The copyright-strike against despacito isn't a very hotly debated topic. There's not much to talk about, right?

A guy called Taiga was fed up with Sotark's pp-mapping antics and copyright striked his map.

The community seems to unanimously agree: "Fuck the person who did this, how dare he do this? This is going too far, he's endangering the whole game. Over a simple feud with a mapper?"

And while the death threats are steadily filling Taiga's inbox and a thousand competent teenage reddit psychologists steadily make progress in figuring out Taiga's motives (spoiler: the only thing these idiots ever come up with is "for attention"), everyone is ignoring two things:

1) Taiga is completely in the right here, because Despacito was actually a severe copyright infringement.
2) This is true whether or not anyone copyright-strikes it, and the game is at risk whether or not someone gets hung up on pp-maps..

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________



who is the villain, Taiga or Sotarks?

Picking sides is fun, I get it, but this is a stupid question and a dangerous distraction. The answer that few people think of but that is the correct one, is: Neither. Everything we do here pales in comparison to the economic damage that this game causes the music industry.

When you download a map, you also download the song. You get a copy of the song on your harddrive, an mp3 file. You can put that file in your Itunes library, you can share it, you can do whatever the hell you want with it - for free. Sounds shady? Hold on tight, it's only getting better.

Let's be very generous and assume that only 10% of the songs in osu are infringing on copyright and should rightfully be taken down. There are currently 8.3 billion ranked plays. Some of those are on several difficulties of the same song, and some maps have the same songs, but then there's also unranked maps and maps that people download but never play. So, how many songs did people download? For simplicity sake, let's assume 10 billion. Sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. It's less than 80 songs per player, and active players often have more than 1000 songs on their harddrives.

10 000 000 000 songs, 10% of which are infringing (again, very generous). Say you SHOULD HAVE bought the infringing songs on Itunes for a price of $1.29...

I'll let you do the math, but let's just say that this is enough money to invite Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee to your private mansion to give you a lapdance while Despacito is playing in the background.

All of this has been going on for years, and it has nothing to do with either Sotarks or Taiga. Taiga might endanger the game by drawing attention to it, but more importantly: The game endangers itself by letting this madness continue for so long.

It's like a long time ago the game lit a fire in its own living room and still keeps it going to this day. Now someone threw a bit of fuel in it. Shouldn't we ask ourselves why the fire is there in the first place and why nobody seems to really care about putting it out for good?





this is a ranked map


Doesn't osu have a copyright policy?
Yes, but it's no better than "we'll look the other way until someone reports something". See if that holds up in a court of law.

This game has been setting itself up for a lawsuit of epic proportions and one day it might hit. Taiga or not. What can be done to prevent this?
The Featured artists were a good start, but sadly they never really caught on.

Maybe it would be wise to systematically remove every problematic map from the game, ranked or not. Possibly enlist the communities help, or even better - employ an algorithm that scans maps automatically and takes them down for further review if it detects a copyrighted song. After all, a game with fewer songs is better than no game.

As it stands, this game remains on the verge of utter legal destruction, and it's neither Taiga's nor Sotarks fault. It's the fault of years of continued sloppy copyright policy.

If osu gets shut down tomorrow, nobody can say that it didn't have it coming.

A warning beforehand: Keep it civil and do not start fights please.

If one DMCA would bring the attention of the entire music industry this game wouldn’t last 10 years

But I would still say it’s unnecessary to to intentionally DMCA a song

It's unfair for the artist to not gain anything for their works thus making it justified but the way it is done and mostly cause of grudge is just terrible

Meah wrote:

It's unfair for the artist to not gain anything for their works thus making it justified but the way it is done and mostly cause of grudge is just terrible

Not saying what taiga did is right or wrong, but as a mapper if I did something to anger some stranger on the internet to copyright strike my map, I would re-evaluate my mapping career instead of victimising myself

Plot Twist: Taiga is actually a Sotarks fanboy and is a tsundere who managed to pull this "notice me senpai" thing
Praise me, I've seen through it

I’m sorry but this is clearly Yandere behaviour

This is a great material for fanfictions

Railey2 wrote:

it's neither Taiga's nor Sotarks fault. It's the fault of years of continued sloppy copyright policy.

