A larger group of popular musicians have backed a new campaign calling for the reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on the basis that it allows the Google-owned YouTube to host their music on unfair terms.

The 180 artists, including Paul McCartney and the outspoken Taylor Swift, are specifically demanding a reexamination of the DMCA’s safe harbor provision, which means that sites such as YouTube are not held liable for copyrighted content that is uploaded to a site by users, specifically that the Act means that the onus is not on YouTube to remove copyrighted material but for artists and music companies to file a DMCA takedown request.

A letter signed by the artists, along with Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music, is currently being used in an ad campaign being run in publications including Politico and The Hill.

Despite YouTube paying billions in royalties to musicians, and helping fight the good fight against music piracy, the crux of the argument is that YouTube does not pay enough and is able to get away with doing so due to these provisions in the DMCA.

The letter in part reads:

DEAR CONGRESS:  THE DIGITAL MILLENNIUM COPYRIGHT ACT (DMCA) IS BROKEN AND NO LONGER WORKS FOR CREATORS

As songwriters and artists who are a vital contributing force to the U.S. and to American exports around the world, we are writing to express our concern about the ability of the next generation of creators to earn a living. The existing laws threaten the continued viability of songwriters and recording artists to survive from the creation of music. Aspiring creators shouldn’t have to decide between making music and making a living. Please protect them.

The letter goes on to claim that the “law was written and passed in an era that is technologically out-of-date compared to the era in which we live. It has allowed major tech companies to grow and generate huge profits by creating ease of use for consumers to carry almost every recorded song in history in their pocket via a smartphone, while songwriters’ and artists’ earnings continue to diminish. Music consumption has skyrocketed, but the monies earned by individual writers and artists for that consumption has plummeted.”

According to Billboard, YouTube argues it gets no advantage from the DMCA as its Content ID system gives labels a way to remove or monetize their music, and 99.5 percent of music claims involve it as opposed to manual DMCA takedown requests.

Greedy

Yet again there is no surprise that the demands for reform are coming from the top of the industry, from artists who make millions, and sometimes even hundreds of millions each year.

It’s simply another example of greedy musicians wanting even more money.

Perhaps the system of ad-supported music video streaming on sites such as YouTube isn’t perfect, but what is missed by these people, in the same way it is missed when it comes to their arguments against free, ad-supported music streaming services from the likes of Spotify AB, is that the alternative is piracy.

These musicians should be grateful that services such as these provide an income stream to them, particularly as the rise of legal music streaming services has resulted in a crash in the levels of music piracy; so quickly do they seem to have forgotten that piracy was predicted to kill the music industry and that they never received a cent from pirated music.

The idea, pushed by many of these artists, that all music online should be paid for, as it once was, is a fantasy that if ever implemented would simply result in hundreds of millions of musical listeners worldwide returning to pirate their favorite artists, complete with an inevitable and serious decrease in revenue being made by the industry as a whole.

Image credit: evarinaldiphotography/Flickr/CC by 2.0