@lyndahere “I really like people who know how to share. Or who are at
least willing to learn how to share. Sharing rocks. 18 June 2013 on Twitter.
It is Sunday and I am wondering what to write when I decided
to re-read and make corrections to some of the posts I had written on earlier
when I started this blog. They were mostly on copyright and criminal stalking.
Most of what I had written still remains central to my understanding of
copyright and stalking except one essential point and that is the distribution
of her bootlegged videos.
Lyndahere or Lynda Elstad provides links from her social media pages to her YouTube account and distributes the links via social media rather than the actual bootlegged videos. The bootlegs still remain unacknowledged and not retweeted by Alan Doyle and Great Big Sea and loading videos up onto YouTube on a massive scale continues. The only time a @lyndahere bootlegged video was acknowledged was by Murray Foster and it ended up in a 'twitter brawl' as fans who criticised the quality of the sound were personally attacked by fake accounts.
Lyndahere or Lynda Elstad provides links from her social media pages to her YouTube account and distributes the links via social media rather than the actual bootlegged videos. The bootlegs still remain unacknowledged and not retweeted by Alan Doyle and Great Big Sea and loading videos up onto YouTube on a massive scale continues. The only time a @lyndahere bootlegged video was acknowledged was by Murray Foster and it ended up in a 'twitter brawl' as fans who criticised the quality of the sound were personally attacked by fake accounts.
It is hard trying to understand and explain the concept of
copyright. It is hard trying to explain to fans how their decisions to watch bootlegged videos and distribute links to
that music may not be in the best interests of the musicians and artists whose
creative work it is. To be honest fans like @lyndahere are simply not interested
in listening to either me or the musicians and artists involved and continue to
place their own needs of attention seeking, writing a blog and fan famdom
above that of the musician and artists music they love. I will wait until the
musician or artists are ready to share it with me by whatever means they
choose.
There are several brilliant resources I found on the
Internet that help parents and teachers explain copyright according to the laws
of various countries including Canada and the US. Childnet International, Young
People, Music and the Internet is a ‘guide for parents, carers and teachers about
digital music at home and on the go’ and recognises the importance of music in
young people’s lives and provides information about how to access it legally
and most importantly safely. The pamphlet states on copyright material “Copyright can seem confusing but applies to
digital music just as it applies to physical CD. Copyright protect the artist
and creator and allow them to be rewarded for their work. Some people are happy
to use their work for free, but most artists rely on copyrighted material to guarantee
income.
Copying music you’ve
bought to your computer or player can generally be done without legal
consequences. However, distributing the song to others without the permission
of the rights holders is a very different story. Unauthorised copying and
distribution of any copyrighted material is breaking the law and that includes
file-swapping of any copyrighted music on the best-known P2P networks such as
Limewire. The recording industry has taken action against many people who have
done this, with some large fines resulting”. There are of course exceptions
to the copyright under fair usage in Canada and the United States.
Another excellent resource in the United States is the
‘Music Rules’ program designed for students in grades 3-8 years and “is
a free educational program designed to help lay the foundation for respecting
all forms of intellectual property, especially music recordings. Made possible
by The Recording Industry Association of America, the program also promotes
musical and artistic creativity and encourages students to use computer
technology responsibly”. There are teacher, parents and carer, and
student’s resources including lesson plans that would be interesting and
relevant to a student’s life. By completing the program students would engage
in the process of understanding how hard musicians, artists and others actually
work to create music and how their actions impact on them. I learnt a lot just
reading the material provided in particular the process of creating music.
In the teacher’s guide they provide three terms relevant to
this post…”Songlifting
A general term for making and/or
distributing illegal copies of copyrighted sound recordings…U.S. Copyright Law The federal law that protects copyright owners from the unauthorized
reproduction, adaptation,
performance, display, or distribution of original creative works… Fair Use Under U.S. copyright law, “fair use” allows someone to reproduce or
make use of a portion of a copyrighted work without permission under certain
conditions. Examples of fair use generally include criticism, comment, news
reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research”. The parents guide outlines the
penalties involved in copyright breaches “Criminal
penalties for violating copyright can run up to 5 years in prison and/or
$250,000 in fines, and these penalties apply even when the violation does not
involve financial or commercial gain. Copyright violators can also be sued for
damages in civil court, including the parents of under-age violators, even if
they were unaware of their child’s actions”.
The
Music Rules program essentially helps students and adults alike to engage in
respect for intellectual property. “Remember
it is illegal to take or make copies of online songs, games, videos, and software
unless you have the copyright holder’s permission”. Upon completion of lessons the teacher and
students sign a certificate that states the student “has
learned the rules against ‘songlifting’ and pledge to respect all forms of
intellectual property, obey the copyright laws that protect intellectual
property, always use computer technology responsibility, always use Internet
technology safely and never accept illegal copies of songs online or on disc”.