Agree

So every time I download a map someone loses $1 (on average) because I didn't buy the song?

If someone took osu and the songs my osu folder contains from me I wouldn't cry over it and much less pay for the songs so I could listen to them once again.

Rather than a way to steal money from artists, osu is a way of artists getting free publicity. If someone doesn't intend to pay for their music they aren't going to pay for their music. So basically no one is really at loss. You can't steal money that never existed in the first place but you sure can talk about an artist and their songs and give them free publicity for well free.

if you think I'm wrong fite me

Deva wrote:

So every time I download a map someone loses $1 (on average) because I didn't buy the song?

If someone took osu and the songs my osu folder contains from me I wouldn't cry over it and much less pay for the songs so I could listen to them once again.

Rather than a way to steal money from artists, osu is a way of artists getting free publicity. If someone doesn't intend to pay for their music they aren't going to pay for their music. So basically no one is really at loss. You can't steal money that never existed in the first place but you sure can talk about an artist and their songs and give them free publicity for well free.

if you think I'm wrong fite me

You walk into a restaurant and order a full menu. After you've finished, you stand up and leave, without paying. However you do leave the restaurant owner a letter. After a couple minutes, they notice that you left without paying. The restaurant owner is about to call the police on you, when he notices the letter on the now vacant dinner table. He opens it and starts reading.

"Dear Mr. Restaurant owner,

the food was great! I'll make sure to tell my friends and leave you a good review on yelp. That should more than make up for the price that I should have paid for your product. I'll make sure to eat at your restaurants again soon!

Regards, Deva.".

The owner of the restaurant is satisfied and looks forward to your next visi...


wait no that's bullshit.
It's not that someone loses money, it's that they have a claim on your money since you're already using their product even though you should have paid for it.
And I can assure you that there are companies that will absolutely press that claim. Let's picture another hypothetical scenario, a more serious one:

The Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Group are suing peppy for creating a platform that illegally distributes their copyrighted media, while peppy is fully aware of everything illegal that's been going on and does nothing against it. There's a lot of money involved, we're talking millions of dollars. Do you think peppy is gonna get away saying that he paid with "publicity", so it's all fine?

I don't think so.


Maybe you could make a deal like that with individual artists, but not with multi billion dollar cooperations. And these cooperations.. if you cross them the wrong way, they'll fuck you hard. They'll fuck you on autopilot, they won't even think about it. They've fucked many others before, they have entire divisions, hundreds of employees that are dedicated just to fucking people. You have no idea what you're dealing with.

Deva wrote:

Rather than a way to steal money from artists, osu is a way of artists getting free publicity. If someone doesn't intend to pay for their music they aren't going to pay for their music. So basically no one is really at loss. You can't steal money that never existed in the first place but you sure can talk about an artist and their songs and give them free publicity for well free

On a corporate level I don’t think they will think that way, they hire their own branding team, publicity isn’t really lacking. They want to squeeze out extra money by forcing the people who enjoy their music (myself included) to buy it only from them

To smaller artist this might work, Eminem give out mixtape at the very beginning and now he doesn’t do that to get publicity.

In the end it’s still intellectual property that the owner can take it down because of this stupid concept called rights

Railey2 wrote:

You walk into a restaurant and order a full menu. After you've finished, you stand up and leave, without paying. However you do leave the restaurant owner a letter. After a couple minutes, they notice that you left without paying. The restaurant owner is about to call the police on you, when he notices the covert on the now vacant dinner table. He opens it and starts reading.

"Dear Mr. Restaurant owner,

the food was great! I'll make sure to tell my friends and leave you a good review on yelp. That should more than make up for the price that I should have payed for your product. I'll make sure to eat at your restaurants again soon!

Regards, Deva.".

The owner of the restaurant is satisfied and looks forward to your next visi...


wait no that's bullshit and so is your entire view on the topic.
It's not that someone loses money, it's that they have a claim on your money since you're already using their product even though you should have paid for it.
And I can assure you that there are companies that will absolutely press that claim. Let's picture another hypothetical scenario, a more serious one:

The Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Group are suing peppy for creating a platform that illegally distributes their copyrighted media, while peppy is fully aware of everything illegal that's been going on and does nothing against it. There's a lot of money involved, we're talking millions of dollars. Do you think peppy is gonna get away saying that he paid with "publicity", so it's all fine?

