suppose, given the evidence it had—that we were the infringers! Until we were able to persuade them that it was the other way around (which we were able to do by demonstrating that the upload date of the files we sent to SoundCloud pre-dated the upload dates for the infringing files) they wouldn't make the CDs for us.

One final plot twist. Now that we had the "artist" names and the new song titles, we could locate infringing files at the streaming platforms, and we started sending out more takedown notices. In response to one that we sent to Apple Music, we got a note back saying, in effect: "The songs you have identified were provided to us by a music distributor. If you have a copyright claim, please direct it to the distributor." And they identified the distributor: Warner Music Group.

Well! That was a surprise! Warner, of course, is one of the world's largest distributor of digital music, with thousands of musicians under contract, and a pipeline that extends to all of the big streaming platforms. Apparently, Warner had some sort of relationship with Vinay Jonge, Amier Erkens, Arend Grootveld, and the rest of them under which Warner........

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