Whilst the HSGA site is down- Some nice Lap Steel downloads

[Arcada]

I've already stated I'll take-down any non YouTube (as they have their own agreement with the PRS)

That agreement was PURELY with "Premuim Music Videos" from the USA site..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7933565.stm

Other than that the only agreement is YouTube pays a licence to the PRS which covers the streaming of music videos from three of the four major music labels and many independent labels..WHO ARE ALREADY paying licence fees..

That was the old agreement, before the new deal was struck, back when YouTube started blocking videos in the UK because (they said) the PRS were asking for too much. More info here along with a link to report your works to them : -Do works have to be registered with PRS for Music in order to receive a royalty payment from YouTube?. I doubt this facility is there only for the "3 out of the 4" major record companies to use! Of course you have to be a paid up member of the PRS to claim royalties!

With respect, your are completely wrong about Youtube,
they say it's the poster's responsibility to OBTAIN copyright permission and THEY (YouTube) by default presume it:- saying:_ "It's possible that you may be permitted to include small excerpts from copyrighted material in your video if what you intend to use is insubstantial or is incidentally included, or where the intended use you have for the copyrighted material falls within a exception or limitation to copyright under the law in your country.
We can't give you advice on either of these topics, and if you do plan to use even a small portion of copyright material in your video we'd strongly advise you to take legal advice first."
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/b ... 3&hl=en-US

YouTube's own words...

Since all content on YouTube is posted by our users, we make it clear in our terms of use and at the time of upload that they must own the copyright to the videos they post or have permission from the copyright holder. We encourage copyright holders to report any specific infringing videos via the these instructions. User accounts of repeat infringers are automatically terminated

Diligence please..

There's more to copyright than what is covered by their agreement with the PRS. There are obviously other things not covered by this, which is why they provide the facility to report it - http://www.youtube.com/t/copyright_notice

YouTube's policy is the same as mine (what I've been saying all along) - to presume the user has the right to upload / post what they do and to take down any infringement as soon as they are made aware of it.

Besides, ultimately YouTube are the publishers of the content on their servers. Posting a link to or embedding a YouTube video in posts is entirely different to posting a link to a mass music track download!

[Basil Henriques]

Let me get this right, are you saying you were "Made Aware" of infringing material posted by me..
By Whom?

[Arcada]

Let me get this right, are you saying you were "Made Aware" of infringing material posted by me..
By Whom?

No, as I have said previously, in that case I made a judgement call based on the sheer amount of material linked to. I've also said this was a temporary measure, erred on the side of caution, and it will be reinstated when you can provide proof that you are entitled to distribute the material. Something which you are unwilling to do.

EDITED TO ADD: -

To hopefully draw a line under this, I recieved a response from PRS which hopefully clears up the PRS/MCPS issues raised earlier:-

1. If downloads are to be provided under the terms of the PRS Licence these must be from a site owned / operated by the license holder. The download files themselves must be hosted on the license holders site, not through a service like mailbigfile.com.
2. A download refers to each track, e.g. if a download consists of 10 tracks packaged in one archive (i.e. a zip file), this would count as 10 downloads every time it is downloaded.

Basil, as I read it, this means: -

1. If you want to provide downloads under the terms of your own PRS License, the files must be hosted on your own site (e.g. Waikiki Islanders).
2. Taking the average track count contained in the zip downloads posted to be 150 (the one I checked contained about 150, and I read that another contained 230), the 5,000 (per annum) download limit would be exceeded with only 34 downloads of a single zip file. There were 27 such links posted, and many have hit their download limit of 50. A rough calculation (27 links x 150 tracks x 50 downloads) would indicate that you have exceeded your allowed download limit of 5,000 by a factor of nearly 40 (with 202,500 downloads). If they were on your own website.

I can provide the contacts at http://www.prsformusic.com who provided this information if anyone wants to take up the issue with them, just PM me.

I hope this resolves the matter. Given the above, the initial post in question has been restored (threads have been merged) but download links to material have been removed.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to publically apologise to Basil (as I have already via PM): -

I know that as a professional musician yourself you would not intentionally flout licensing / copyright issues, and I sincerely apologise if I came across like that in some of my posts. That certainly was not my intention.