I don't think so.


Maybe you could make a deal like that with individual artists, but not with multi billion dollar cooperations. And these cooperations.. if you cross them the wrong way, they'll fuck you hard. They'll fuck you on autopilot, they won't even think about it. They've fucked many others before, they have entire divisions, hundreds of employees that are dedicated just to fucking people. You have no idea what you're dealing with.

Well if that entire menu or lets say one dish for simplicitys sake, had to be prepared only once and it could feed the entire population simultaneously over and over again then your analogy would somewhat make sense, but that's not the case.

As for your more serious example big companies would do that for their reputations sake and sometimes just because they can and want to prove that they can even though most of the time they won't gain any money from it (or at least not an amount significant enough to justify doing it).

Also I'm not saying that what peppy did/is doing is right.

N0thingSpecial wrote:

On a corporate level I don’t think they will think that way, they hire their own branding team

why pay for something if you can get it for free?

As I already said if someone has intention of buying a song they will buy it. If someone doesn't want to buy a song they won't do it no matter how well it's advertised.

There's not really much merit in discussing 'doomsday' scenarios like these. osu! is fully compliant with the DMCA and acts very swiftly to honor the will of rightsholders where it becomes apparent that their work is being used without permission in the game.

That being said, the music industry has developed well beyond the past of "1 download = 1 sale" - it is trivial for even young children to find ways to 'download' tracks from major artists these days. Piracy is sort of a cultural institution embedded into the way the internet is, and that isn't really going to ever change. The people who desire to purchase a given work will do so, or pay for services that allow them to access said content freely, and those who do not will just pirate the works to begin with.

osu!'s monetization is an absolute pittance for a service of its size, it doesn't offer ANY ads, it has no major partnerships or sponsors, the entire game is more or less a community funded endeavour. The tracks accompanying beatmaps are of barely 'acceptable' quality by music purchase standards (hence why anything above 192kbps is disallowed in a beatmapset). We're positioned quite firmly to view the tracks as a secondary necessity to any beatmap set, not their distribution as the main draw, if that makes sense.

To swing back onto the topic at hand, all of the Featured Artist tracks are fully licensed for usage in osu! and are 150% safe for use for mapping. There's over 500 of them at this point, and we're in talks with a variety of artists (and music labels) to gain blanket usage rights for their works. I'd say as is, we likely have a library of licensed music that rivals or perhaps even exceeds many other rhythm games out there, and it is only going to get larger as time goes by.

Leave the worrying about such eventualities to us and just enjoy the game, yeah? Licensing and whatnot is a great big legal tangle and the very definition of grey-area stuff, just know that we're acutely aware of these kind of things and have been working quite hard to keep things moving forward.

N0thingSpecial wrote:

In the end it’s still intellectual property that the owner can take it down because of this stupid concept called rights

Yeah, it really sucks people can actually fight against stealing and replication of their content so people cannot profit from their effort and creations. /sarcasmoff

We know very well why exactly it is a thing that songs gets DMCA'd in osu!.

Stefan wrote:

N0thingSpecial wrote:

In the end it’s still intellectual property that the owner can take it down because of this stupid concept called rights

Yeah, it really sucks people can actually fight against stealing and replication of their content so people cannot profit from their effort and creations. /sarcasmoff

We know very well why exactly it is a thing that songs gets DMCA'd in osu!.

We’re stepping into personal belief here, I’ll just respond with I agree and I see nothing wrong with the DMCA

Also thank you staff for everything

Well, speaking of copyrights, say that using the unlicensed "track" for the beatmap is forbidden, so we can't use most of the beatmaps uploaded so far.
Then, who has the copyright of the "maps"? Mappers? Track creater? Nobody?

I know it's a little irrelevant, but I really should know

Ephemeral wrote:

There's not really much merit in discussing 'doomsday' scenarios like these. osu! is fully compliant with the DMCA and acts very swiftly to honor the will of rightsholders where it becomes apparent that their work is being used without permission in the game.

