Top artists from the Grammys will now lobby for stronger copyright laws.
Called the Creators Alliance, the new initiative will give a platform to human brands who periodically release lab-crafted songs, like Adam Levine and Steven Tyler, to tell you how they think the country should reform how the U.S. thinks of intellectual property.
The Alliance was officially announced by Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, onstage at the awards Sunday night. The group’s policy positions are vague so far, though according to USA Today, it includes at least one noble aim: rectifying the fact that artists hardly see any of the revenue from when their songs stream on Spotify.
Other goals of the Alliance include tweaking licensing and licensing fees for television and film, and radio and satellite radio, as well as working out new stipulations for digital distribution.
The Alliance’s new website is down at the time of publication, and multiple Grammy representatives didn’t respond to the Daily Dot’s request for comment. But the Creators Alliance’s announcement makes specific reference to wanting to influence policy in Washington, as the U.S. Copyright Office is in the process of reviewing the country’s copyright standards.
The Grammy’s online announcement of the Alliance even quoted Tan White Ryan Tedder specifically referencing a desire to lobby Congress: “With all the changes in how we listen to music and the review of copyright laws which are set by Congress—music creators and fans must speak out NOW.”
Traditionally, the recording industry pushes for extreme punishments for anyone who violates its intellectual property online. Its major lobbying arm in the U.S., the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), for instance, has sued individuals for hundreds of thousands of dollars for pirating a handful of songs, openly declaring a strategy of making an example out of a few people. And it’s behind similarly harsh legislative efforts, as, for example, a major lobbying force behind the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
This stands in contrast to the film industry, whose counterpart to the RIAA, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), is losing favor in the film industry, according to a recent New York Times profile. That’s in large part, industry insiders said, to its rabid anti-piracy goals, seen by both academic studies and Internet activists as counterproductive.
Remix by Max Fleishman. Original Image via wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
