Or think about music: Periscoping a song or multiple songs from a gig would in theory be a "performance" for which royalties are due, although the questions of who'd be liable for them and whether any music rightsholders or collecting societies would be willing to pursue them remains to be settled.
Part of that involves becoming more transparent about how much artists are paid for their work.Spotify, which offers consumers a free version of its service with advertisements or a "premium" service with no adverts for around $10 a month, pays fractions of pennies to rightsholders each time a song is streamed.
(This newspaper discussed the music industry's apparent embrace of digital streaming and iCloud, and Apple's cloud strategy).What is surprising is not that Apple managed to strike licence deals with music rightsholders to allow copying purchased files among a user's gear.
It distributes around 70% of its revenues back to rightsholders, and splits that amount according to songs' popularity.
And, if it does, many works possibly many millions are "orphaned," where they are within the purview of the owner or owners, but where (or even who) those rightsholders are remains unknown.
(A slightly related kind of service, which relies on more traditional metadata, can help establish whether a stolen camera has been put back into use by looking for serial numbers).Prior to an effective reverse-image search, photographers or rightsholders had to resort to tracking down purloined images by hand, sometimes hiring services to do this.
"We've already paid $500m to rightsholders so far and by the end of 2013 this number will reach £1bn.
Requesting addresses to be taken down is a common tactic of rightsholders looking to stop torrenting, but tends only to mean that the site moves to another, similar address.
Best of all, from the music industry's perspective, is the one feature of Spotify that does not resemble piracy: It pays royalties to record labels, musicians and other rightsholders.
Judge Chin addressed that issue by concentrating on the question of orphan books — that is, copyrighted books whose rightsholders have not been identified.
Remixes and mash-ups are already a big part of SoundCloud's appeal, but finding a way to pay royalties for the songs used in them was a key part of the company's pitch to music rightsholders when negotiating licensing deals.