That being said, the music industry has developed well beyond the past of "1 download = 1 sale" - it is trivial for even young children to find ways to 'download' tracks from major artists these days. Piracy is sort of a cultural institution embedded into the way the internet is, and that isn't really going to ever change. The people who desire to purchase a given work will do so, or pay for services that allow them to access said content freely, and those who do not will just pirate the works to begin with.

osu!'s monetization is an absolute pittance for a service of its size, it doesn't offer ANY ads, it has no major partnerships or sponsors, the entire game is more or less a community funded endeavour. The tracks accompanying beatmaps are of barely 'acceptable' quality by music purchase standards (hence why anything above 192kbps is disallowed in a beatmapset). We're positioned quite firmly to view the tracks as a secondary necessity to any beatmap set, not their distribution as the main draw, if that makes sense.

To swing back onto the topic at hand, all of the Featured Artist tracks are fully licensed for usage in osu! and are 150% safe for use for mapping. There's over 500 of them at this point, and we're in talks with a variety of artists (and music labels) to gain blanket usage rights for their works. I'd say as is, we likely have a library of licensed music that rivals or perhaps even exceeds many other rhythm games out there, and it is only going to get larger as time goes by.

Leave the worrying about such eventualities to us and just enjoy the game, yeah? Licensing and whatnot is a great big legal tangle and the very definition of grey-area stuff, just know that we're acutely aware of these kind of things and have been working quite hard to keep things moving forward.

the music industry has indeed moved past 1 download = 1 sale.

In Germany the current rate is 1 download = 1000€ fine in your face, and you better hope that you're a child then because you might get out of paying it. Legal landscapes can change rapidly. It might be a grey area now, but it's a grey area that can be exploited to osu's great disadvantage and in the future the grey area might just turn pitch black. In fact, you can expect it to turn pitch black. Laws always gravitate towards where the money is, in this case the music industry.


It's great that you're moving forward, better forward than backward that's common sense, but I have to say that you're not moving very fast since these issues have been known for years and Despacito can still end up being qualified. You're playing with fire. Ideally you'd be taking it down before a DMCA had to be filed.

Now, I'm no lawyer but I sincerely doubt that "low audio quality" would even be an argument worth considering if push comes to shove. Osu is a sitting duck and you know it.

I'm not saying that anything bad will happen to osu, I'm saying that it could, and if it does then it was 100% predictable and preventable.
Let's hope that nothing happens and that you guys can maneuver yourself into a position where you're mostly untouchable.


Anyway, I only made this thread because I thought that the communities response to the DMCA-strike was hilariously backwards.

pineappleman wrote:

Well, speaking of copyrights, say that using the unlicensed "track" for the beatmap is forbidden, so we can't use most of the beatmaps uploaded so far.
Then, who has the copyright of the "map"s? Mappers? Track creater? Nobody?

I know it's a little irrelevant, but I really should know

the map as in a particular configuration of circles, sliders and spinners, without music or anything?
Practically, there's no copyright for that. It's up for grabs, no legal action would ever be taken if you steal a map and call it your own.
Theoretically, it would go to the mapper, since he's the creator of the map.

Deva wrote:

N0thingSpecial wrote:

On a corporate level I don’t think they will think that way, they hire their own branding team

why pay for something if you can get it for free?

Should you get it for free if I told you the owner doesn’t want to give it away for free?

Look my point is they are squeezing out the small portion of people that WILL start buying/streaming songs instead torrenting them. Which surprise someone will make the switch as streaming becomes more convenient and popular.

If you want to talk about WHY, I might as well tell you I might do it when I become dirt poor someday despite knowing I shouldn’t.

Everything we do here pales in comparison to the economic damage that this game causes the music industry.

This is a laughably wrong statement. No one uses osu! as a means to pirate low-bitrate crappy audio. If someone were to pirate music, they would use one of the multitude of means available that are actually intended for pirating music. Rather if anything, osu! benefits the music industry by exposing people to a broad range of genres of artists they may have otherwise never heard of. Copyright is simply an unjust means of maintaining monopoly control over non-scare resources.

wew. so many quality posts. and this isn't evern meant as sarcasm.

