EnochLight wrote:I think if Discover as a curated, communal, Factory Sound Bank. Nothing more.
No, that's a really bad comparison and you need to stop that way of thinking now, imo.
You've
bought Reason, thus
paid a license fee (or rather, Props have paid a fee for the loops, eLabs et al, and all the other FSB sound designers, you pay Props) to freely use those paid for samples and patches in your commercial work.
With Discover you can freely use other people's efforts in your commercial work and nothing has been paid to anyone else. Buy you'd be alright, Jack! You get all the royalities!!
Of course, if you're
not producing commercial work, i.e., you're a hobbyist, then Discover I imagine works fine. But who is a hobbyist and who is a commercial producer? Already last year we saw a commercial artist caught with his pants down, so to speak, using warezed music software. Let's recap that great excuse: Oh, it was my engineers laptop, no really, it was, it was an emergency and I didn't have my laptop with my own real license!
So commercial producers are happy to use material and software illegally if they can find ways to justify it to themselves. So someone will be more than happy to scour your work on Discover looking for something they can rip off. If Sam Smith found a musical loop of you farting on Discover, he can simply put a beat to it and his fans will buy it on iTunes in their hundreds of thousands and he'll make millions from you farting into your iPhone.
They have that fanbase, the quality of the content itself doesn't matter, cos fans will buy any old shit!
Although frankly, you farting into an iPhone is likely of far higher musical quality than Sam Smith
joeyluck wrote:It never crossed my mind that I would ever upload my masterpiece to Discover. I would never upload something in which I am extremely attached. And if there's something I upload that I am not so fond of and someone makes a hit, there's no reason to be bitter.
The first statement will likely be true of most users, people would keep what they consider their best work to themselves. But then what is one person's
rejected material they've uploaded to Discovery can become gold-dust to someone else.
They could still potentially earn a lot of money on something they didn't write,
merely arranged, and you still might not be able to do anything "good" (whatever "good" means here) with your original loop.
For example Adam Fielding's now infamous production is not his song. It's clearly written by the person who uploaded the loop. Adam did a typically great job of arranging it. But now Props are using that arrangement to market Discover, and by extension their commercial products, to whit, Take and Figure. So Props sell more Apps; Adam earns nothing for arranging, because he's agreed to do the work free, but does earn a bit of kudos, while the original uploader doesn't even earn that, he's long since forgotten. But let's be clear, that original uploader is the
writer of that track. It's arguably no different to The Verve just using a brief Andrew Oldham string loop and writing a whole new song around it - the court ruled it was Oldham's song.
Props "get out of jail free card" is that they hope that people can sort this out between themselves. But in practice a lot of people are selfish and they simply won't bother. And the hobbyist who wrote a tune he didn't like or can't use, that then goes on to become a hit for someone else deserves to be paid. And the irony is that existing commercial producers are far more likely to steal stuff off Discover than hobbyists, because it saves them a ton of money ripping off existing material. The hobbyists likely do share and it will be a lovely, egalitarian commune with flowers and unicorns. Yeah, don't kid yourself!!
And let's be frank, the moment someone uploads a Disney loop, or anything else that isn't the creation of the uploader, and someone else unwittingly uses it commercially and someone somewhere notices, and they will, that will be the day PH find themselves up a gum tree without a paddle (apologies for the mixed metaphor), but I don't see that contract will be much of a defense in court.