Yahoo, Sony Rewrite Law? Or Terminology? by George Ziemann -- November 28, 2007 Newsfactor.com's Barry Levine offered up this interesting tidbit a few days ago: "You make a video with a recent Bob Dylan song on the soundtrack, and upload it to Yahoo Video. Using such copyrighted material in user-generated content for Yahoo might now be legal, following an agreement announced between Sony BMG and Yahoo." A few paragraphs down, he makes the assertion again: "The provision in the Yahoo deal to allow protected material within user-generated content might help to legalize the common practice." It seems dangerous to suggest that anything the two companies do will "legalize this common practice." It will do no such thing. What might happen is that Sony-BMG licenses Yahoo to allow this in exchange for a privately negotiated fee or a cut of advertising revenue. If I put the same video described above on this site, it would not be described as "legal" by Sony. Because the law hasn't changed. Saying so seems deceptive. Of course, all information about the music business seems deceptive. I believe we're seeing a change in the terminology as the RIAA members try to figure out how to undo the propaganda they've been spewing for the last 8 years. We used to be fans and customers of the acts. The labels were for classification purposes only. 35 years ago, some listeners may have been aware that, for example, a lot of their favorite artists were on Atlantic. Other than that, the labels had little influence over our buying decisions. Then customers became pirates. It started with tape recorders in the 70s, when we decided we could make background music for parties or long drives with what we wanted on it and leave out everything we thought sucked. This was, of course, not allowed. The Congress specifically allowed it and the labels shut up. CDs arrived, sales ramped up as everyone replaced their vinyl collection, the music world was peachy keen. Big cars, big houses, big piles of cocaine... The RIAA's biggest problem is Tipper Gore. Computers showed up at the party, and in another ten years people were starting to archive so much data that out 20 MB hard drives just weren't cutting it any longer. The next thing you know, a CD burner, which cost $100,000 (for a single speed burner) when the labels started making CDs, are down to $500 and still dropping. Suddenly, that pirate-proof CD that Sony was so proud of was now a wide-open target. We could all see the audio tracks. The music-buying public became pirates, almost overnight. Everything you do with music was suddenly "illegal," but not for any good rock 'n' roll sort of reason. They've kept that up for at least 8 years. Now things that the law never mentioned in the first place are going to suddenly become "legal" again, one by one. The pirates will become "consumers" and "music fans" again. At least in the press releases.