N0thingSpecial wrote:

but as a mapper if I did something to anger some stranger on the internet to copyright strike my map, I would re-evaluate my mapping career instead of victimising myself

^ this + ephemeral's post really express how i think about it as well.

also last time that we got new featured artists someone / some people asked why there even are featured artists and that they think the idea is stupid. THIS is the embodiment of why featured artists are a huge step into the right direction for osu! as a game.

B1rd wrote:

Everything we do here pales in comparison to the economic damage that this game causes the music industry.

This is a laughably wrong statement. No one uses osu! as a means to pirate low-bitrate crappy audio. If someone were to pirate music, they would use one of the multitude of means available that are actually intended for pirating music. Rather if anything, osu! benefits the music industry by exposing people to a broad range of genres of artists they may have otherwise never heard of. Copyright is simply an unjust means of maintaining monopoly control over non-scare resources.

again, tell that to a multi billion dollar cooperation. They'll laugh in your face and then they'll sue the shit out of you. They won't care about your ancap ideals, or whatever the thing is that you cobbled together in your mind.

Whether or not it was your intent to pirate music through osu, as a matter of fact you already did.

"But if I wanted to pirate, I'd go to bit torrent!"
"But you did download 100 copyrighted songs through the osu client, they're saved on your computer?"
"well..."

It's funny because I can almost see you in front of a judge, saying your line.

"Your honor, Copyright is simply an unjust means of maintaining monopoly control over non-scare resources. Therefore, I reserve the right to download music wherever I want, whenever I want, without paying for any of it! Thank you."

Railey2 wrote:

again, tell that to a multi billion dollar cooperation. They'll laugh in your face and then they'll sue the shit out of you. They won't care about your ancap ideals, or whatever the thing is that you cobbled together in your mind.

Whether or not it was your intent to pirate music through osu, as a matter of fact you already did.

"But if I wanted to pirate, I'd go to bit torrent!"
"But you did download 100 copyrighted songs through the osu client, they're saved on your computer?"
"well..."

It's funny because I can almost see you in front of a judge, saying your line.

"Your honor, Copyright is simply an unjust means of maintaining monopoly control over non-scare resources. Therefore, I reserve the right to download music wherever I want, whenever I want, without paying for any of it! Thank you."

So what do you suggest? Just take down the whole game? You keep saying all this sensationalist stuff about multibillion dollar companies but not coming up with any practical solutions. What's the point of that? I'm sure there are a ton of copyrighted songs, and anime opening videos or other music videos, etc. What can we do? Nothing realistic without destroying the game, I'd say. We can't get approval from every artist or company and can't realistically take down everything that is not "strictly legal".

take down the stuff that the game could be immediately nuked for, anything that comes from major, major labels, at the least.
Keeping songs that are only protected by minor labels could be a calculated risk that's worth taking.
Slowly expanding the group of featured artists that eph talked about.

Railey2 wrote:

again, tell that to a multi billion dollar cooperation. They'll laugh in your face and then they'll sue the shit out of you. They won't care about your ancap ideals, or whatever the thing is that you cobbled together in your mind.

Whether or not it was your intent to pirate music through osu, as a matter of fact you already did.

"But if I wanted to pirate, I'd go to bit torrent!"
"But you did download 100 copyrighted songs through the osu client, they're saved on your computer?"
"well..."

It's funny because I can almost see you in front of a judge, saying your line.

"Your honor, Copyright is simply an unjust means of maintaining monopoly control over non-scare resources. Therefore, I reserve the right to download music wherever I want, whenever I want, without paying for any of it! Thank you."

That'd be the day, corporations spending tens of thousands in legal fees suing osu! players with no assets bar a few anime dakimakuras. Another laughable scenario that wouldn't happen. No one has anything to gain from taking legal action against osu! or its players. Rather, it seems the downfall is coming from one vindictive manchild who would rather destroy the experience for everyone than not get his own way. And with you slavishly defending the copyright practices of corrupt corporations and governments, you're like two peas in a pod.

Railey2 wrote:

take down the stuff that the game could be immediately nuked for, anything that comes from major, major labels, at the least.
Keeping songs that are only protected by minor labels could be a calculated risk that's worth taking.
Slowly expanding the group of featured artists that eph talked about.

