I don’t didn’t understand how it works 🥺
Edit 2: Honestly, it just takes someone to endorse it and it’ll be huge. But for me personally, I’d rather own my music.
I’d rather own my music.
I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. Given how cheap storage is nowadays, I’m also used to just have my music collection replicated through my devices and listen locally, but being able to upload that library and share with my friends (and in turn, get access to their library as well) seems like a very nice way to discover more stuff and increase the range of available content, without losing “ownership” of anything. Unlike Spotify or the other streaming services, there is no central entity determining what should be available or not.
(Of course, this doesn’t mean that is a good idea to just upload your collection to a Funkwhale instance and make it public for everyone. That will be a very fast to getting kicked out. Or worse, to be receiving a nastygram from some IP lawyer)
So if you have a good mix of friends who kept/ripped their CD/Vynil collection or bought songs from their favorite indie musicians, you can end up with a pretty extensive library. This makes it a decent (and legal) alternative to sneaker-net piracy.
Isn’t that still not considered legal?
Legality aside, this is the huge barrier of entry for most people, I’d think.
The libraries you share can be set to private or “invite-only”. So, if you share only with a small group of friends and not make it publicly available it should still be under fair use.
At least in the Netherlands this would still constitute unauthorised copying of licensed material, and therefore be illegal.
Honestly, the question in this case then becomes “how will anyone be able to enforce it?”
I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll defer to this article talking to one about this type of use-case as a result of the Covid pandemic.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/is-streaming-movies-to-friends-through-discord-and/1100-6476735/
“Fair use comes in a couple of flavors,” the professor said. "There is–let’s call it the ‘small uses,’ the quotations and quotes and clips; there is ‘satire, parody, transformation;’ and there is one thing I think of as ‘reasonable, normal consumer uses,’ which can include all media, provided it’s very personal and appropriately limited to things you already had some kind of access to.
I think the third is the part of Fair Use that you’re talking about. But he goes on to say:
The case gets worse as you get to larger and longer media like watching an entire movie; the case gets worse as you raise the quality of the streaming, so as you switch to streaming it through the software itself rather than just picking it up with the microphone; the case gets worse as you include more people and as people are less related to each other–as you get beyond the immediate nuclear family into a larger group of friends."
So streaming to even your family is already a gray area, but it seems that doing what you’re suggesting is a much weaker case for Fair Use.
He also doesn’t mention the amount and frequency of sharing, which would likely factor in.
If you create a library of every album you ever owned, with a large amount of high quality on demand streamable copyrighted content to all your friends, you’re squarely in “most likely not fair use, but you won’t know until they catch you” territory.
It all comes down to how likely do you think you’ll be caught, and what you think you can prove in court. I definitely would not want to be the first person the RIAA makes an example of.
The other use-cases are very cool seeming. Killing Bandcamp should be every music lover’s goal, and this seems like a good platform to do it with.
It all comes down to how likely do you think you’ll be caught, and what you think you can prove in court. I definitely would not want to be the first person the RIAA makes an example of.
The streaming companies only start squeezing down on the “people sharing account passwords” for economic reasons, and I don’t recall hearing of anyone being worried about a lawsuit over a clear violation of their ToS. I find it really hard to believe that it would ever make sense for the MPAA to go after someone because they were sharing their music collection with friends/family.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s been ruled you technically aren’t even allowed to make digital backup copies of your media. There’s just no world they’d go after you for that.
It’s pretty great!
and I am trying to figure out what is missing to get more people interested and using it.
A link to the project would be a good start.
Why, oh why is so hard for some people to comment without the snark?
Anyway, I updated the post. Hope that makes it easier for you to find it now.
Attitudes like this are what turns the general public away from giving something the time of day.
This is not about “the general public”. If your comment was “That sounds interesting but you didn’t put the link to the project”, you’d have achieved the same thing and you wouldn’t sound like the anti-social loser like you do now.
After extensive personal efforts of pasting the copied project name into the google search bar (because i wasn’t going to type each and every letter of that name) i can proudly help you out of your missery!
Here you go. https://www.funkwhale.audio/
It’s not about me, it’s about sending people directly to the thing they’re reading about.
Ok, guess I finally have to check out what it’s exactly about, then.