With all @lyndahere’s comings and goings from St John’s one has to ask again where does she get all her money from for tickets, travel and accommodation. There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of money. I was also wondering why a person with this much unidentifiable income and such a need for helping someone doesn’t want do it for someone who actually needs it. Despite filming at charity events attended by Alan Doyle, Great Big Sea and others she never seems to offer any of the income that could be made available from YouTube or the money and time she has available for travel and accommodation to helping people others less fortunate than herself. I am sure that Russell Crowe’s South Cares charity at his Australian rugby club would have liked some of the money that could have been raised by her bootlegged videos of the Indoor Garden Parties she attended and bootlegged in St John’s and New York city.
There have been a number of tweets and comments on her
Twitter and blog to justify her actions of bootlegging and stalking. The latest
one from @lyndahere to @alanthomasdoyle on Twitter “Given right time & place hear the right song & it can
permanently affect the course of a life. CBC SC & OZ Vanguard. 30 June
2013. I am not sure exactly what she means by this tweet. I am wondering
what she hopes one of her bootlegging recorded videos will do exactly. Alan
Doyle and Great Big Sea have already signed significant record deals with
record companies in Canada. They have both sold thousands of CDs, made official
videos that have had hundreds of thousands of hits, their songs played on
radios throughout the world and sold out concert venues. So what does she hope
to achieve through her bootlegging? Attract new listeners for Alan Doyle and Great Big Sea? Her blog suggests otherwise.
So I guess she means the fans. There is no doubt that being
introduced to Great Big Sea and other artists and musician’s music can change
lives at any age. And yes they have changed mine. Despite scraping and saving
for nearly two years the thought of attending a concert in St John’s
Newfoundland motivated me to get out of my comfortable cocoon at home and
travel. I loved Newfoundland and hope to return very soon. So yes I understand that music
changes lives but the chances of one of her videos changing her life or that of
those she so persistently films is very little as the research indicates the article below. Success in the music world just as it does in life
takes hard work as it does any of us to achieve anything we
desperately want. And yes some people like to live and work ethically and
morally and do things the right way regardless of whether she does or not.
'Odds of Becoming a
YouTube Celebrity by Book of Odds.'
Twenty hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; in turn, users stream seventy-five billion videos per year. With all those videos, what are your chances of making a dent in the YouTube universe and garnering, say, one million views?
Slate.com writer Chris Wilson recently addressed just that question, concluding that “[y]ou might have better odds playing the lottery than of becoming a viral video sensation.” Wilson gathered data on about ten thousand randomly selected YouTube videos and found that 1 in 2.39 videos was viewed no more than ten times after one month, while just 1 in 401 reached ten thousand streams.
The odds are heavily stacked against the user, so much so that in Wilson’s sample, just one video cleared one hundred thousand views, and none went over a million. His article’s title was “Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube?” The answer, according to Wilson’s data, was a resounding no.
And yet, anyone who has visited YouTube enough times knows that there are plenty of videos with at least one million views—too many, in fact, to count. Can we use Wilson’s data to estimate a video’s odds of getting one million views? We can, but first we must apply some corrections.
As with many data sets, Wilson’s YouTube stats are heavily skewed, with a huge number of videos bunched at no more than a few views (most commonly zero), and an ever-decreasing total as the numbers get higher. There are, for example, 2,226 videos with no views in their first month, 237 with one view, 158 with ten views, and just 23 with one hundred. Any statistical estimation demands a more or less normal distribution, where the data resembles a bell curve rather than the power law.
This can be accomplished by taking the natural logarithm of the video streams plus 0.5 (which is there to make all numbers positive, as you cannot take the natural logarithm of zero—it also results in an almost perfect skewness). We can then find the average of that number for the sample as well as the standard deviation; from there, we can find the odds of a video getting any number of views.
Let’s go through a numerical example. The average of our “transformed” number of views is 2.56; the standard deviation is 2.26. The natural logarithm of 1,000,000 + 0.5 is 13.82. One million page views, then, is (13.82 – 2.56)/2.26 = 4.98 standard deviations away from the mean. In nontechnical terms, that means it is a very unlikely occurrence—something we already knew! This, however, can tell us how many YouTube videos will garner one million views in its first month on the site: about 1 of every 3.1 million.
Those are pretty long odds, but they may be overstated. As you can see in the graph, the statistics are very good at predicting video streams at fairly low viewer numbers but seem to overstate the odds (claiming that the odds are longer than they are in actuality) at very high numbers.
This might have to do with the theory of the fat tail. The vast majority of YouTube videos are user-generated and of little interest to more than a few people. These heavily impact the sample averages and distributions, making high view count videos seem less likely than they actually are. For example, compared to Wilson’s actual results, the statistical method under-predicts videos with ten thousand views by about 50 percent and videos with one hundred thousand views by about 150 percent.
It seems likely, then, that the odds of reaching one million views are being underestimated even more severely, though it is difficult to venture a guess as to how much. It must also be pointed out that our statistics cover only the first month of a video’s life; certainly, its odds would improve if we went out a full year.
Still, regardless of what the true odds of your YouTube video getting one million hits are, we can say with certainty that they are very, very low. Then, again, if a video of a dance down the aisle at a wedding can beat the million mark twenty-eight times over in just two months, why can’t yours?
Originally published on Book of Odds