Ok, seems reasonably. I think another thing that is an issue is the fact that songs are downloaded as straight up .mp3 files. Maybe it's possible to introduce an encrypted file format for songs that only the osu client can read and have songs be downloaded in that format instead. Not sure how feasible it is though, I'm not a programmer.

Railey2 wrote:

And these cooperations.. if you cross them the wrong way, they'll fuck you hard. They'll fuck you on autopilot, they won't even think about it. They've fucked many others before, they have entire divisions, hundreds of employees that are dedicated just to fucking people. You have no idea what you're dealing with.

Wow, dramatizing.

Railey2 wrote:

Anyway, I only made this thread because I thought that the communities response to the DMCA-strike was hilariously backwards.

As Eph said, leave it to the people running the show and don't be a reddit armchair counselor / lawyer. Doesn't really suit you well considering you called out those "hobby psychologists" for doing the same thing.

B1rd wrote:

Rather, it seems the downfall is coming from one vindictive manchild who would rather destroy the experience for everyone than not get his own way. And with you slavishly defending the copyright practices of corrupt corporations and governments, you're like two peas in a pod.

What this guy said.

Rayne wrote:

Railey2 wrote:

And these cooperations.. if you cross them the wrong way, they'll fuck you hard. They'll fuck you on autopilot, they won't even think about it. They've fucked many others before, they have entire divisions, hundreds of employees that are dedicated just to fucking people. You have no idea what you're dealing with.

Wow, dramatizing.
As Eph said, leave it to the people running the show and don't be a reddit armchair counselor / lawyer. Doesn't really suit you well considering you called out those "hobby psychologists" for doing the same thing.

you say that, but I've been fucked by them before. 1000€ fee for downloading a movie, not kidding. It's not dramatized, it's very real. When a company gets big enough to have a legal division, it starts operating like that as long as the cost of their legal employees is lower than the fees said employees will bring in. Ask anyone who has ever had to deal with them.

You don't need to be a lawyer to see that what osu is doing is very questionable and could have some very nasty consequences. It's not news, most people knew about it already, hence why the communities reaction to the DMCA was so strong.


Also lol, in B1rds mind defending copyright = standing up for corrupt cooperations and governments. Blocked. There's only so much craziness I am willing to tolerate.

Wishes wrote:

Railey2 wrote:

take down the stuff that the game could be immediately nuked for, anything that comes from major, major labels, at the least.
Keeping songs that are only protected by minor labels could be a calculated risk that's worth taking.
Slowly expanding the group of featured artists that eph talked about.

Ok, seems reasonably. I think another thing that is an issue is the fact that songs are downloaded as straight up .mp3 files. Maybe it's possible to introduce an encrypted file format for songs that only the osu client can read and have songs be downloaded in that format instead. Not sure how feasible it is though, I'm not a programmer.

that sounds like an excellent idea. At least it would keep people from ripping off the music and sharing them further, although I'm really not sure how that would affect thing legally. I'm out of my depth there.

Railey2 wrote:

ou say that, but I've been fucked by them before. 1000€ fee for downloading a movie, not kidding. It's not dramatized, it's very real. When a company gets big enough to have a legal division, it starts operating like that as long as the cost of their legal employees is lower than the fees said employees will bring in. Ask anyone who has ever had to deal with them.

Those letters you're talking about are just fishing for easy money. Obviously some people are scared it'll go to court and they'll pay the unjust fee. Most of the time they won't take it any further if you choose to ignore it because they can't possibly keep up with the amount of letters they're sending and take everyone of them to court.

Another thing you can do if you wanna be safe is just file an objection, but well that's not your point anyway.



There's also a difference between getting DMCAd by designated lawyers vs DMCAing a map because you don't like the guy who mapped it, which is what people were criticizing.

Piracy is essentially contraband that is virtually 100% the same as the source, distributed for free through digital technologies. It is a supply chain that directly outcompetes the source in which it came from, due to its near-infinite supply and low cost of production. Lost sale does not equal a theft, as the end-user simply chooses the source that costs them less (you know, free?).

It would be more accurate to place piracy under consideration of contraband, not theft.

Not that it preserves copyright at all, nor morally ethical with regards to most artists' wishes.